by David Hoyt

About an hour’s drive southwest of Chicago is a grassy bank on the shore of the Fox River where, according to some, the predominant architecture of the twentieth century first took shape. It was here that a precocious and independent-minded physician, Edith Farnsworth, asked her newly-emigrated German friend and paramour, Mies van der Rohe, to build her a country cottage. He did so, after a fashion.

The structure known as Farnsworth House stands outside of the village of Plano, Illinois. It was begun in 1945 and completed in 1951. By the time it was “move-in ready”, its new owner declared it unlivable, and broke off relations with the architect, at which point Mies filed a lien against her and Farnsworth responded with a countersuit against the patron saint of modernism.

A sculptural masterpiece of steel frame construction, the house seems to float above the meadow as if defying gravity, wrapped in glass without internal partition as if to announce to obsolescence of privacy well before the advent of social media. Yet it was too hot in summer, and frigid in winter. It lacked adequate ventilation, was prone to leaks from the roof and window frames, and was located squarely within the flood plain of the Fox River, which has inundated it several times.

Farnsworth’s disappointment with the structure was given metaphorical expression in an unpublished poem she wrote in 1960. Yet the poem, titled “Artifact,” is more than a metaphor. It announces a fundamental flaw in the paradigm of glass-and-steel modernism that has come to dominate so much of our built environment. The large expanses of sheet glass that seemed to “let the outside in” (as Mies put it) actually did the opposite: they gave an illusion of intimacy with nature while walling it off. The price paid for this illusion, among other costs, was the ongoing destruction of wild and free-flying birds crashing into it. Read more »

by Rachel Robison-Greene

As soon as Joan opened her eyes for the first time, she knew things. The knowledge didn’t always stick around long; she formed beliefs based on fleeting perceptions. Eventually she came to recognize the familiar sights, smells, and sounds of her parents and family. As she grew, she found that she could direct and control some of what she knew. She used that power to craft her identity. She found she loved to learn facts about history. She enjoyed figuring out how to cook new dishes for the people she loved. She was excited each time she could identify a plant at a glance.

Human beings are blessed and cursed with this power—the power not only to know things, but to take ownership of and control over what we know. We use this ability in the service of the life quest that is determining who we are and what we care about.

In his Meditations on First Philosophy, the philosopher Rene Descartes famously engaged in a reflective survey of the things he’d come to believe in his life. He recognized the weight of that responsibility and took it seriously. He describes the process,

Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was stable and likely to last. But the task looked an enormous one, and I began to wait until I should reach a mature enough age to ensure that no subsequent time of life would be more suitable for tackling such inquiries. This led me to put the project off for so long that I would now be to blame if by pondering over it any further I wasted the time still left for carrying it out. So today I have expressly rid my mind of all worries and arranged for myself a clear stretch of free time. I am here quite alone, and at last I will devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.

Descartes recognized that there was something irresponsible about being nothing more than a passive receiver of beliefs. An infant can be excused for simply forming beliefs on the basis of sense impressions. The older we get, the more of a responsibility we have to make sure that we believe true things. Or, at the very least, we have a responsibility to try not to believe false ones. Read more »

by Paweł Skała-Piękoś

Note on method: This essay was written through an AI-enhanced process, as were my previous columns here. The argument, the structure, the successive revisions and the final judgement are mine. I developed the line of thought in Polish and used two AI systems, ChatGPT 6.1 and Claude (Anthropic’s Fable 5.1), as critical assistance: to test formulations, to flag overstatement and redundancy, to check transitions, and to help transcreate the Polish text into English. One Claude instance worked throughout in the anti-dogmatic register I have borrowed from Kołakowski since my first column: accept the thesis generously, then examine it sceptically, then say what survives. Because the essay rests on events of the past ten days, the models also ran successive fact-checks against current sources; their own knowledge of 2026 was out of date and had to be corrected several times, which is a useful reminder of what such assistance can and cannot do. My instructions asked the models to challenge the argument rather than flatter it, to hit both sides of the political divide wherever the criticism applied, and to keep the English natural while preserving my voice. 

In October 1978 Leszek Kołakowski published a short credo in Encounter under the title “How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist”. He took its motto from a Warsaw tram, where a conductor used to shout what he rendered as “Please step forward to the rear!”, and he proposed it as the slogan of a mighty International that will never exist, because it cannot promise people that they will be happy. I referred to that essay a month ago, writing here about relations between Canada, Europe and the United States. I return to it today because history has added another chapter.

The Democrats won, and won as they have not in a generation: as of 8 November they hold at least 54 seats in the Senate, with counting still under way in Mississippi and Alaska, and 254 seats to 162 in the House, with 19 districts uncalled. The background is the war with Iran, fought since 28 February, and the price of petrol, which rose from $2.98 a gallon before the war to more than $4 in the spring and still cost that much on election day. Even Vice President Vance had the honesty to write that the problem was not turnout but the fact that people who voted for Trump in 2024 voted for Democrats in 2026, and among the causes he named the war with Iran. We know whose decision that was.

One of the three traditions named in the credo, the conservative one, lost, and the first reflex of its present custodians was to do what they had been doing for the past ten years. Four days after the midterms the President called on the Department of Justice to deal with the Democrats who, having won, had announced impeachments of members of his cabinet; he called those announcements extortion, offering no evidence that anyone had been threatened. This essay, however, is not about why the right lost. It is about what is left of it, and about what in it was left-wing. Read more »

by Barry Goldman

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return —W.H. Auden, September 1, 1939

Hurt people hurt people. —Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan senator-elect

What Auden and El-Sayed are talking about is not a difficult concept to understand, but it is a very difficult concept to internalize and adopt. What makes it difficult is what psychologists call “fundamental attribution error.” If I am late to our date, it is because my meeting went unexpectedly long and there was unusually bad traffic. If you are late to our date, it is because you are an inconsiderate jerk. My failures are caused by extrinsic circumstances. Your failures are intrinsic to who you are. Consequently, if I do something bad, I just need to explain the whole story. If you do something bad, you need to be punished. Few ideas are so intuitively obvious.

So let’s talk about our old friend Hypothetical Smith. Suppose Smith has been convicted of a horrible crime. No decent person could have done anything so horrific. Obviously, he is a bad person, and he needs to be sentenced to life in prison or even death. Why might we oppose imposition of that sentence? Let’s start with the easy answers.

First, we might oppose the sentence because, although he was convicted of the horrible crime, there is still a chance he didn’t do it. The Innocence Project and others like it have freed hundreds of falsely convicted prisoners. When cases are carefully reviewed and modern forensic methods are brought to bear, it turns out lots of people rotting in prison are there because of a mistake or because of prosecutorial misconduct.

Next, we might oppose the sentence because it was imposed discriminatorily. Black men are sentenced more harshly than white men. The criminal justice system discriminates against black people, brown people, and poor people in jury selection and in providing effective assistance of counsel.

We might oppose the sentence because Smith didn’t know what he was doing. He may be either so cognitively deficient or so floridly insane that he can’t be held morally responsible. We may differ on borderline cases, but if Smith is clearly “incapable of forming the requisite intent,” we are likely to find a harsh sentence to be inappropriate.

Further, we could oppose a long prison sentence or the death penalty simply because they are barbaric. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

I was just visiting my family for Halloween. One night, I lay in my sister’s living room with my parents sitting next to me, and heard the phone ring. But this wasn’t a normal phone. It’s called a Tin Can, and it’s made especially for kids. The premise is simple: parents buy their children a corded (already charming) telephone, and load it with a few numbers. These are the only phone numbers that a Tin Can is able to call. 

My niece Charlotte was calling my mother with an interesting request for an 8-year-old: she wanted to know about my mother’s family.  

Charlotte had developed an interest in where she came from, and the first step? Finding out the stories of my parent’s past.

Charlotte is an intense child, and I could hear her questions through the phone. My mom was glad to provide the answers. 

The conversation went something like this:

• Charlotte: And you had parents?
• Mom: Yes, of course. I had a mom and a dad.
• Charlotte: And…they aren’t living anymore?
• Mom: No. They both died a long time ago. Before you were born.
• Charlotte: And are you sad?
• Mom: Well, sometimes. But it’s just part of life I think.
• Charlotte: Were you close with your mom?
• Mom: Yes. 
• Charlotte: And what did she like to do?
• Mom: Well, she liked art. And she loved to run.
• Charlotte: And how many brothers and sisters do you have?

And then, just like that… It was on to the next person. The conversation was surreal. Listening to my mom tell my niece about her own mother was beautiful. And, technically, it was all correct. But there was a problem with this: while it may have been correct, it was in no way sufficient. Read more »

Tree backlit by sunlight in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by John Ambrosio

What goes around comes around. In 1963 during a speech at the Manhattan Center in New York, Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, described the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as “the chickens coming home to roost,” meaning that you reap what you sow, that it was the inevitable result of a violent and oppressive American culture and foreign policy.

In other words, the assassination was a kind of reckoning, blowback from a society that has willfully ignored and disremembered its history, a people who refused to see what’s in front of them, a country that failed to come to terms with its dark side. That is, with the genocidal violence perpetrated against Native Americans, the atrocity of chattel slavery and racial apartheid, and an uninterrupted history of military interventions and imperial wars.

Today, America has reached a historical moment when national amnesia is no longer an option, when a neofascist authoritarian movement intent on preventing a reckoning is seeking to rewrite U.S. history to conform with an invented and sanitized past, with a vision of American society purged of undesirable ideas, inconvenient facts, and non-conforming identities. Trump and MAGA Republicans are manufacturing a fictionalized past to justify an authoritarian future, to create a racially and ideologically purified society cleansed of opposing realities, values, and beliefs.

The resounding defeat of Republicans in the midterm election is a stunning rebuke of Trump and a prostrate Republican-led Congress. The sheer scope, scale, and margin of the Democratic victory was simply too big to steal. As it turned out, the 2024 Republican coalition was built on electoral sand, the blue wave was actually a tsunami, political gravity is still in effect, and a tidal wave of Republican dark money was unable to prevail over the discontent and anger of voters. American voters across the political spectrum and in every major demographic group imposed a titanic reckoning on Trump and MAGA Republicans, a political earthquake (especially in Texas) that took the form of a Democratic blowout that reached into deep red districts and states, to punish Republicans for their cruelty, incompetence, corruption, and callous indifference.

Despite this historic outcome, it remains to be seen if America will have the fortitude to look in the mirror and grapple with an honest and historically accurate representation of itself. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

“Know all men by these presents, that I, Henry Thoreau, do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined. . . . I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion.” (Civil Disobedience)

An experience I had years ago serves as a dispassionate preamble for how acolytes of certain movements can use labels to define you and/or hoodwink you into swallowing a point of view you may not yourself share. I was investigating the phenomenon of homeopathy, the treatment for various maladies that involves successive dilutions of an active substance hundreds of times over with water (or alcohol) until the final tincture contains not a single molecule of the substance left. This, paradoxically (and allegedly), enhances the substance’s power to cure the malady, thus turning Paracelsus’s dictum on its head: “All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; the dosage alone makes it so a thing is not a poison.” * The same principle goes for cures: The dose makes the cure, beyond which it becomes a poison. According to homeopathic ideology, it is the dilution, not the dose, of a substance that makes the cure. And, oh, by the way — these “active” substances are chosen according to their propensity to provoke the actual symptoms being treated. In other words, it works on the principle “similia similibus curantur”, like cures like. But the “like” entity has been diluted entirely out of the mixture! Because red onions make your nose run and your eyes water (both symptoms of a cold), you can use the diluted juice of red onions to treat colds and allegies. I shit you not.* Homeopaths would say the dilution and “succussion” (vigorous shaking) of the red onion mixture “potentates” it. Quelle hair of the dog! Find the dog that bit you, and instead of taking one of its hairs to use in a treatment, shave the dog bald, slap it silly, and call me in the morning.

I was interested in learning what homeopathy was because homeopathic treatments for livestock are allowed in organic practice, but antibiotics are not allowed. What was it about homeopathy that made it preferrable to traditional, tested antibiotic treatments for disease in animals? Well, it’s natural, for one thing. It’s also perfectly harmless . . . because there is literally nothing to it except water drops on a sugar pill. So, I was reading a discussion in which a veterinary doctor was arguing strenuously with an advocate of organics for appropriate antibiotics use where indicated, and she insisted this not be called “allopathic medicine.” And what is that? Allopathic medicine is that medicine which is not homeopathic medicine. So, what was this veterinarian’s problem? She obviously discounted homeopathy, even loathed it, so why wouldn’t she embrace the term “allopathic”?

It turns out “allopathy” was coined originally as a term of abuse by the inventor of homeopathy, Samuel Hahnemann, an 18th century German physician. He was understandably appalled by some of the standard treatments of the time, such as bloodletting to solve “an imbalance of the four humours.”* Hahnemann thought homeopathy was treating the underlying causes of illness instead of trying to beat illness into submission through what he called allopathy, treatments that have opposite effects to symptoms. Unfortunately, Hahnemann’s answer to the prevailing quackery was just more quackery, but who can blame an 18th century physician for not knowing what he didn’t know?

The veterinarian insisted that her practice was simply veterinary medicine and that the pejorative term allopathy be repudiated because it was bullshit. She resented having her medical practice framed by a quack, and I could see her point.

Which brings me (finally) to my own point: Of bullshit labels at once purge thyself. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Malcolm Murray

For years, the AI conversation has revolved around two acronyms: AGI, artificial general intelligence, and ASI, artificial superintelligence. Will we get AGI by 2030? Is ASI possible at all? The problem is that nobody agrees what either term means. Depending on who you ask, AGI has either already arrived or is decades away. A term that can mean anything does very little work, and both have become less useful the closer we get to them.

What is turning out to be far more useful is a third acronym: RSI, or recursive self-improvement. AI systems are now good enough to do a large share of the work of building the next AI system. If that share keeps growing, at some point AI is improving AI, with humans contributing less and less, and potentially eventually without humans in the loop at all. Each generation builds a better successor, faster than the one before. Unlike AGI, RSI is something we can actually measure. And the latest measurements startlingly suggest Anthropic is closer than expected.

The view from inside Anthropic

On November 2, Anthropic filed a revised version of its IPO prospectus. Buried in the risk factors was a remarkable sentence: the company’s internal estimates “indicate that we may imminently meet” its own threshold for “dramatically accelerated progress attributable to AI.” Anthropic also wrote that it does not expect to be able to safely let Claude build successive generations of itself “without meaningful human supervision or understanding.” Companies don’t usually say things like that to investors.

Three days later, METR, the independent AI evaluation organization, published its assessment of AI R&D acceleration at Anthropic. METR’s staff spent almost three months with high-level access inside the company. Their headline finding was that Anthropic is likely improving its models at roughly twice the rate it did between early 2024 and late 2025, and that most of that speedup likely comes from Anthropic using its own AI in research. They also found no significant bottlenecks that would stop this over the next twelve months, though they have low confidence in this. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

“Hilarius Bookbinder’s Scriptorium Philosophia” might sound like the working title of a sequel to Terry Gilliam’s “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnasus”. It is rather a very interesting and entertaining Substack written pseudonymously by an American philosophy professor. It first came to my attention last year, when it caused a bit of a stir with a post entitled “The average college student today”, which detailed the author’s bleak experience with the current cohort of average undergraduates. This was followed by the author’s response to critics of that post, wherein he attests that the overwhelming majority of informed respondents (i.e. students or teachers in contemporary Western post-secondary institutions) said that their own experiences mirrored those of Dr. Bookbinder. To wit, that literacy, critical thinking, academic integrity, and work ethic among this generation of students has collapsed to the point where teachers have to drastically lower their work demands and achievement standards, or else imperil their careers by assigning failing grades to an institutionally unacceptable proportion of their pupils/clients/customers. Having not been in a post-secondary institution myself for over a decade, I can’t personally testify to the accuracy of his assessment, but it seems to jive with everything I’ve heard from personal acquaintances in primary and secondary education (what miracle do we expect to happen in the months between the end of high school and the beginning of university?), and the various academic philosophy blogs I peruse have swelled with robust concurrence of his account. I am not entirely distraught that my dreams of being a post-secondary philosophy teacher never panned out.

But I’m not writing today to bemoan the death of the educated society. Instead, I’m reflecting on another of Hilarius’ posts, more fluffy and less depressing, but enriched with some edifying philosophical fibre. In “Collecting as an imperfect information game”, he sets out to argue that the activity of collecting (stamps, coins, historically significant snippets of barbed wire) is a sort of game. More precisely, a game fitting the definition of games proposed by American-Canadian philosopher Bernard Suits, in his book “The Grasshopper”, which is itself an attempt to refute a claim made in Wittgenstein’s “Philosophical Investigations” that it is impossible to define “game” because there is no set of common features shared by all games. More precisely still, Hilarius argues that collecting is a game of imperfect information, following John von Neumann’s distinction between perfect (e.g. chess) vs imperfect (e.g. poker) information games.

To quote Liza Powel O’Brien, Conan’s wife and creator of the highly recommendable podcast “Significant Others” (about the long-suffering spouses of famous people… surely a coincidence), “there’s a lot to unpack here”. Read more »

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A BLE W AIL, 1975.

Performance, Berkeley Art Museum, Pacific Film Archive.

“… Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s innovative oeuvre blurred distinctions between conceptual art, literature and film. A performance and multimedia artist, T. Cha addressed themes of displacement, language and intercultural identity through an interdisciplinary body of work, tracing feminist genealogies and straddling an array of media, yet always returning to the written word to expose language’s identity-shaping power alongside its intrinsic limitations.

More here, here and current show here.

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by Martin Butler

Light is reflected from a rose in my garden. Focused by the lens in my eye, this forms an image on the retina, which in turn sets off a neural impulse along my optic nerve. This in turn travels to the visual cortex at the back of my brain, where a mental image is formed. I then see the rose. Activity arises in my pre-frontal cortex. Motor neurons in my spinal cord and arms activate the muscles needed to point the hose I am holding in the direction of the pot in which the rose is planted. The movements necessary to water the rose are coordinated by activity in the cerebellum which sits at the back of my skull just behind my brain stem. A swarm of bees approaches me. After my visual cortex registers this fact, the limbic system deep inside my brain activates the sympathetic branch of my autonomic nervous system, producing the ‘fight or flight’ response. My heart rate increases, I feel fear, drop the hose and run away.

Everything we do, experience, feel or think seems to either come from the brain or end up in the brain. Unsurprisingly, there is a strong temptation to claim that for all intents and purposes we are our brains, and this seems true to such an extent that philosophers have envisaged the possibility that for all I know I might be no more than ‘a brain in a vat’. They mean by this that a brain immersed in suitable nutrient fluid and connected up to a super computer feeding it appropriate neural stimulation could create all the ordinary experiences of everyday life: a world created within a brain. The story told above about the rose and the bees suggests that, provided I have the right inputs and they are coordinated with the outputs produced by the decision-making in my pre-frontal cortex, I could never know I was not simply a brain in a vat. (This of course is the basis for the film The Matrix)

Putting the brain in a vat hypothesis aside, it’s worth noting that neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists are quite happy to talk as if the brain produces ‘representations’ or ‘models’ of reality, suggesting that we come to know the world secondhand in the brain rather than in the world itself. To go back to the rose example, the account I gave indicates that I see the rose in my brain rather than in my garden, or at least that the only experience I can have of the rose is the representation produced in my visual cortex.

Something has gone seriously wrong here but it’s not immediately obvious exactly what it is. Two errors initially stand out. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

[Y]ou only have yourselves to blame. —Donald Trump, 5 November, 2026

Two years ago, in these pages, I tried to express an intensely personal, and very deep sense of what I can only call anguished disgust, with the predicament that constitutes electoral politics in America. I related how, anticipating the experience of having to vote for a Kamala Harris, participant in what should be in any sane world a simply disqualifying Gaza genocide and dedicated to tested milquetoast policies–at best–whose attempted implementation seemed certain to advance rage-inspired responses on the part of a growing far-right (never mind the left), or for a third-party candidate in a wasted vote in what was expected by almost everyone to be a perhaps historically close outcome that would inevitably be contested, thereby very possibly throwing the election to a Trump I fully expected to carry out Project 2025 policies and inspired maneuvers, legal or not–and then some–as he did; and I said I wished I could smuggle a gun into the voting booth and blow my brains out after participating in such a disgrace. I did not relate at the time how I actually had to check myself when I wanted to respond to the election worker offering me an “I voted” lapel sticker by telling him where he could shove it. I managed to summon up enough common decency to  decline politely instead of making this pathetic situation unnecessarily much worse.

As it turned out, I needn’t have agonized about any of this: driven in part by the very concerns I mentioned above about Harris, Trump defeated her by enough to render my concerns about closeness or contestation utterly moot. And my column was denounced as “bothsiderism” amongst other things in the comments section. The fact that I had actually voted for Harris anyway made the whole thing even more pointedly absurd.

Two years later, voters in Minneapolis and Houston decorated memorials devoted to residents murdered by Trump’s ICE with the same “I voted” stickers I turned from with revulsion in 2024, on a day in which Democrats easily took both houses of Congress, as well as state houses and legislatures throughout the country, even in places like Texas, South Carolina, Kansas–which hadn’t elected a Democratic senator in 100 years–and Mississippi (the Senate race there remains too close to call as I write on Sunday, 8 November, though the Democrat, Scott Colom, is leading by a few thousand votes). Democratic candidates throughout the country managed to take constituency seats in places Trump and Republicans won in 2024 with previously unthinkable swings of 30 and 40 points, in certain cases. It is the most lopsided congressional victory since the post-Watergate scandal/Vietnam war debacle in 1974. Read more »

Figurehead

A poet sails the line of a poem
like a ship’s figurehead,
arms spread in a twenty-knot breeze
embracing wind, the air,
the fabulous future,
poised before the next word
only to find it isn’t there,
the right word
the one that says it all, that
pulls the rabbit out of the hat of the poem,
that drops scales from blind eyes,
that gives ears their prize and brain its due
and, with the barest need to be said
fulfils its longing for what the heart
always knew

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by David Winner

We are living in interesting times, and people are making interesting claims, particularly with regards to Israelis and Arabs, Jews and Muslims.

Criticism of Israel, of course, need not be antisemitic, but bona fide antisemitism is proliferating. An acquaintance’s boss (in a very progressive workplace) publicly referred to my acquaintance as “visibly Jewish” while castigating her for missing a meeting with a potential Jewish donor.

Meanwhile, it is de rigueur to accuse any American Muslim politician of terrorist associations like celebrating 9/11. Mamdani, El Sayed, Ilhan Omar… have all suffered such denunciations along with harassment and threats of violence. As a non-famous white Jew not running for office, no one cares, but, yes, I denounce any violence caused by Hezbollah, Hamas, the Moslem Brotherhood, the KKK, the JDL etc. Genuinely, I do.

Irrelevant defenses of Israel abound. Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania recently responded to comments about Israeli atrocities by making the familiar point that Israel should have the right to be a Jewish state as there are several Muslim states. Okay maybe. But many Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, I would conjecture, are less interested in the nature of the Israeli state than living comfortably and safely without physical danger and food insecurity.

Several American supporters of Israel have developed sudden concern for the way that Iran and Sudan abuse their citizens, arguing that only Israeli oppression gets focused upon. Probably true but disingenuously missing the fact that while we’re supporting Israel militarily and vetoing UN resolution after UN resolution condemning them, we’ve been busy bombing Iran and ignoring Sudan.

I shudder when yet another person defends Israel as the ostensible “only democracy in the Middle East” as it sets up a chilling Shirley Jacksonesque scenario in which people voluntarily opt to murder. Most likely Jackson’s characters from The Lottery would have voted for the sacrifice if there had been a referendum as Israel seems to have voted to keep Netanyahu in power, democracy and genocide going hand in hand. Read more »

by Eli Rarey

The TV show Heated Rivalry arrives on cinema screens this week, transforming it from a short six-episode TV season into a 5-hour cinematic experience. I for one can’t wait to sit with an audience in a darkened theater and share in Shane and Ilya’s steamy romance. For those of us who love the show, it has always been an epic, monumental narrative, taking an outsized role in our lives. But why? The success of the show has created a kind of mystery—what about this story made it such an undeniable cultural force? Let us compare it to another cultural force which has recently entered the public imagination: Homer’s Odyssey. I am setting aside Christopher Nolan’s version of the story (which I found disappointing) to look instead at Homer’s text, which offers some surprising parallels with our favorite TV hockey romance.

The first four books of The Odyssey, the first sixth of the total epic, concern themselves not with Odysseus and his journey but rather with his son, Telemachus, on the island of Ithaca, where his father is the absent king. The war is over, the other surviving kings have returned. No one knows where Odysseus is. Other men are trying to get his wife Penelope to accept that Odysseus will never return, but so far she has remained faithful to her perhaps-dead husband. If Penelope does remarry, this would likely leave Telemachus, brought up as the son of a king, with no inheritance—maybe even exiled or dead. Telemachus can’t keep these suitors from harassing his mother—in fact, he can’t even keep them out of his house. They’re literally eating all his food. Telemachus responds to this situation by leaving Ithaca in a boat to go visit his father’s friends. Interesting! Telemachus is going on his own little odyssey, a mirror of the journey his father takes—his own sea voyage in which perhaps his character will also be tested. Maybe at each house he visits some challenge will be put before him, and if he triumphs then he will be provided with what he needs to defeat the antagonists at home.

Actually, no. In a series of detailed scenes, Telemachus is graciously fed by his hosts and entreats them for help. They tell him what a great man his father is. There are no confrontations, no narrow escapes, no triumphant victories. There is very little conflict in these scenes. He is treated only with respect, even before anyone knows he is the famed Odysseus’ son. He is welcomed and fed. No secret tensions erupt in violence—each person he meets holds his father in the highest esteem. They regale Telemachus with stories of his father’s great cunning as a warrior and attempt to reassure him that even if the gods have delayed his father (spoiler alert, they have) Odysseus will soon return home to Ithaca. Homer’s tale provides details of where Telemachus sits, who serves him, and when he introduces himself. These detailed social niceties would have had meaning for Homer’s audience, yet the question remains: why are we spending so much time and attention on table manners? Why are the nuances of courtesy so important to the story? Read more »