by Bill Benzon

About a week and a half ago I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and saw one of those tweets that was commenting on something about which I was clueless. Meta? What’s that about? Such tweets are common enough. I generally never find out what they’re about. But this little mystery resolved itself soon enough.

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg had proclaimed himself Emperor of the Metaverse. Not in so many words, of course, but for the purposes of this essay, yes, that’s what happened.

I had a vague idea what “metaverse” referred to and learned a bit more as I read articles, mostly skeptical, about it. Many of those articles traced the word to Snow Crash, a dystopian science fiction novel Neal Stephenson published in 1992.

I may or may not have read it. It’s something I might well have read, but I don’t recall it Read more »

Photo taken yesterday evening at Schiphol airport in Amsterdam.

by Bill Murray

Consider the medieval mariner, slighted and sequestered, hard-pressed and abused, gaunt, prey to the caprice of wind and wave, confined below decks on a sailing ship. If the captain doesn’t get the respect he demands, he will impose it. So will the sea.

The sailor found solace in ritual. You get the idea he rather enjoyed taboo things. If the ship’s bell rings of its own accord the ship is doomed. Flowers are for funerals, not welcome aboard ship. Don’t bring bananas on board, or you won’t catch any fish. Don’t set sail on Fridays (In Norse myth that was the day evil witches gathered).

Helge Ingstad, an explorer we are about to meet, wrote that “Norsemen firmly believed in terrible sea trolls …. And those who sailed far out on the high seas might be confronted with the greatest danger of all: they risked sailing over the edge of the world, only to plunge into the great abyss.”

If they fell short of the abyss, what did they find? Fortunate men like Eirik the Red found safe harbors and hospitable enough terrain in Greenland to scratch out a life beyond the reach of Norwegian kings. Freedom. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

At MIT I had my initiation into a breathless pace of academic activity that was quite different from the pace I had seen elsewhere until then. The whole place was a dynamo of research activity, you could almost hear the hum and feel the energetic throb of multiple high-powered brains at work. While teaching was an important part of daily activity and it often fed into research, it was research where the main action was. Later I found out this was more or less the case in other top departments in the country, but at MIT I had my first experience. There was the thrill of thriving at the frontier of your subject, you saw the frontier visibly moving from one seminar to another, from one widely-cited journal article to another, you had to run fast even to remain at the same place, and while the competition and the race were invigorating, you could also see the jostling and the occasional hustle.

I was amazed how well-informed people were about who was doing what in which department in the country, who was pushing the (research) boundary where, which young faculty you had to attract before others grab them, what was the going market rate for a particular ‘hot-shot’ scholar, who was having an offer from which top department, and so on. (This reminds me of a phone conversation I had with the Dean of a top east-coast university much later when I joined Berkeley. This Dean wanted to know if I’d be interested in joining his University. Before he went any farther, I told him that I had only recently settled down in Berkeley, both my wife and myself liked the place, and just bought a house, and so I’d not be interested in moving. He talked for a while and then gave up. But before ending the conversation, I think he took pity on me and gave me a bit of ‘personal advice’. He said he could see that I was not yet used to the system in the American academic market. “When somebody offers you a job”, he said, “you don’t say ‘no’ even before I told you the salary I was going to offer you, which I am sure is much higher than what Berkeley is paying you. Even if you are ultimately not really interested, you try to get all the information, take the time, bargain with your Department, and get a raise for yourself”).

At the MIT Department those days the most revered leader clearly was Paul Samuelson, who every day at noon would preside over the lunch table at the Faculty Club in the top floor of the building. At the table, he’d often entertain us drawing upon his spectacular collection of stories and gossip, not just about economists, but often about physicists and mathematicians. To Paul there was a clear hierarchy of disciplines. It was visibly demonstrated to me one day when we took a visiting English friend who wanted to meet Paul. We told Paul that he’d be interested to know that this friend had done his degree in Astrophysics, but now he was thinking of moving to Economics. At this Paul immediately said, putting his hand above his head, “Astrophysics, then Economics (he lowered his hand to his chest level), what next? Theology? (moving his hand to the knee level). Read more »

by Claire Chambers

I was delighted to learn that Abdulrazak Gurnah had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. On 7 October 2021 it was announced that the prize had been bestowed on Prof Gurnah for‘his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.’

My immediate thought after finding out that he had won this ultimate literary accolade was that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer or more grounded writer. In a Tweet that went semi-viral, another colleague, Dr Michael Collins who now works at King’s College London, encapsulated widespread feelings of surprised glee that a man of Gurnah’s humility whose writing is not widely known had won the £840,000: ‘My former colleague at Kent just won the Nobel Prize in Literature! I once hit him with a door’. This humorously bathetic post made me think of the photograph I took to accompany an interview I did with Prof Gurnah over a decade ago, for my book British Muslim Fictions (2011).  In it, Gurnah is tall and dignified, his white hair distinguished over a dark suit jacket and light button-up shirt. What interests me, though, is the humble backdrop. Gurnah stands in front of an ugly Brutalist building at the University of Kent, where he works as Professor of Postcolonial Literature. In the foreground are garish plastic safety barriers, temporarily fencing off some roadworks. This, then, is a novelist whose high standards for his writing never shade into elitism or pretentiousness.

I wrote to congratulate him on this richly-deserved achievement. In these dark days of the Covid-19 pandemic, it felt great to have some good news to celebrate for a change. As well as our interview, we had got to know each other a bit more at a talk of his which I moderated at Nottingham Contemporary in 2013. In this post, I would like to provide some short reflections about his body of fiction, reflections which are informed by the interview and talk. Read more »

Nothing But Light

reflections stutter in the picture plane
as if Vincent were still alive
dragging oils across canvas in French light
inhaling the color of things
expiring his incandescent translations
in spectacular conjugations of frequencies
setting fire to a field with crows
turning night into pinwheels, vibrations
underpinning everything in sight
nothing still but the lying frame
a thing suggesting what is seen is all there is
while what’s real is past that edge
beyond expanse and nothing but light

Jim Culleny
10/27/21

painting, Wheatfield with Crows,
by Vincent Van Gogh

by Chris Horner

De gustibus non est disputandum —Roman Maxim

How can I know what I think until I see what I say? —EM Forster

When I first began to take photography seriously, as a practitioner as well as a viewer, I naturally discussed the activity with other photographers. It wasn’t long before I noticed a paradox in the way they view what they do. On the one hand, it is widely accepted that photographic results are subjective: if you like what you do, its enough: you should ‘shoot for you’, not for anyone else’s taste, because nobody can be right or wrong about what makes a good image. On the other hand there is a tendency to search out the opinions of others, talking about improving, learning from other photographers and generally getting better at the craft. Some is about the technical business of using the camera to best effect, but much more is about the notion achieving the goal of making aesthetically  ‘better’ pictures. To this end certain photographers in the various genres (landscape, street, portrait etc) are held up as exemplars (Ansel Adams, Cartier Bresson etc). So it seems that there is the belief that judgment is entirely subjective, and yet, somehow, not. But what makes something ‘better’ when it it comes to art?

A few years ago, there was a debate in the pages of a British newspaper along the lines of ‘is Keats better than Bob Dylan?’. Mainly futile, I think, as the unanswered question was surely better at what? It’s not clear that one can usefully compare -and rank -an early 19th century lyric poet with a 20th/21st singer-songwriter, because they aren’t really doing the same thing. Another half submerged question lurking in the discussion, was really: are there standards by which we can assess the excellence or otherwise of a work of art? Is there is a qualitative difference between the novels of Tolstoy and those of Dan Brown – or should we just say, ‘if you like it, it’s as good as anything else’? Here, I think, the discussion often gets confused. So we have a debate about excellence, or worth, judged according to an uncertain standard; and conflated with that another about the canon, about ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, so called. Here you might well be tempted to dismiss it all, and just say ‘if I like it, its enough’, or maybe better: ‘there are no standards beyond ones own taste’. If that is so, we might as well just shut up about what we like or don’t like in art. A person just has the response they happen to have, and different people will have different responses. The rest is, or should be, silence. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Suppose on your way to work every day you pass a small, shallow pond. One day as you approach it, you hear a commotion and cries of “Help!” When you get close enough, you can see a small child is drowning in the pond. You could save them. The only problem is you are wearing new shoes for a big meeting today and they will get very muddy, probably ruined, if you save the child.

Should you save the child?

It seems like you should, right? At least, morally, you should. Peter Singer who came up with that example wanted to derive a very simple principle from it.

The Singer Principle: If it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without sacrificing anything morally significant, we ought, morally, to do it.

What might be significant enough to make you hesitate to save the child? What if you might lose your job over it? And what if, when you lose your job, you and your family will quickly become homeless? What if the pond were deeper and you might drown yourself trying to save the kid?

Consider this.

You’re on your way to the movies. You’ve got your ticket money and your popcorn money. Let’s say $20. You run into an old friend of yours out front collecting money to save people from some far away catastrophe. You have complete faith and trust in her, so when she tells you that every $5 will save the life of one person, you believe her. And when she tells you that the catastrophe is likely short-lived and there’s no reason to think that anyone you save will die soon after. One life? $5. Two lives? $10. Do you give her anything? Your popcorn money? The whole $20? Do you go the ATM and withdrawal all you have? Would you be willing to remortgage your house? Read more »

Sughra Raza. Starry Night, October 2021.

Digital photograph.

by Ethan Seavey

On the Métro a man reads an ancient book. He cares for it greatly and flips each page with an abundance of caution. You know that it is ancient because the incredibly thin sides of each page have been painted an antique green and the page that he is reading is yellowed but in otherwise very good condition. The cover is a nice dark gray but it is too dark to read the title from where you stand clutching a pole, your body swaying and swinging and attempting to balance inside this skittish steel carriage. You know that he cares about this book because the dark cover reflects his fingertips. It is covered with a cellophane wrapper which implies that he has bought it just an hour ago from a Bouquiniste along the Seine and that he hasn’t brought it home yet where he would throw out the plastic. But he is deep within the book, hours, days into its story. He kept the plastic to protect it in a world as dangerous for an antique book as the Métro.

This man engages with his identity in a way that you fear. He’s seen: he is a literature professor in the making, the kind that leaves behind a stable life of business and begins to teach later in life. Today he’s too young and proud and primped to stoop to that salary. He wears a Hugo Boss mask and three layers of suit and tweed and pressed cotton. His shoes are as shiny as the cellophane holding the book and he is seen loving books and he is a bit unhappy. He turns and leans his forehead against the door and looks into the lightless tunnel flashing past. This tells his fellow passengers that they should expect his departure and a wordless goodbye and more space in the car and a subtly sentimental vacancy. Read more »

by David Oates

The  soon-to-be famous ship is part-way around the world. It will eventually become only the second vessel in recorded history to achieve the complete circumnavigation – after Magellan. But the ship is poised over disaster. Somewhere in the seas off present-day Indonesia, the captain has ordered full sail and then retired to his cabin. The ship hits something – there’s an awful shudder and it stops dead in the water. A reef, probably.

There it stays for some twenty hours – “as its crew tries and tries to fathom the trouble they are in.”

The ship is the Golden Hinde, and the captain is thus, of course, Sir Francis Drake – hero to every British schoolchild for the following four hundred-some years. Four hundred years of “gloating,” as author Horatio Morpurgo puts it, as he uses this pivotal moment to put some questions to the glittering hero – to its crew – and to ourselves.

Is Drake’s triumphant return to Plymouth harbor in September 1580 – the ship loaded with treasure – really all there is of this tale? It makes for easy telling, with Drake cast as the swashbuckling old sea-dog, as if from an Errol Flynn movie of the thirties. But what has been left out of this version?  Morpurgo uses this daylong pause to ask the question: this episode of doubt ended in bitter enmity between the captain and his ship’s chaplain, who apparently preached against the great man – upon his own ship! – during these hours of peril. Why? What other stories are buried beneath the blinding treasures and easy clichés of the Golden Hinde? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric J. Weiner

He was both a street fighter and a hard-boiled romantic for whom the radical imagination was at the heart of a politics that mattered, and he was one of few great intellectuals I knew who took education seriously as a political endeavor. —Henry Giroux

On August 16, 2021, Stanley Aronowitz, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, labor organizer, educational theorist, author, and dissident public intellectual died. Essentially self-educated, he told me once that he began with Spinoza and just kept reading. He may have actually started with Kafka or Dostoevsky, but the order of things is less important than the central lesson. It’s because of him that I often find myself telling my students—who overwhelmingly come to Montclair State University for a credential or, in Aronowitz’s lexicon, to be “schooled”—that to be educated all they really need is a “library card” and intellectual curiosity.

Through his radical and relentless pursuit of knowledge and justice, Aronowitz provided a blueprint for living an intellectual life that matters to those of us who refuse to accept the status quo. He showed us through his dissident research and activism how to direct the imagination toward the utopic horizon of radical democratic freedom and economic justice. At the heart of Stanley’s intellectual project was his life-long rejection of fatalism; his revealing criticisms of the status quo always pointed to radical possibilities for social change. Aronowitz never feared freedom like so many “intellectuals” who camouflage their conservative bias within critiques overburdened by cynicism. His embrace of what Erich Fromm called “positive freedom” was amplified by his deep respect for working people and his willingness to get his hands dirty in the fight for a future that looked radically different than the past or present. Read more »

School of fish in a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol. Photo taken last week.

by Thomas Larson

Everyone knows—or should know—how burdensome a pregnancy is on a woman. It’s especially hard now if you live in Texas where a fetal heartbeat detected at six weeks means by law the woman cannot terminate her pregnancy; she must carry it to term. The burden of having a child, whether planned for or forced, is made worse by the financial responsibility of raising that offspring, for parents and families, through childhood and adolescence, the next eighteen years. Would any man argue that such a load, for poor women in particular, is among the toughest things she’ll ever face?

But there’s another Atlas-like weight on the woman: The Texas anti-termination law refuses to address the father’s role, which I think should be restated with typographic emphasis: He Is the Father of the Fetus. While some good men do share the many duties of parenting—pregnancy, birth, and the child’s life itself—many men don’t. They flounder and flee. The stats for deadbeat dads (estranged, separated, divorced) are appalling: 30% pay nothing and 50% are forever in arrears. (As a consequence, close to 85% of custodial parents are mothers.) Is it right to force a woman to have a child when there is one in three chance that the newborn will not be supported by both parents?

I propose that we add another provision to the Texas law or the Supreme Court’s all-but-certain decision to modify or overturn Roe v. Wade. First, the Texas law should stipulate that the father of each child, in gestation or in the world, must be identified by a DNA test and by the mother. Second, the father—by court order—must pay for child-rearing over the next eighteen years. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

When Robert Solow asked me in Cambridge if I’d like to join the faculty at MIT in the other Cambridge, I was taken aback, and asked for some time to think about it. Until then I never imagined living in the US, a country I had never visited before, and what I saw in Hollywood films was not always attractive. I was planning to go back to India where my aging parents, younger siblings, and the majority of my friends were.

There was also a mental block. Growing up in the leftist environment of Bengal, I had developed a visceral distaste for the American political regime in general, its imperial hegemony and its support of oppressive regimes all over the world in the name of fighting the cold war. The ongoing Vietnam War was obviously a major irritant. At the same time I knew that in the world of new ideas, entrepreneurial innovations, and academic excellence American preeminence was undeniable. In particular MIT Economics Department was then, as now, one of the top two or three Departments in the world.

Most of my friends told me that it was silly of me not to give an immediate positive response to Solow. When I asked about how it was like living in US, most of them were not very helpful. Only Kalyan, the mathematics student, who had some experience of living there, told me that it should be fine, except that I had to be mindful about two things: (a) whenever there was a policeman around, I should keep my hands out of my pockets, otherwise I’d be shot on suspicion of hiding a gun; and (b) I should minimize visits to doctors, not just for the expense involved (particularly compared to NHS in UK), but also because American doctors were supposedly ‘knife-happy’, on the slightest pretext they’d cut out a limb or two, as fees they got from surgery were high! Read more »

by David J. Lobina

I naturally pose this question in the context of the series of posts on Language and Nationalism I have published here in the last few months. An example of a peripheral nationalist movement, the case of Catalonia will allow me to make my final message on these issues explicit enough, thus bringing the series to an end (this is the last entry; the previous 4 instalments are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4).

Catalonia, a region in the north-east of Spain, is by any definition of nationalism one might have quite clearly a nation which is furthermore in charge of a significant number of state functions all of their own – namely, it has a devolved parliament, some control over fiscal policies, a local police force, and more. What Catalonia isn’t, of course, is an independent nation-state, though in the last decade or so political events in the region suggest that a sizeable portion of Catalans would be partial to changing that. So what do the people of Catalonia want? And who are the Catalans to begin with?

The answers to these questions are partly historical, but contrary to what is usually the case in discussions such as these, we don’t actually need to go too far back in history. This is of course in keeping with the point I have made in this series of posts that the concept of nationalism and the actual reality of nation-states are rather modern phenomena, no older than 200 years (and mostly European in origin). Curiously, however, it is often the case that many standard or official histories of a given country or nation start rather far back in time, and the case of Catalonia is no exception. The monumental Història de Catalunya [The History of Catalonia], for instance, first published in 1987-89 (in 8 volumes, expanded to 10 in 2003), starts in prehistorical times. There are no doubt many who will claim that in some cases the history of a nation does start much further back than 200 years ago; some nationalists from the Basque Country, for example, another region in the north of Spain, regard Basque culture as a 1000-year phenomenon, but this is an ideological viewpoint rather than a historical one and I shall not be concerned with this type of discourse here.[i] Read more »