by Malcolm Murray

I recently finished reading Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government and Citizenship – a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders on the effects of AI on democracy. It comes out soon (October 25). It is a good read, worth reading for its myriad examples of AI in action at all levels of the democratic system. Ultimately, though, it seems to be a missed opportunity, failing to engage with many potential larger ways in which AI might affect democracy.

The book’s strength lies in its meticulous and hyper-granular description of all the ways that AI might affect elements of a democratic society, from enabling citizen power, to assisting in court cases, to empowering politicians. It offers many examples of how AI has been, will be, or could be adopted, for good and for ill. It maintains an admirably balanced and neutral stance throughout, detailing both the ways AI can be used to empower individual citizens, as well as how it could empower powerful vested interests. It is thoroughly organized, with separate sections on politics, legislation, administration, citizen and courts, and a starting briefer describing the relevant AI capabilities for each before outlining use cases and providing examples. The book admirably outlines the need for Public AI – AI as a common infrastructure provided by government, akin to water and electricity.

On the whole, however, the book feels like a missed opportunity to take the authors’ highly detailed knowledge and push their conclusions further. These limitations come through on a few different levels. First, the book feels dated in terms of its conception of AI. Although some examples are from this year, such as DOGE’s attempted hollowing-out of government, many pre-date the LLM era and could easily have been included in a book written five years ago, which is an eternity in AI. Many examples relate to models trained on thousands of examples, not billions, and the authors do not distinguish enough between which examples are more relevant for pre-ChatGPT AI models, and which for today’s General-Purpose AI.

Second, the authors pull their punches. The authors make clear that they do not want to engage with the more speculative risks of “AI doomers”, but in staying away from anything that smells of speculation, they stay too close to the world of yesterday, thereby excluding many of the risks from AI to democracy that we are already seeing signs of. Read more »

by Richard Farr

A recent news story about the fate of Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance returns me to some reflections on a failing most of us exhibit to some degree: we find it convenient to invent people. 

If the story of Shackleton’s grandiosely-branded Imperial Antarctic Expedition is not familiar, I recommend Alfred Lansing’s spare and compelling Endurance, followed by Caroline Alexander’s more detailed The Endurance, which is also graced with expedition photographer Frank Hurley’s original pictures. In summary: Amundsen having “beaten” Scott in a “race to the Pole” (see note), Shackleton — also beaten — decided that a transit across Antarctica might be the next big headline. His “exceptionally strong wooden ship” left England in the last days of 1914; the following month at 77°S it became trapped in pack ice. Held fast for eight more months and slowly drifting north, it was crushed at last. Shackleton and his men, unable to reach land, began a desperate fight against cold and starvation culminating in the legendary journey of the lifeboat James Caird across 800 miles of ocean to South Georgia. “The Boss” then organized the rescue of his remaining men from Elephant Island.

In 2022 an expedition using remotely operated submersibles located the wreck, perfectly preserved under 3,000 meters of cold Weddell Sea. One of the expedition members, Jukka Tuhkuri, wondered exactly why it had been crushed — a good question that few had bothered to ask because the answer seemed obvious. (“Wooden ship! Pack ice!”) On examination, a different answer was equally obvious: by 1914 shipwrights knew a great deal about constructing wooden ships so that they would not be crushed by Antarctic conditions; unfortunately Endurance was not one of them. Its hull had been designed for the entirely different sea conditions of the polar north. 

So to the punchline: the record shows that Shackleton knew this. Had the sainted explorer taken the wrong ship, known he was doing so, and covered it up? Was he not the perfectly wise, honest and resolute leader after all? A chink in the myth perhaps?  Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

About two weeks ago, on October 3rd, news broke that the Net Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA) was no more. The NZBA was one of several business-led alliances convened by the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEP-FI), with the goal of helping the financial industry to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint by 2050, with interim goals set for 2030. These various alliances (such as the Net Zero Insurance Alliance, which itself died in 2024, and the Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, which suspended its activities earlier this year) were themselves grouped under the umbrella of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), founded by UNEP-FI at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 and co-chaired by former central banker and current Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance), billionaire and erstwhile presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg (in his capacity as UN Special Envoy for Climate Ambitions and Solutions), and Mary Shapiro, former chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). (Acronym-averse readers are in for a rough ride.) Membership in GFANZ was conditional on a commitment (and demonstrable efforts) to align business activities with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial temperatures.

At its founding in 2021, the NZBA’s membership comprised 42 banks representing about 28.5 trillion dollars. In 2024, membership had peaked at 140 banks representing about 74 trillion dollars. Its insurance equivalent, the NZIA, peaked in 2022 with 291 members representing 66 trillion dollars. How did these initiatives collapse, despite the participation of most of the world’s corporate financial power? American democracy ruined it. More precisely, Republicans gained control of the federal House of Representatives in the 2022 mid-term elections, and signalled that they would investigate companies participating in climate initiatives for anti-trust violations. This emboldened Republican-led state governments to launch their own “anti-woke” intimidation campaigns against financial companies flirting with ecological sustainability. Several Republican attorneys general threatened in 2022 to file anti-trust suits against participating financial institutions, prompting some NZBA member institutions on Wall Street to threaten to leave that alliance unless membership criteria were neutered to placate Republican climate change deniers and fossil puppets (the banks did not use such accurate language in explaining their predicament). GFANZ weakened its requirement that members move to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their funded activities by 50% by 2030.

This would not, of course, be enough to appease the Republican-represented fossil cartels (to be fair, the Democrats are also quite adept and practiced at representing the fossil cartels’ interests against the interests of American citizens, humanity in general, and all extant terrestrial life). Read more »

ChatGPT confirmed that this is Virginia Creeper and also suggested a caption: “Autumn’s rebellion against the wire.”

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by Eric Schenck

In December of 2016 I hitchhiked from Dallas, Texas to Tucson, Arizona to visit my best friend.

It was the day after Christmas. I wanted to make it there by New Years – and I did.

Here are my stats:

• Total days: 4
• Total drivers: 12
• Total miles traveled: 956
• Shortest ride of the trip: 15 miles (the first one)
• Longest ride of the trip: 350 miles (the last one)
• People who didn’t pick me up: about a million 🙂

I was craving a little bit of adventure, and I certainly got it. 

Hitchhiking the U.S. was fun, scary, and (at times) even made me laugh. But more important than these things?

Everything it taught me:

If somebody is nice, it doesn’t matter how weird they are.

One of my first drivers was a guy in a baseball cap. He smiled when I climbed in, nodded when I said thanks, and didn’t say a word the entire time.

Something else interesting about him? He had about 1,500 beer cans in the back of his truck. Before he dropped me off, I helped him unload them at the dump.

When I finally got out, he gave me one more nod, and then was on his way. 

Weird?

Definitely.

But he gave me a ride, and that’s all that matters. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Laurie Sheck

1.

It has been over 200 years since Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein in the stormy summer of 1816. Although she was only eighteen, she had already lost one child just days after giving birth; her second child, William, was a few months old. By the time Frankenstein was published, in 1818, Mary had given birth to a third child, Clara Everina, who would live for a little more than a year. It was within this context of rapid cycling between birth and death, welcoming and loss, joy and pain, that Frankenstein came into being. Mary’s own mother, the writer Mary Wollestonecraft, had died thirteen days after Mary’s birth.

The first edition was published anonymously on January 1, 1818, by the small London publishing house, Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, with a dedication to Mary’s father, the writer and political philosopher William Godwin, and an unsigned preface by Mary’s husband, Percy Shelley.

The reviews, though mixed, could be searingly negative. Most of them assumed the author was a man. Several conjectured the author was Percy Shelley himself.

“Our readers will guess from this summary, what a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity this work presents…Our taste and our judgment revolt at this kind of writing…it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners or morality…it fatigues the feelings without understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart….” The review ends wondering whether “the head or heart of this author is the most diseased.” (The Quarterly Review, January 1818).

A review in La Belle Assemble, was more positive, “This is a very bold fiction.” So was Walter Scott’s review in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine where he pronounced the book, “An extraordinary tale, in which the author seems to us to disclose uncommon powers of poetic imagination,” though he found the self-education of the Monster, “improbable and overstrained.”

Although The Edinburgh Magazine found the Monster to be “a very amiable personage” it encouraged the anonymous author to “study the established order of nature as it appears…than to continue to revolt our feelings by hazardous innovations.”

The British Critic also referred to the “diseased” and “wandering imagination” of the author and suggested the writer “might be disciplined to something better.”  “The writer of it is, we understand, a female: this is an aggravation of that which is the prevailing fault of the novel.” Read more »

by Barry Goldman

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas spoke recently at The Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law. He was asked how he balances stare decisis with originalism, and he made the following remarks:

Well, if I find it doesn’t make any sense … I think we should demand that, no matter what the case is, that it has more than just a simple theoretical basis.

[I]f [it’s] totally stupid, and that’s what they’ve decided, you don’t go along with it just because it’s decided.

I don’t think that … any of these cases that have been decided are the gospel, and I do give perspective to the precedent. But … the precedent should be respectful of our legal tradition, and our country and our laws, and be based on something – not just something somebody dreamt up and others went along with.

At some point we need to think about what we’re doing with stare decisis, and it’s not some sort of talismanic deal where you can just say ‘stare decisis’ and not think, turn off the brain, right?

We never go to the front, see who’s driving the train, where is it going. And you could go up there in the engine room, find it’s an orangutan driving the train, and you’re going to follow that? I think we owe our fellow citizens more than that.

To be clear, I have nothing good to say about Clarence Thomas. I think he’s a particularly bad judge, even relative to the rest of the bad judges on the Supreme Court. I think he (and they) are wrong on every significant issue. But I agree with him on this. If a decision is totally stupid, if it doesn’t make any sense, and there is an orangutan driving the train, we shouldn’t turn off our brains and go along.

The problem, of course, is that he and I disagree about which decisions are the stupid ones. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Under Construction. December 2023.

Digital photograph.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

I can’t know for certain that you are a conscious being with an active mental life.  I have access (I think) to my own internal states.  I feel my own anxieties, indulge in my own joy, anticipate my own future, and remember my own past.  I can’t do the same for you; indeed, for all I know, you might be a philosophical zombie: you might act in every observable way as a conscious human being would act, but, in fact, you might lack internal mental states entirely.  Beliefs, desires, hopes, etc., might not happen inside of you. This is The Problem of Other Minds. It is an epistemic problem about what we can really know about human minds other than our own.

In ordinary contexts, though, we don’t think knowledge requires certainty.  The idea that you might be a philosophical zombie isn’t a skeptical hypothesis I’m expected to take seriously, especially if I’m enjoying your company or consoling you about a loss.  As Bertrand Russell wrote, let a philosopher “get cross with his wife and you will see that he does not regard her as a mere spatio-temporal edifice of which he knows the logical properties but not a glimmer of the intrinsic character.  We are therefore justified in inferring that his skepticism is professional rather than sincere.”

In our everyday interactions with one another, we take behavior that is typically caused by certain mental states in our own case to count as sufficient evidence that the same or similar mental states are present in the minds of other people.  If you pluck the fruit from the tree, it’s likely because you believe it is ripe.  I am justified in drawing that conclusion because that’s likely the belief that would motivate me to pluck the fruit.

This reasoning is good enough for us most of the time in our interactions with other human beings.  When it suits us, however, we treat non-human minds with much more skepticism, especially when it is in our interest to do so.  Though philosophical behaviorism is no longer in vogue in human psychology, scientists still treat it as gospel when it comes to research on non-human animals.  When discussing interactions with animals, a scientific approach involves making observations about stimulus inputs and response outputs without speculating about the inner states of animals whose internal lives we can’t access. We make similar judgments when thinking about the minds of animals that we kill for food. This is The Problem of Animal Minds, and it is much more than an epistemic problem. Read more »

by Derek Neal

Kazuo Ishiguro often talks about a scene from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre that has influenced his writing. In an interview on the occasion of his Nobel Prize in 2017, he mentions how “the narrator hides from the reader and hides from herself in the Charlotte Brontë books,” and how he also writes first person characters in this way. Elsewhere, Ishiguro mentions a specific scene from Jane Eyre where she is crying but doesn’t tell this to the reader; instead, another character in the novel reveals this information. Here’s the passage form Jane Eyre, where Mr. Rochester, whom Jane is in love with, is speaking to her after she believes she has seen evidence that he is in love with another woman. Rochester asks her:

“What is the matter?”

“Nothing at all, sir.”

“Did you take any cold that night you half drowned me?”

“Not the least.”

“Return to the drawing-room; you are deserting too early.”

“I am tired, sir.”

He looked at me for a minute.

“And a little depressed,” he said. “What about? Tell me.”

“Nothing—nothing, sir. I am not depressed.”

“But I affirm that you are; so much depressed that a few more words would bring tears to your eyes—indeed, they are there now, shining and swimming; and a bead has slipped from the lash and fallen on to the flag.”

Rochester continues for a few more lines until the chapter ends, with Jane not saying anything else or commenting on the conversation. She is hiding from the reader and, as Ishiguro says, from herself, but the encounter with Rochester reveals her true feelings for him. In being forced to confront the world outside one’s head—the objective world, rather than her subjective one—the truth she would seek to repress comes to the surface.

Ishiguro most famously used this technique in The Remains of the Day with the butler Stevens, another character who spends the novel hiding from the reader and from himself. Read more »

Just a Little Time

Just a little time with you
upon the gleaming sea

Just a little time will do
and the time will make us free
And yes, the sky is our bed tonight

Just a little company
can make a prairie small

And to hear a word or two
resounding down the hall
can lift the weight, can swing the gate

Just a little time with you
will tip the hand of fate

Jim Culleny, 1972
The song: Just a Little Time With You_0001.wmv

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by William Benzon

I didn’t see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial when it came out in 1982, but I was certainly aware of it. It was an unexpected smash hit and went on to become the highest grossing film of all time, at least for a while. At this point I don’t remember why I didn’t go to see it. After all, I’d enjoyed Spielberg’s previous film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

Whatever.

I certainly knew the basic story: A weird little alien gets left behind and is befriended by a young boy. They do stuff together. Somehow the alien sends a signal back home – there’s that iconic line, “E.T. phone home.” His people come back for him. The end.

About a week ago I saw E.T. in my Netflix queue and thought, “Why not?” I started watching it. By about a half-hour in I was delighted, but also surprised, and even a bit disoriented. My rudimentary sense of the story didn’t give me any particular expectations, but my lack of specific expectations had not prepared me for, you know, THIS! This little note is an attempt to figure out just what it is that I saw.

Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On Yom Kippur this year, I went to church.

I hadn’t intended to go; or rather, I hadn’t noticed that the Jewish Day of Atonement would coincide with the date of the performance I had been planning to attend, and which was to be held in a church. I had realized just two days earlier that the Übersetzeressen (“Translators’ Dinner”), to which my employer had invited all of us in Languages Services, would by chance fall on September 30, International Translation Day, which is also the feast day of St. Jerome, the patron saint of translators. And so, heartened by this serendipity, I started investigating the significance of other dates during the same period, and came across Yom Kippur, which began this year at sundown on Wednesday, October 1, just as I was settling into my pew at the Reformierte Kirche Russikon for Winterreise.

Anna Gitschthaler, an Austrian soprano based in Switzerland, has thrillingly reconceived Franz Schubert’s song cycle as theater and has been performing it this month, together with pianist Rebecca Ineichen, director Adela Maria Bireich, and set designers Erika Gedeon & Stefan Schmidhofer, in Zurich’s Oberland. Gitschthaler is of course not the first to give Winterreise a dramaturgical makeover, nor is she the first female singer to perform the 1827 setting of 24 poems by Wilhelm Müller, conventionally sung by a man: I have written here about some innovative stagings, by Ian Bostridge, Brigitte Fassbaender, and Joyce DiDonato, as well as about my own involvement in a “gender-bending” performance of the cycle two years ago, with my colleagues Annina Haug and Edward Rushton. But Gitschthaler’s Winterreise is indeed a pioneering production—of Müller and Schubert’s evocation of suffering and redemption, as well as in its own right—because it makes self-conscious use of the sacral space of a temple as the (literal) staging ground for a work of musical theater, and thus innovatively enacts the equivalence of art and religion, if not in fact the superiority of the former over the latter. Read more »

by Marie Snyder

It feels like I understand the idea that all suffering comes from expectation in a way I didn’t used to. Now it seems so obvious, but I’m not really sure what flip was switched. It’s not just that if we stop expecting to get things, we’ll be happier, but how ridiculous it is to expect anything to stay the same at all, much less get better, ever. And that understanding seems to help reduce some anxiety over the things that can’t be easily changed. Suffering is inevitable, but it can be somewhat diminished in order to have more contentment. We can change what counts as suffering, and we can change our perspective around tragedies, so maybe we can also change how we can continue to bear witness to, or experience, absolute atrocities. 

One simple way to reduce suffering is to narrow the definition. Comedian Michelle Wolf jokes, “It’s hard to have a struggle and a skin care routine,” which clarifies that we might be considering some difficulties as suffering in a way that doesn’t fly when we widen the scope of our horizons. Pain is pain and can’t definitively be compared, yet I believe many of us have an automatic judgment in our heads that lists events in a hierarchy. Typically suffering from having to do a task we don’t want to do, like write a boring report or clean out the fridge, or from wanting luxuries we can’t afford, like another trip, might be relegated to the bottom as whining. The pain from it is there, though: the agony and stress from uninteresting maintenance that’s necessary to further our own existence or the grief over lost opportunities. Furthermore, it can develop an extra layer of shame on top of the suffering if we try and fail to elicit sympathy for having so much food that some is left to rot and needs to be cleaned. When we realize we can’t afford that trip after all, this is a suffering we are expected to bear without complaint. 

The shame on top of the very real distress doesn’t help, but a different perspective might: comparing to those worse off, recognizing the tasks as merely one choice with alternatives that are even less pleasant, or maybe even finding ways to enjoy the task or staycation are ideas passed down for millenia. If we can increase our distress tolerance around these lesser calamities, then we can potentially wipe out the bottom layer of our pile of pain.  Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

“We have to develop Singapore’s only available natural resource, its people,” Lee Kuan Yew often said in one variation or another.

Lee, Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, held the role for 31 years before his “emeritus jobs” of Senior Minister and later Minister Mentor – staying active in Singaporean government until his death in 2015 at 91 years-old. Throughout his life Lee reminded Singaporeans and the world that Singapore had been not much more than a dusty red sandbar when it began – dependent on water from peninsular Malaysia and unable to meet its own agricultural needs.

Singapore’s economy was transformed from being centered around shipping, trade and a British naval base to being diversified to include more profitable and scalable industries including manufacturing, finance, software and biotech. To do this, Singaporeans had to be able to move into white collar jobs – which of course required education and lots of it.

Accordingly, education became an early focus for Singapore’s leadership. Most of Singapore’s founders were themselves graduates of the greatest schools in the British Empire – including Cambridge, Oxford and the London School of Economics. But they were the products of highly successful families who could afford to send their sons abroad (although notably, Mrs Lee also attended Cambridge and became a highly successful attorney in her own right – making her a pioneer and icon in Singapore). These leaders understood their country needed education not to be concentrated in the elite – but to be the standard for all Singaporeans. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In Timur Vermes’ best-selling novel Er ist wieder da (‘He’s back’), Adolf Hitler wakes up in Berlin. Somewhat disoriented after discovering the year is 2011, he soon finds his way to the public eye again: he is understandably regarded as a skilled Hitler impersonator, an excellent ironic act for a 21^st-century comedy show. His handlers don’t mind the fact that he never breaks character.

Clips make it to YouTube, and the ‘Führer’ becomes a beloved persona. After humiliating the ineffectual leader of a far-right fringe party, he is assaulted by skinheads. Politicians express their sympathies, a book deal follows. The novel ends with its main character at the head of an up-and-coming party, whose slogan is: Es war nicht alles schlecht – “it wasn’t all bad”.

Vermes puts Hitler in a Germany that believes it is finally able to laugh at him, or at itself through him. Commercial media encourage his popularity, which at first seems tongue-in-cheek but gradually turns out to be more than that. The country is unprepared for his literal-minded and violent racist madness – and for the traction it subtly gathers, the threads in our own discourse that it starts to pull on again. Everyone thinks they know Hitler, but fails to recognize him when he is among us now.

I thought of this story again as I read historian Alec Ryrie’s new book The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It. Ryrie’s thesis is that after the Second World War, the Atlantic and European world placed Hitler at the center of the Western value system (as its negative mirror image). This went at the cost of another historical figure, whose return we have similarly stopped expecting: in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Jesus had represented a moral authority that was deeply felt not just by Christians, but also by free-thinkers and atheists. In the mid-twentieth century, Nazism became the new moral absolute. This model lasted for decades, but Ryrie discerns a new cultural shift, one that is happening now. With the age of Atlantic hegemony, the ‘age of Hitler’ is coming to an end too. What lies beyond it is still up for grabs. Read more »