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 »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric Bies

I picture the LORD God as a child psychologist—very much of a type, vaguely professorial, plucked from the ’50s. Picture him with me: shorn and horn-rimmed, his fingernails immaculate, he’s on his way to a morning appointment. As he kneels in the garden to tie his shoe, his starched white shirtfront strains against his gut.

Thus we find the LORD, seated in his air-conditioned office, placing birds and beasts before toddling Adam, whose first instinct, amusingly, is to name. “Horse!” he yells, flailing his arms as the dapple-gray Arabian rounds a copse of palms. “Horse!” he yells again, though this time it’s a penguin sliding by on its belly.

Those who can read Hebrew tell us that adam simply means “man,” which means, for all intents and purposes, that God named the first person “Person.” Of all the uncollared dogs that showed up on the family farm in Michigan when my father was a boy—the dogs that arrived, rambled around, and were inevitably flattened on the interstate—each was known in the same fashion, without any fuss, simply as “Dog.”

Which makes one wonder, what animal was it that St. Francis of Assisi encountered on the forested slopes above Gubbio? It’s true that that particular story gets less airtime than those in which we find il Poverello preaching to the birds or kissing lepers. And yet it may just mark his greatest conversion: not from this or that religion to Catholic, or from Catholic to yet more Catholic, but from terrorizing wolf to adoring doggie. It isn’t hard to imagine Francis with a smile, allowing the bristling thing’s big paw to eclipse his palm as he takes it in his hand for a good shake, as if to say, “You have eaten some of these kind people and their pets, chewed on them and enjoyed it, and I love you still; go along now and be a new man.”

A well-known prayer, apocryphally attributed to Francis, tells us that it is by pardoning others that one is pardoned. And the notion that our inward state bears a direct relation to our outward action does sound right. But does the structure hold up analogically? Is it by harming that one is harmed? By helping that one is helped? By naming that one is named? Read more »

Water lilies on a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Ethan Seavey

September 7, 2021 (roughly 11,000 years ago)

A sad young novelist named Ethan Seavey wrote this sad scene in which the love interest is brutally honest and is revealed  to be less loving of Peter the person and more loving of Peter the artist. At the end of a three month long workshop, Peter invites only the love interest, Noah.

//

Seavey wrote:

I sot [sic.] on the floor of the empty gallery for a while and waited. I finally hear the door open and he walks in and I pat the ground next to me. He sits next to me and glances around the room.

“Yours isn’t here,” he says. “But I bet that Joan of Arc painting won.”

“It’s not even biblical.”

“Where’s yours?”

And so I took him all the way to the top, to the dome and to my great failed masterpiece, a graffiti tableau on top of the old cathedral. I thought I’d shock him but it had no such effect on his face. He frowned and looked on.

“It’s not your best. Just your boldest. The Joan of Arc one deserved the win.”

I look at him and wonder how he can be so cruel.

“Your use of color is all over the place. You can’t see the whole picture. All you can see is each little vignette. In one corner a man is flayed by the beast; in another four horses jockey for first place and over there is the heavenly sphere you have broken up. It is biblical but not in grandness or nuance. It is a meaningless bastard tomorrow without implication.

“But Joan is assertive and beautiful and unsure. She says a lot without opening her lips. The artist has less talent than you but they knew how to fight with integrity.

“You see that. You know this isn’t the peak of your work. But you’re stubborn and sad. And that will offer no more opportunities than…” and he gestures at the dome, “this soulless failure.”

I listen until those last words and then I leave him alone on the roof. I’m walking down the stairs and yes I am gone but I am picturing him sitting alone and glowing in his genius like he always is.

//

After discovering this text, my team of archaeologists focused on two main points. One is relatively short compared to the intricacies of the other. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

The first article of this series argued that in principle we should expect our personal identities to survive a transition to artificial brains. Obviously there remains the minor technical problem of how to actually build such brains. The most popular conception of how to approach this is known as ‘whole brain emulation’, which entails replicating the precise functional architecture of our current brains with synthetic components.

This is a cautious approach, in that the closer the design of your new brain to your old one, the more confident you can be that every precious memory and personality trait has been copied over. However, this also means copying over all the limitations and flaws that evolution bestowed upon our biological brains. Yes, you won’t have to worry about your cells ageing anymore – a definite upside! But you will remain stuck with outdated structures like the amygdala and hippocampus as well as the convoluted circuitry linking them together. It would be like upgrading your 1950s classic car engine with all new modern parts. It’s still the same, inefficient, loud, polluting machine, just shinier and more durable.

This is why we will choose to design far more advanced brains instead. Though this raises a risk of its own: what if we create kinds of minds that are far more powerful than our current ones and they destroy us before we have a chance to upgrade ourselves to rival them?

This is known as the ‘existential risk’ posed by artificial general intelligence (AGI). Read more »

by David J. Lobina

In an article on anarchist thought and action, Noam Chomsky draws a crucial but often neglected distinction for politically-inclined activists: that between visions, the ‘conception of a future society’ one might aspire to, and goals, the actual ‘choices and tasks that are within reach’, the latter ideally guided by one’s vision.^[i] These, Chomsky tells us, are often in conflict, as the most sensitive choices at some point may bring about changes and situations that can be far from, and perhaps even opposed to, the vision one is campaigning for.

The specific case that engaged Chomsky in the piece is the role of the corporation in modern society, a “legal entity” that can grow so powerful as to become ‘immune from popular interference and public inspection’ –  i.e., out of the reach of the state. Rather counter-intuitively, Chomsky concludes, an anarchist may well be advised to aim to strengthen public institutions and other spheres of the state in order to rein the corporations in, even if for an anarchist a future, desirable society would be one in which the state is in fact replaced by autonomous spheres of self-realisation (Chomsky’s preferred definition of anarchism); a clear discrepancy.

This state of affairs, however, is not exclusive to anarchist activists; indeed, the conflict between one’s goals and visions may well be a feature of normal life. The case I would like to consider in this two-parter is that of the international volunteer – those people who spend their unpaid time outside of their home countries to the benefit of others. In particular, I am interested in discussing some of the challenges a volunteer faces in a place like the occupied territories of Palestine. Read more »