by Eric Schenck

Rowing is a sport that you naturally underestimate. You think of canoes, of guys with perfect hair, of leisurely strolls on a lake while the glorious sun shines down.

From my experience, that’s not even close to the truth.

In reality, it’s brutal. If you’re doing it right (going fast) rowing is torture for the body. Not canoes, but long shells that only move if you do. Not perfect hair, but blacked out vision and legs on fire. Not a glorious sun, but on the water by 6 AM and a January river that doesn’t care how freezing you are.

Rowing will chew you up and spit you out.

And it’s worth every second. Read more »

by Philip Graham

For over twenty years I have been in awe of David Jauss as a writer, as a colleague and teacher, and above all for his insight into the contradictory human heart. His short stories have been gathered together in two essential collections, Glossolalia and Nice People, and many of these stories, I believe, take their rightful place among the best short fictions in American literature. He is a master of the precise, illuminating moment, and the clarity of his prose is deepened by his parallel work as a poet.

It’s not surprising that his poetry collections, Improvising Rivers and You Are Not Here, are, in turn, informed by his work as a fiction writer. Jauss’s poems aren’t afraid of the tug of narrative. And because of his love of music, particularly jazz, he is more attuned than most writers to the importance of rhythm, unexpected harmonies, and structural invention in writing, whether prose or poetry.

Jauss is also the author of two important collections of craft essays, Alone with All that Could Happen, and, most recently, Words Made Flesh. David and I were colleagues for ten years at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and I remember quickly learning to attend his craft lectures. David knew how to see through the common clichés of creative writing advice, whether it might be the accepted modes of characterization, the “flow” of prose rhythm, use of epiphanies in short fiction, or constricting notions of what constitutes a plot. The audiences for his lectures were always filled with both students and fellow faculty members because we knew that, when David spoke, we would all become his apprentices, and happily so. Read more »

I went a bit “meta” this week with this self-portrait by reflection in a framed photograph of my wife taken by Tanyth Berkeley which hangs in my office.

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by Rebecca Baumgartner

A seat by the fire

I remember listening to President Obama’s first Inaugural Address fifteen years ago because of something Obama said which, according to the political pundits, had never been expressed in a Presidential speech before. This was the moment in question:

“For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers. We are shaped by every language and culture, drawn from every end of this Earth; and because we have tasted the bitter swill of civil war and segregation, and emerged from that dark chapter stronger and more united, we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself…” (italics added)

I had never heard a politician mention non-believers before. Nor had the rest of the country. Obama was stretching the definition of American pluralism further than it had typically been stretched, certainly further than it had ever been stretched in a mainstream political speech. A few journalists commented on it in the days following the speech, but the nod to non-believers was hardly the most significant moment of that day. 

Unless, that is, you were one of those non-believers, inured to years of prayers and biblical references in every public speech and ceremony (including elsewhere in Obama’s own speech); inured to saying “One nation under God” in school; inured to all the ways that the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment are routinely violated in public buildings and by those in elected office. 

These speeches, buildings, and laws are for all of us, but in practice they are treated as belonging to only those Americans who hold specific religious beliefs. Here, at last, was a President explicitly welcoming non-religious citizens to a seat by the fire: my fellow Americans.  Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

It has been a busy few months in the field of animal studies. It seems like every month is a busy one for animal studies these days, which is salutary. As a hobbyist follower of this area of study, every time I turn around there is a new line of research to catch up on. All the better for me, as it eats up reading time that might otherwise be spent doom-scrolling through the latest outrages and tragedies. Save me from myself, you heroes of scholarship.

The first item of note is the honouring of Lori Gruen as “Distinguished Philosopher of the Year” by the Eastern division of the Society for Women in Philosophy, an American organization that has been supporting and promoting women philosophers for over fifty years. Gruen is a prolific and influential figure in the ecofeminist tradition, focusing mainly on environmental and animal ethics as well as on the ethics of incarceration, and has published extensively over the last three decades. She has also been a mentor, collaborator and co-author with many other people in the field, and I have come across her work several times over the last few years while reading through other researchers’ bibliographies.

I haven’t read enough of her work or ecofeminist work generally to have a well-informed opinion of it, but my not-well-informed sense is that it leans towards normative ethics and elaborating the entailments of posited moral facts, which is outside of my preferred meta-ethical wicket. (Once the worm of Nietzschean critique gets into your brain, it becomes difficult to find any enthusiasm for the discovery or analytical definition of moral facts). I also have some general misgivings about the essentialist bent of much of the ecofeminist work that I’ve encountered (e.g. relational ethics is feminist, empiricist science is patriarchal), which has kept me from engaging with that literature more than incidentally. I nevertheless remain open to the possibility that these impressions are mistaken and, given that most of the targets of ecofeminist critique are certainly real and disastrously powerful, I am glad that they have their oars in the water, paddling in roughly the right direction. This is a common muddle in normative ethics, where some things are so obviously wrong (animal cruelty, systemic racism, environmental destruction) that a very wide swath of viewpoints can converge on a common conclusion despite profound disagreements about facts, values and methods.

Coincidentally, Gruen co-authored an entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the Wikipedia of academic philosophy) on “The moral status of animals” with another animal philosopher who has been in the news of late. Susana Monsó, whom I have mentioned in earlier columns owing to her co-authorship with Kristin Andrews of several works, has been hitting the interview circuit to discuss her book “Playing Possum: How Animals Understand Death”, newly translated to English. The book explores the experience and understanding of death among non-human animals, using examples from wild and captive creatures to argue that many animals do in fact have a concept of death. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

In 524, the Roman philosopher Boethius was imprisoned in exile awaiting his execution. He was used a as a political tool and was convicted on false charges, including the charge of sorcery. In these dire conditions, he wrote The Consolations of Philosophy in which his muse, Lady Philosophy, appears to him to provide her “doctor’s help” for his anguish. She speaks to him in verse,

Why then are miserable men in awe
When tyrants rage impotently?
If you first rid yourself of hope or fear
You have disarmed the tyrant’s wrath
But whosoever quakes in fear or hope
Drifting and losing mastery
Has cast away his shield, has left his place
And binds the chains with which he
Will be bound.

The advice that Lady Philosophy imparts to Boethius resembles that offered by the Stoics—we cannot control external circumstances. We can’t prevent people from being ignorant and cruel. We can’t stop tyrants from manipulating and harming people in pursuit of power. Chaos, suffering, and death are inevitabilities. In challenging times, we must focus only on what we can control—what is in our own minds. For Boethius and for the Stoics, desperate times (and all other times) call for a turn toward philosophical reflection on the nature of virtue and of the good life.

In The Enchiridion, the former slave turned Stoic philosopher Epictetus takes the idea that we ought not to be concerned with what is outside of our control to an extreme. He says,

With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed if either of them dies.

Most people in search of a philosophy for hard times would be unlikely to go this far. What is needed is a path forward that allows us to cope with tragedy and injustice without abandoning the value of people we care about or the issues we find important. We long for solutions that ease our anxiety but also provide us with reasons to live. Read more »

by Derek Neal

On November 5, 2024, at around 10:30 pm, I walked into a bar, approached the counter, and sat down on the stool second from the right. I ordered a stout because there was a slight chill in the air. As this was the night of the American presidential election, I pulled out my phone and checked The New York Times website, which said Donald Trump had an 80% chance of winning. This was my first update on the election, and it seemed bad. I put my phone back in my pocket and took a sip of the stout. A man entered the bar and sat down next to me, on my right. There was a half-drunk glass there, and I realized he’d gone out to smoke but had probably been at the bar for a while. Besides us—two solitary men at the bar—the rest of the place was busy, full of couples and groups who seemed to be unconcerned with the election. This may have been because I was in Canada, but my experience of living in Canada for the past four years has shown me that Canadians are just as interested in American politics as Americans are, if not more so. My work colleagues had been informing me of the key swing states, for example, while I had simply mailed in my meaningless Vermont vote and returned to my life. I had no idea who would win this election.

Over the course of my two and half hours at the bar, I ended up in conversation with three different men. M. was the man to my right. I’m normally not much of a talker, but the election provided an easy conversation starter. “Are you following the election?” I asked him. It was loud and I had to repeat my question. M. mumbled that he wasn’t but asked how it was going. “Looks like Trump might win,” I said. M. raised his eyebrows, which were flecked with grey, and said something along the lines of, “Well, he has some ideas.” I had trouble making out what M. was saying, partly because of the noise in the bar, but also because M. spoke so softly. It was as if he didn’t believe in the importance of his own words. Talking or not talking, it didn’t seem to matter to him.

I pulled out my phone again. Trump was at 82%. I showed M. Then he took out his phone, a flip phone. “I’ve still got this old thing,” he mumbled. This seemed like an opening for a new conversation—a discussion on the merits of “dumb” phones versus smartphones, on phone addiction, on attention. “Why’d you get one of those?” I asked M., gesturing at his phone. He looked away and started talking about privacy with smartphones, and how he didn’t want people tracking him, or something along those lines. “How do you like the flip phone? How long have you had it?” I asked. M. said he’d had it since 2016, and that it didn’t cause him any problems because he didn’t have a job, but it sure made meeting women difficult. Read more »

Max Waldman. Judith Jamison in “Cry”, 1976.

“This 1976 portrait by Max Waldman shows Judith Jamison dancing her signature role in “Cry,” a ballet described as “a hymn to the sufferings and triumphant endurance of generations of black matriarchs.” – Smithsonian.

Legendary dancer Judith Jamison died on Nov 9, 2024. She was incredible to watch!

More here, and here.

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by Martin Butler

Fewer than half the population in the UK believe in God according to the latest surveys, even though religious belief is growing globally and the heady days when the ‘new atheists’ were in full flight are now behind us. The internet has given those on opposite sides of the fence the opportunity to lock horns continually, each side determined to show the irrationality if not downright stupidity of their opponents. I wouldn’t expect the level of debate to be particularly high, but what I do find slightly depressing is the complete absence of anything but the crudest understanding of what belief in God and religious belief in general actually  means. Both sides mostly embrace the ‘God of the gaps’ theory – science cannot explain everything, runs the argument, and God serves as a kind of backstop to account for the unexplained.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most important philosophers of the 20^th century can, I think, help us to develop a more sophisticated conception of religious belief.[1] Despite never producing anything close to a philosophy of religion, the religious point of view was clearly important to him throughout his life: ‘I am not a religious man but I can’t help but seeing every problem from a religious point of view’ (RW p79). Although, Elizabeth Anscombe, a devout Catholic and one of his most famous pupils, once declared that ‘nobody understood Wittgenstein’s views on religion.’[2]

Wittgenstein famously produced two quite distinct approaches to philosophy, the first in the only book he published in his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the second in the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously; although there have been many other publications over the years of his extensive notebooks and conversations. Towards the end of the Tractatus several important remarks set the stage for his approach to religious belief through both periods of his philosophy. ‘We feel,’ he says, ‘that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain untouched’ (TLP 6.52).

It is with these ‘Lebensprobelme’, which cannot be ‘solved’ through science, that religious belief is concerned. The problems of life cannot be stated as genuine questions since if they could, factual answers describable by science could be given: ‘If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it’ (TLP 6.5), whereas the problems of life are concerned with what cannot be said – what he refers to elsewhere as the mystical. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

What does the election of Trump mean for risks to society from advanced AI? Given the wide spectrum of risks from advanced AI, the answer will depend very much on which AI risks one is most concerned about.

The AI risk spectrum can be drawn from the near-term, high-certainty risks such as bias and discrimination to longer-term, more speculative risks such as loss of control over agentic AIs. In between those endpoints, there is a range of risks where we believe advanced AI will have an impact, but it is hard to know how much and how soon. This includes everything from AI enabling terrorists to create more deadly weapons, more persuasive AI-enabled disinformation as well as AI-driven disruptions of the labor market. The impact of Trump v2 will likely very greatly between the different points in this spectrum.

Foreseeing the impact of Trump on AI is hard. Four years is an eternity in AI land. AI looks nothing like what it did four years ago. The first Trump administration had inherent high levels of uncertainty. And many different factors will influence the Trump administration over the coming years. But there seems to be some fundamental elements that will likely significantly impact the Trump administration’s actions on AI. Read more »

Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller

They believed consciousness resided in the heart,

Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians
who scooped out dead pharaoh’s brain
through his nose with a spoon
and stuffed his skull with rags assuring
that he would not be thinking in the other world
to which he’d travel by long boat
being wrapped in cloth, speechless, in gold, supine,
embarked with a breathless retinue of slaves
through the hole at the end of the earth
to a place far in imagination.

Here and now sunlight climbs a trellis of trees
along a rail line on which, at irregular intervals,
a freight comes dragging coal behind three engines
or hauls boxcars labeled J.B. Hunt,
or pulls chains of steel cubes and chemical tanks
heavy with inventions of consciousness,
some inscribed with graffiti sprayed by
a deft hand in bold letters, in colors
set with a master’s touch
tuned to the tones of both heart and brain
while the smell of blue-grey diesel
sparks a synapse between beats
and one step follows another
behind a rear-tined tiller
as I urge a throttle.

Who knows who sings
through what instrument
—did Aristotle?

Jim Culleny
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015

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by Dick Edelstein

Catalan jazzman Ignasi Terraza and his trio lit up Barcelona with eight sets in October at Jamboree, a cutting edge Gothic Quarter club in the neoclassically-styled Plaça Reial, once an historic crossroads of the Camino de Santiago with the Roman Via Augusta, now a nexus of Barcelona night life and the local jazz scene. The series marks the 25^th anniversary of the first Jazz a les Fosques concert that the blind pianist performed in darkness, letting listeners share his sensory experience and gain insight into his musical sensibility.

Anyone who can walk in someone else’s shoes is either a saint or a specially sensitive individual, so when Terraza joked that being sighted is overrated, the audience caught the irony, insanely proud of his accomplishment as the leading exponent of Catalan jazz. His compatriot Tete Montoliu once burnished Catalunya’s image, like cellist-composer Pau Casals, whose Cant dels ocells is broadcast worldwide from Camp Nou football matches to mark a moment of silence for departed socis. Four decades ago in San Francisco, when I told a local jazz musician that I was moving to Barcelona, he replied “That’s in Catalunya—that’s where Tete Montoliu lives”.

In a darkened room, listeners tune in to the way a sightless pianist apprehends music synesthetically, as a cymbal crash becomes a circular pyrotechnic light-burst. Drummer Esteve Pi plays with a clarity that is melodic, architectural, economical, calibrated and precise, limning the structure of his discourse, not just in solos, also in ensemble parts. The trio’s limpid playing is framed by Swiss-Greek bassist Giorgos Antoniou’s supple bass lines and subtle styling; and on opening night, guest singer Laura Simó surprised listeners with a crystalline enunciation of English syllables that added an attractive twist to her interpretation of  Billy Strayhorn’s romantic recitative ballad “Lush Life”, a jazz standard whose stock goes up with each new generation. Other nights, rising-star trumpet player Joan Mar Sauqué and Australian clarinet-flautist Adrian Cunningham created unexpected sounds with their instruments, formless textures that eventually resolved into structure. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

Professor Paul Heyne practiced what he preached.

I had the good fortune of having Professor Heyne’s Microeconomics class in my very first quarter at the University of Washington. He may have been tenured faculty whose own textbook we used, but he was a natural instructor who engaged students effortlessly. Which is no small feat when speaking to 400 mostly freshmen students in the university’s largest lecture hall.

Professor Heyne understood the “sage on the stage” model of education came with challenges at best. Still, that’s what the university demanded, and it was his job to make it work. So, he followed his own beliefs and teachings and offered students incentives for valuable participation – in the form of muffins and cookies.

Before every class, Professor Heyne picked up a dozen baked items from the café in the next building. He had Teaching Assistants running around the lecture hall with wireless microphones, getting them to students with raised hands. When someone offered a correct answer or insightful comment, they might hear, “Give that woman [or man] a cookie!” And he or she was rewarded like a dog getting a Milk Bone.

Everyone knew there was a limited supply of treats – so they were not only coveted, but reserved for high quality participation. Moreover, in true Pavlovian fashion, the opportunity to get a treat had most of what could easily have been a large, passive audience perked up and participating at 9:30 am.

Professor Heyne had an amazing way of teaching Microeconomics in a narrative, easy to understand way. He most consistently pointed out we are all making economic decisions every day, all the time – because economics isn’t about money, it’s about trade-offs, resources and maximizing our utility which could just as easily be sunshine and water as dollars and labor. Unsurprisingly, his book was called The Economic Way of Thinking. Read more »

by William Benzon

A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran an op-ed in which Drew Lictenberg, who is the artistic producer at Shakespeare Theatre Company, pointed out that there has been a drop in Shakespeare productions recently:

American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19. Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.

Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare?

After pointing out that Shakespeare productions can be costly, a problem exacerbated by Covid-19, Lictenberg points to political and cultural polarization:

Given contemporary political divisions, when issues such as a woman’s right to control her own body, the legacy of colonialism and anti-Black racism dominate headlines, theater producers may well be repeating historical patterns. There have been notably few productions in recent years of plays such as “The Taming of the Shrew,” “The Tempest” or “Othello.” They may well hit too close to home.

Why be concerned about this drop? Things change. If and when the polarization lessens, Shakespeare will come back. Won’t he? What if the polarization persists? Is it possible that Shakespeare will never come back? What would that mean?

I warn you, however, that I do not intend to answer those questions. I don’t see how that’s possible. Rather, I present them as a way to begin thinking about the position that Shakespeare occupies in the imagination of well, you know, us, a bunch of people oriented toward Western culture. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Last Saturday, November 2, 2024, at a collective atelier in Zurich’s Wiedikon neighborhood, I attended the launch of a new periodical. TETI Journal, available both online and in print form, is a publication presenting academic and artistic work in line with the aims of TETI Group, an “interdisciplinary research platform to investigate the changing materialities and imaginaries of our global societies.”

TETI Group, whose acronym stands for Textures and Experiences of Trans-Industriality, was founded in 2011 by the art historian Gabriel N. Gee, and is currently “animated” by Jose Caceres Mardones, Philippe Desarzens, Anne-Laure Franchette, Lori M. Gibbs, Stéphanie Gygax, Monica Ursina Jäger, Petra Koehle, Maria João Matos, Cora Piantoni, Bérénice Serra, Jan Van Oort, Caroline Wiedmer, and Gee himself. It includes TETI Press.

Gee coined the term trans-industriality in his 2008 doctoral dissertation, which examined the art scenes of industrialized northern England during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, in the wake of deindustrialization. As Gee writes in the introduction to the first issue of this new, spinoff vehicle, he was “intrigued by the social, but also cultural and political alternates that emerged to replace the former order, and by what appeared to be vivid connections to the industrial foundations of the modern age including the complex array of global entanglements associated with the dark side of modernity.” A complex array indeed, since for Gee, “the movement from industriality to post-industriality is not understood as being linear and synchronised, but rather, as multidirectional, ambiguous, leaning sideways and even backwards, in a constant metabolising process.” Read more »

In the woods, near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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