A young rowan (Sorbus aucuparia) tree, catching some sun in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Eli Rarey

I was one of those who bought tickets to see Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey in IMAX 70mm weeks before it opened in theaters—and I was also one of those disappointed by my experience of the movie. I had been listening to an audiobook of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s epic in preparation. With repeated stock phrases and unusual syntax, Mendelsohn preserves the profound strangeness of the original rather than trying to render it in language that sounds natural to a modern ear. (I highly recommend this translation and the audiobook, which Mendelsohn narrates.) Nolan’s approach, I knew, would be the opposite; but I hoped that at least he would be inspired by the source material to make something like a great road movie. The road movie is one of my favorite film genres—the mechanical propulsion of the car somehow fuses in my imagination with the mechanics of the film reel unspooling (even if I’m watching it digitally over wifi) to create a perfect marriage of form and content. Walter Salles in his “Notes for a Theory of the Road Movie” says, “In terms of storytelling, The Odyssey seemed to me the basis of it all.” Nolan’s film, perhaps because of the fractured chronology, felt less like a road movie than a war film, concerned less with the sensory experience of moving through a landscape than the psychological effects of encounters with extreme violence.

It may have been naive of me to expect The Odyssey to easily adapt into a road movie, despite so many hailing it as the ur-text for the entire action-adventure genre. It seems to me that our road movie quests, and our adventure quests in general, follow the mythic model of the medieval chivalric romances more than they do Homer’s epic. There is no longing for home—the opposite in fact. The hero goes out into the world, seeking his fortune in foreign lands. The motion is outward, into the unknown; this is better suited to our modern ambitions and anxieties. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Marie Snyder

We want help to know the best approach to take to life. In lieu of church services or complex readings, many turn to influencers for their formulas for “winning” at life that often judge us based on challenging perceptions of beauty or endurance or wealth. The trend towards optimizing provokes people to track everything they do, from the number of steps, to hours of sleep, but for what? To prove they have a right to be here? To belong? To be loved? It definitely doesn’t appear to be making people happier. That may be the cost of simplification of complex advice that edits down more complex ideas into a more superficial draft. The profits come with the reality that it works. People will click on these videos, subscribe to podcasts, and buy all the books. At some point we stopped looking for how to be a good person and instead aimed to be impressive or even just base-line likeable.

There’s a capitalist benefit to convincing people they’re somehow defective by providing unattainable standards to work towards that, of course, involve products to buy. But it also feels like, culturally, we’re not growing up. Kant called it immature, lazy cowardice whenever people try to figure out how to live by blindly following advice instead of heeding their own reason:

“If I have a book to have my understanding in place of me, a spiritual adviser to have a conscience for me, a doctor to judge my diet for me, and so on, I need not make any efforts at all. I need not think, so long as I can pay; others will soon enough take the tiresome job over for me.” 

In the 250 years since he wrote that, we’ve figured out some of the mechanisms that enable us to develop a conscience. We have mirror neurons that help us feel bad when we’ve exploited someone or made them suffer in any way, provided we direct any attention towards them. It’s only possible to be happy while knowingly harming others by not looking too closely at the effect of our actions. Luckily, we’re surrounded by distractions.  Read more »

Sughra Raza. Catching Rays. Boston, June 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by William Benzon

The God Test: Artificial Intelligence and Our Coming Cosmic Reckoning (2026) is Robert Wright’s sixth book. It builds on themes and concerns in the previous five books, which I’ll get to at the end. As the title indicates The God Test is about artificial intelligence.

Until OpenAI released ChatGPT in late 2022 AI existed mostly in science fiction, a collection of genres that has become increasingly popular in the last five decades. The intellectual discipline was relatively small, problematic, and often institutionally precarious. Moreover those within the discipline were sometimes/often motivated as much by cultural mythology as by the challenges presented by the discipline itself. Curiosity kept researchers engaged in problem solving while mythology told them why those problems are important.

The particular approach to AI that produced ChatGPT, so-called deep learning, has a characteristic that differentiates it from much earlier work in AI and from all other work in computing: We don’t know how it works. And by “we” I don’t mean only the general public or intellectual specialists outside the discipline. By “we” I mean everyone, including the scientists and engineers who have developed the technology.

The standard line about computers, that they only do what they’re programmed to do, doesn’t apply to large language models (LLMs), the particular technology that dominates the current scene. The engineers program a transformer to “examine” (or, if you prefer, ”consume”) a large corpus of texts, and the transformer constructs (“emits”?) a “model” of the language in those texts – Wright discusses this process in “Chapter Two: The Great Inversion.” The inner mechanisms of that model, however, are opaque. The engineers who programmed and ran the transformer can’t see into it to see how it works – something Wright discusses in “Chapter Four: The Evolution of a Large Language Model.” Read more »

by Joan Marcus, Guest Columnist 

Fifty years ago, my father became convinced that a girl named Lucy in the apartment below ours stole my mother’s engagement ring.

He blamed my brother for this. He thought Bobby had let this child into our flat and she’d entered our parents’ bedroom, opened the top dresser drawer, and nicked the ring from its wooden tray alongside a collection of loose buttons and my father’s cufflinks. He raged at my brother, who was only eight. It’s what he did—yell, mostly at my brother, about things that mostly weren’t his fault. This particular tantrum was bizarre even by my father’s standards. Lucy was a tiny thing with white-blonde hair and scraped knees, in the same third-grade class as my brother, but never his friend. She didn’t come over for playdates. No one had seen her in the apartment, nor did she have any history of showing up uninvited. If my father really thought Lucy took the ring, he could have confronted her mother, but he never did, so he must have known it would make him seem crazy. Even so, he was convinced, and no one tried to dissuade him. Not his wife. Certainly not his frightened children, who knew the best thing to do with an irrational parent is to clam up and wait for him to comes to his senses.

                              *

I’ve never known what to do with disagreement. Whether it’s a friend, colleague, or loved-one, I find myself tongue-tied the second anyone challenges me. Blame it on my father if you must. The less trauma-informed explanation is that I feel responsible for marshalling all my proof and articulating it brilliantly, and in the moment, the best proofs elude me—even, or perhaps especially, when the disagreement is about something absurd. Once I stood at the front of a classroom trying to convince a bunch of college first-years that Helen Keller wasn’t a fraud. The “Keller was faking it” conspiracy theory gained traction in the dark days of COVID lockdown, over TikTok at first, spreading however these things spread. The original posts were likely ironic, but I assure you my students in fall of 2022 were believers.

Because this was a classroom discussion, I wasn’t speechless the way I would be if a family member lobbed a conspiracy theory at me, but I wasn’t exactly confident. “How Helen Keller learned to communicate is well-documented at the Perkins School for the Blind,” I tried. “You can go research it any time.” Read more »

Bread House Salt God

The tsunami smell of yeast inundated our house
the mornings our mother baked bread,
up through floorboards it came, up the stairwell
it spread stirring our dreamselves alive,
fresh loaves, bells for the nose, their toll
expelled sleep from somnolent heads,

Broken bread, “you are the salt of the earth,” he said
as a breeze blew over a wine jug’s spout which made
a lowing sound as if a ghost were playing a bass flute,
as if a shade could play such an instrument.

We heard with superstitious ears
and over our shoulders cast that condiment,
a column of salt. Lot’s wife turned around
with sorrow. Her heart bled, it thumped
to her anger at what God did, ached
over the ashes of each house.
over the ashes of Ash Wednesday,
over the ashes of the day before,
over smoking coals glowing with
godjustice.

She stood unnamed becoming a pillar of
sodium chloride looking back,
watching tongues of fire,
watching pillars of smoke,
watching her world burn,
condemned for not keeping her grief hid.

Jim Culleny, November 2008

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by Ken MacVey

You may not have heard of Brendan Carr—he is not exactly famous but with time he is getting better known, and you are likely to hear more about him in the coming months. Officially, he is the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, which licenses radio and television broadcast stations in the United States. Unofficially, he is becoming President Trump’s policeman on what these stations may convey and not convey about Trump and his administration.

On July 16, Trump  gave his primetime speech on “election security,” which to no one’s surprise turned out to be about alleged election tampering and a push for his SAVE America Act bill to take effect before the November mid-term elections. That bill would overhaul the country’s voter registration system and restrict voting by mail. The bill is stalled in Congress. CBS carried  Trump’s speech but ABC and NBC did not. The next day Trump publicly declared that ABC and NBC affiliate stations should lose their FCC broadcasting licenses  because they did not broadcast his speech.

This is nothing new. Trump several times before has called out for taking away licenses of network affiliate broadcasters because he was upset with their news coverage, or more particularly, coverage of him and his administration. If any licenses are to be revoked or denied it would have to be through the FCC. By legislation the FCC has five commissioners. By statute no more than three commissioners may belong to the same political party. Currently there are three commissioners—two Republicans and one Democrat. Trump appointed Republican Carr as chairman in January 2025, who he also originally appointed to the FCC in 2017 after Carr had served as FCC general counsel.

The Communications Act of 1934–the governing statute for the FCC– provides that licensed broadcasters must serve the public interest as a condition of their license. The rationale for requiring licensing is that the radio and television broadcast spectrum must be geographically limited to a small number of broadcasters to avoid airwave interference with each other. Airwave broadcasting is a “natural oligopoly” in a way similar to how electric and other utilities are what economists and regulators call “natural monopolies.” Such monopolies, for example, are said to be necessary to prevent competing companies placing multiple parallel water pipelines or electric transmission lines in or on the same street when a single pipeline or transmission line would more efficiently serve customers. As natural monopolies, privately owned utilities must serve what is legally called “public convenience and necessity” and are accordingly regulated. Similarly, FCC broadcast  licensees have a public interest requirement and are subject to FCC regulation. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

The Greek poet Cavafy begins his fine poem “Ithaka”:

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon–do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Here I am, cast up on the shores of 92 years. I have things to weep over, yes, and things to rejoice over, yes. Most of my companions have gone. I find myself wanting to tell my story, and so I do in poems that remember and in bits of memoir. My court is the internet where friends sometime listen and sometimes, sometimes I say, catch the attention of an unknown who’s wandered in looking for wine and a little food and some entertainment.

Well, my “thought” was not always “lofty” so I’ve met Cyclops, “angry” Poseidon, many sirens, maybe even a tribe of Laestrygonians.

And the story is always with me, a continual source of imagery, a way of understanding myself and a help in explaining my self to others. (See the little gift you get from the difference between myself and my self? a readerly gift.) I’ll come back to this.

I was a reading a poem by Derek Walcott whose opening obliquely refers to Homer’s story and I found myself wondering how long it would be before the Homer mentioned in those lines would go unrecognized by everyone except scholars. I fear the loss of the mythologies of Greece and Rome that provided a binding field of imagery and felt-meaning to centuries of poets of the West. Yes, it is part of the general downgrading of the humanities but also an understanding that one can no longer be well-educated and eurocentric. And we are finite. We do not have “world enough and time,” memory enough and time. So much must be lost, replaced, forgotten. But the Odyssey? I need it. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Philosophers aren’t under the same obligations as scientists; they may come to a conclusion first and then work backwards through the argument. This may be because the alternative to a given conclusion is undesirable; Derek Parfit, for example, spent his career defending moral realism because, to him, the alternative was a relativism which meant that ethics didn’t really exist at all. There is a danger, of course, in arguing for what we want to be true instead of simply letting the argument take us where it will. But if the argument is ultimately sound, who cares what impulse originated it? I’m mentioning all of this because, as a very amateur philosopher, I’d like to believe that, even if I very much want something to be true, that doesn’t mean I’m always bound to create shaky arguments for why it is true.

So, one thing I’d like to be true is that AI will never achieve anything like human consciousness. Please note that this is not the same as the claim that AI already has achieved consciousness; that’s a claim that I think is pretty readily dismissed. Even if chatbots are by now easily capable of passing the Turning test, that merely demonstrates that we have no reliable method for determining the existence of consciousness anywhere other than through words and actions, which may be well generated without any conscious thought-process behind them. And I’m actually less threatened by the world-imperilling potential of a conscious AI (the world is already plenty imperilled by more imminent dangers) than I am with aesthetic concerns. I can reject all AI writing as slop at this point purely because it’s an exercise in mindless regurgitation. An AI isn’t thinking about the color red when it writes “the red dress,” and it most certainly isn’t thinking about more complex subjective experiences like “the red dress she wore that particular day in late autumn in Toronto.” Without this interiority as a basic reference point, the writings of AI are nothing more than the noodling of a p-zombie.

This position isn’t particularly novel or innovative. The problem, of course, is with that “never” – can I say with absolutely confidence that an AI will never have the interiority – the conscious basis of experience – that it takes to write great works of literary art? It’s at this point that my belief in the inherent limitations of AI clashes with some more basic intuitions about the nature of consciousness itself. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

Looking back I see that my undergraduate education—as seen through my three (one merely attempted) majors—was a tour through the grammatical persons. I started out majoring in political science (and studying Latin, to my lasting regret), because I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. Third-person plural.

I quickly switched to psychology, which was divided between third-person singular (experimental psychology) and second-person singular (clinical psychology). This alone should have been the clue that psychology might not be a science, but there were others. Outside of the statistics classes—reassuring as they were to the field’s aspirations—all the textbooks had the same plot. Unlike math or chemistry textbooks, which I assume are at least technically progressive, psychology textbooks were a tour of incommensurate, historically explored possibilities, with chapters on psychodynamic theory, Gestalt, behaviorism, and—finally—the then-nascent field of neuroscience. The apotheosis of the field’s haplessness appeared in each textbook with the appearance of the “diathesis–stress model” of schizophrenia, which proposed that psychopathology arose from a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental factors. No kidding.

This sent me across campus to the philosophy department, where I discovered phenomenology, which—at its most rigorous—is the systematic investigation and description of first-person singular experience. “Lived experience” has become a cri de cœur in recent years, in which I hear the echoes of Husserlian Erlebnis or Sartre’s l’expérience vécue, though—as with many things—current usage is a memed-down version meant to evince uninterrogable private experience. But, or so phenomenology claims, there is a lot that can be said and communicated  about the structure of these private experiences. For example, the idea of an object and the object itself, while sharing the same content, have different phenomenological properties. One appears in time and space, is experienced as having permanence, etc., while the other does not. Almost any first-person experience—from the experience of mathematical proofs to elusive states like ennui—can be the subject of such investigations.

I graduated with a double major in psychology and philosophy and—in the four decades since—it does not appear that much progress has been made in reconciling the third-person view with the first-person view. Psychology with philosophy. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

Road trips were a staple of my childhood.

My family didn’t have money, so a vacation was usually just driving somewhere else. And as long and soul-sucking as some of these drives could be (three days from California to Texas was a favorite), they were great. 

Homemade sandwiches. Stacks of Nickelodeon magazines. Picking a car color, and then seeing how many of them you passed. What more could a 12-year-old want?

But at some point, all of this stopped. 

Life got in the way. I grew up, went to college, moved abroad. I used my time more productively, and the entire idea of a road trip started to take on a campy feel of something very much not necessary.

Who would drive somewhere…just to drive somewhere?

But that’s what I did in July. 

For the first time in years, I found myself on a road trip. And it was great. I flew into Los Angeles, and for the next five days, my surfing bud Martin and I lazily made our way to San Francisco.  Read more »

The Stausee (lake formed by a dam on the river Eisack) with the A22 Autobahn going across it, in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, seen through a pane of shattered safety glass on an observation deck on the north bank.

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by Robert Jensen

Most politicians pledge to work for the working class, or sometimes for working families, a less Marxist-sounding label. Meanwhile, scholars struggle to define the category. I won’t assess the political posturing or adjudicate definitional disputes, but my work experience—spanning six decades and a wide variety of jobs—illustrates why the claims of working-class authenticity that are prized in today’s politics are so fraught.

Once upon a time, the working class was understood as people in capitalist economies who don’t own the means of production and must sell their labor to owners. But as economies grew more complex, anomalies piled up. What about managers who aren’t owners but make lots of money doing the bidding of owners? What about technical employees whose specialized skills give them bargaining power? What about small-business owners of modest means who hire employees? Turns out there are lots of “contradictory class locations.”

I’ve never been a manager, had any specialized technical skills, owned a business, or made big money, but my class status is rife with contradictions and conundrums.

Work history

My paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was a blacksmith in a small town in North Dakota, but my father had no interest in the family trade. After a lackluster college career on the GI Bill, he got a job as an insurance adjuster—a white-collar working-class job for which he wore a shirt and tie to the office but got paid like a laborer. My mother, whose family had a similar trajectory, stayed at home with four kids until we were all in school and then took a series of low-paid office jobs.

Although I didn’t’ realize it at the time, money was tight in our family. I didn’t get shiny new things, and family vacations were low-budget affairs that involved staying with relatives or in a borrowed camper. We always had a house and ate regularly, and I didn’t feel poor, but I knew the difference between myself and the affluent kids at school. Read more »

by Marianne Janack

Synaesthesia is one of those phenomena that make the scientific study of perception difficult.  Its general characteristic is that, as one researcher puts it, extraordinary experiences follow from ordinary sensory in-put. Some synaesthetes hear in color; some hear something and it makes them feel like they have been touched (physically) by something or someone; some connect colors to tastes. The phenomenon of “colored hearing” had been studied by German psychologists since the early 19^th century, but early psychonauts discovered that these experiences were not necessarily inaccessible to people who weren’t synaesthetes by nature. One could induce those experiences with mind-altering substances.

Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind by Mike Jay (Yale University Press, 2023) is an intellectual history of the exploration of the mind that was undertaken by people who took mind-altering substances. Baudelaire, William James, Maud Gunn, Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas de Quincey all make appearances, as do a cast of less familiar names. In addition to being an intellectual history of self-experiments, though, it is a book about how theories of mind became theories of brain and neurochemistry, and about how self-experiments—and their disappearance—were part of that change. The book has 4 sections: Part I is The New Accelerator: Drugs and Mental Enhancement (the chapters are “The Elixir of Life” and “Prosthetic Gods”); Part II is Beyond the Veil: Drugs and the Limits of Consciousness (the chapters are “A World of Pure Experience”, “The Unseen Region”); Part III is Saturnalia of the Senses: Drugs and the Creative Imagination (the chapters are “Tales of the Hashish Eaters,” and “Extasi, Fantasia, and Illuminati”); Part IV is Lost and Found (the chapters are “A Sin, a Crime, a Vice, or a Disease?” and “Twice Born”). Jay’s history is about how the subjective accounts of drug experiences came to be seen as mere anecdotes rather than evidence, and how moral and political concerns came to dominate the discussion of drugs and mind-altering substances.  Jay argues that the way forward for research into drugs and the mind must go back to older methods which paired laboratory data with data gathered from first person accounts. Read more »