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.

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Dear Peridot Child,

Cupped by mountains, you are thirty-two-something degrees North in latitude. You are of raw seasons, placed as a story within a story, a fledgeling in the rorschach nest of the imagination, the wordy part of the planet wound around your ears. You are your own battlefield, fired up to fifty degrees Celsius then doused by torrents of Monsoon rains. You are chrysalis and oak, simmer and lull. In 1947 you are coming to a world of wars.

Grains of dust in a new country are upturned mirrors. You are one, you are many: Thirty two million on the day of your birth.

You washed up alone, wishing for a desk with empty drawers, a green gem on your finger.

The Peridot is the gem of youthfulness

and wisdom

Khizer, the saint of lost travelers appears here:  by this roadside, in this market, on the balcony of this mosque. This means everywhere. He has an ancient white beard and youthful eyes. His robe is green. The city of your birth opens to thirteen gates, of which one is named after Khizer. Doves peck at prayer beads, broken and rolling across the threshold.

Peridot ranges from a springtime

 yellow green to a warm olive green.

There are ledgers under the yellow-green mustard fields. Names float to their owners and hang around their necks. There are tunnels that muralists paint, and underneath, a map of sacrifice.

The ancients believed that peridot can

inhibit enchantments,

At your birth the earth is a chessboard.

The peridot protects the wearer

 from evil spirits

We are  bricks on a sheer veil.  By nightfall, the mirrors dissolve into a phoneme large enough to hold the day’s garden, its smallest tendril and dot.

It glows in the dark.

by William Benzon

Some years ago I went to a concert by the Gordys, a local group in Hoboken, New Jersey, that performs an eclectic mixture of folk, rock, and klezmer music. The performance had been an annual event and this was, I believe, the 11th or 12th such concert. The concert was held at 7 in the evening in Frank Sinatra Park, which is located on the Hudson River in full view of Manhattan.

I’d been to a previous Gordys concert two years ago and knew how it would go. In particular, I knew that there’d be lots of families with children and that, near the end of the concert, when they went into klezmer mode, there would be dancing. That’s what interested me this time, the dancing. I wanted to see what the kids did.

I had my camera with me and took a number of pictures. Since I had a particular interest in young children I paid close attention to what a half-dozen or so of them were doing for a nine-minute stretch during the evening. At one point I noticed that one boy seemed a bit distressed for no reason that I could discern. When I had returned home and began rendering the photos on my computer I was again struck by that little guy and came up with a story about what was going on. Here’s that I figured out.

First I’ll say just a little more about the Gordys. Then I present a run of photos with descriptive comments. I conclude with a bit of thinking. Read more »

by Bill Murray

With earth set on a slow rolling boil through the rest of the summer, now might be a good time to mentally transport oneself to the cold. How’s about a winter weather sailor’s tale?

St. John’s, Newfoundland and the Grand Banks

People feel pain but too often fail to appreciate its absence. There are solid, evolutionary, survival-dependent reasons to prioritize pain – flee that sabre-toothed tiger, and fast! – but how much fuller life would be if we could celebrate time spent pain free. And what do you know, here is an island full of people who do just that. Welcome to “The Rock.”

Newfoundland marches to the beat of its own drummer, or at least to the ticking of its own clock. An hour and a half ahead of the U.S. east coast, the island they call “The Rock” is an island alone. No one shares Newfoundland Standard Time, which is a half hour ahead of the rest of Atlantic Canada and a half hour behind the nearby French territory of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon.

At 400,000 square kilometers, Newfoundland and Labrador comprise a province triple the size of the other Canadian maritime provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island combined. Newfoundland is the sixteenth largest island in the world, larger than Iceland, or Cuba. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Judges judge. The way to tell that someone is a judge, as opposed to a legislator, is to examine whether the judge judges actual ongoing controversies between particular people who have incurred, or will incur, specific harms – or not. In that sense, the difference between legislating and judging is locus standi – or “standing.” Article III of the U.S. Constitution extends to the judicial branch of the US government only the power to decide “cases and controversies.” To seek a judicial remedy, one must demonstrate a sufficient connection to a harm to them personally that is a result of a law, or action, that is the subject of their case.

Civil Rights Activists were forced to commit civil disobedience, to openly break laws, and be punished for doing so, because “law testing” is (or, rather, was) not allowed. To have standing in cases where people of color were denied the right to be in certain spaces, someone of color had to go into and physically occupy those spaces, then face the legal, and often actual physical, peril that resulted. In other words, Civil Rights Activists were not allowed to challenge the Constitutionality of laws in an American court without standing. And they couldn’t get standing without breaking the (relevant) law.

But that’s all done with now. Now, you are free to pursue a case all the way up to the Supreme Court on the theory that hypothetically someone might one day break that law or merely disagree with it on policy or political grounds. This is what I mean by the death of standing. I’ll just give two examples from the last session of the Supreme Court. But there are other recent cases suggesting standing is no longer a thing. Read more »

The Politics of Wind

There is something that loathes a vacuum,
high pressure to low, breeze is of disequilibrium,
there will be calm without it.

The greater the absence here
the fiercer the blast from there,
the more thorough the vacancy there
the deeper the absence here.

To breathe, lungs must be partially void,
it’s in the nature of things:
breath tends toward equilibrium,
as does wise governance.

The power of wind, like that of populations,
may be exploited as well; disequilibrium
breeds contempt, contempt breeds gales,
but equilibrium, like the exchange of love,
is calm, is peacefully still.

Jim Culleny
© 4/16/22, rev 8/6/23

by O. Del Fabbro

I met Kseniia during my second visit to Ukraine, in June 2023. The moment I met her, I knew that this thirty-four-year-old woman is a special one. Kseniia belongs to the type of women who made Molotov cocktails to help defend Kyiv in March 2022. “I had some romantic idea to create these Molotov cocktails, because I heard that it might come to urban warfare, and I wanted to help. We spent a whole day making them, but the smell of petrol was awful.” Nevertheless, Kseniia made several boxes.

The concept of women making Molotov cocktails was something I only knew from news reports, and I distinctly remember the impression that such women made on my perception of the willingness of Ukrainians to not only resist but also fight the aggressor. To suddenly be sitting in front of such a woman seemed surreal to me.

The more I listened to Kseniia’s numerous stories, the more it occurred to me that she was much more than just a simple activist. Kensiia is a hub of different intense experiences: sadness, happiness, danger, beauty. Kseniia, I believe, has seen it all; and her stories speak for themselves.

The Saddest Experience

Kseniia opened and still runs two aid organizations. One supplies the military and civilians with food, clothes, drones, night vision goggles, whatever people contact her for. The other organization repairs roofs of destroyed houses, especially in the countryside, and supplies the military with used cars. So far, the later organization called ‘livyj bereh’ – which means the left bank of the river – has repaired two hundred roofs and donated more than forty cars to the military. In total, she raised more than half a million euros. “Pink Floyd sent us some money too,” says Kseniia with a little pride. The controversy around the provocative statements on the war of the former Pink Floyd member, Roger Waters, is something Kseniia has no clue about and also does not care. Read more »

by Joseph Carter Milholland

Once, when I was asked who my favorite character in a Dostoevsky novel was, I replied Achilles. This is not as silly or as meaningless an answer as you might initially think; in fact, my response reflected one of my most deeply held beliefs about literature, a belief connected to what I think is a crucial feature of the entire literary canon. 

Some years ago, the literary canon was almost always in my thoughts. Not just the books that are said to be in it, but the concept itself. Why should we read the canon, and what use was there in creating one? I knew almost instinctively that there was immense value in what Matthew Arnold called “the best that has been thought and said,” but I struggled to pinpoint what exactly would be the result of studying the canon for an individual. Despite all the claims made for it, the literary canon does not make you morally better, nor does it provide any special insight into non-literary academic fields, nor is it of any help in most practical matters.

At the time, literary journalism provided no convincing answers to my questions. This was during the great glut of “Defence of the Humanities” discourse, when dozens and dozens of articles in magazines and newspapers and professors’ blogs were dedicated to why university students should study the humanities, with none of the answers securing a consensus even among academics. Studying the humanities, some claimed, could produce better citizens, could cause us to become more empathetic with others, or could benefit workplaces in some hard to quantify way. In these debates, the canon was frequently a major subject, although here too there was no prevailing view of the matter. Should the canon be defended, revised, or abolished? I can recall some commentators who argued for all three positions at once. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait at Itaimbezinho Canyon, Brazil, March 2014.

Digital photograph.

by Jonathan Kujawa

Mathematicians can be extraordinarily fussy about how they write. From having a near fetish on their choice of chalk to Donald Knuth taking 10 years in the middle of writing a multi-volume book series to develop an entirely new typesetting system [1], they spend an inordinate time thinking about how to write something. Indeed, a good choice of notation can be amazingly revealing.

Lately, I’ve become a bit obsessed with something a little more mundane: how we write numbers. The Arabic numeral system of 1, 2, 3, 4, … is so widespread and so ingrained that it is as invisible as the air we breathe. In elementary school, I remember learning the Roman numeral system of I, II, III, IV, …, but only use them occasionally when I need to read a clock or decode the year of a movie or Super Bowl. Certainly, if you asked me to compute

LXIV (CCCXXVIII – XXXVI) + DCCCXXVII

I would have a hard time figuring out that it equals XIXDXV.

Most of us ordinarily work using base ten. This means we use position to record powers of 10 (the tens place, hundreds place, and so on). This also means it is natural to have exactly 10 different symbols. You can have 0 tens, 1 ten, 2 tens, 3 tens, and so on, but 10 tens doesn’t need a symbol since it rolls over and is recorded as 1 hundred. Thus the Arabic system has 0, 1, 2, 3,4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. Their shapes are designed to be easy to draw and read, and are maybe even suggestive of their value. When I was in elementary school, I did calculations by counting the three points of 3, the four corners of 4, and so on.

Altogether, the Arabic number system is efficient, practical, and pretty straightforward. It’s no surprise it became the standard. Roman numerals are terrible to use because they are written in a haphazard way that is disconnected from how we record, use, and calculate numbers. The Arabic system also has the advantage that how we use it to write numbers matches how we read numbers in English. No doubt, the rise of English and the Arabic number system are tied together. I recently saw a funny meme about this:

But it turns out there are lots of other interesting ways to write numbers. Read more »