by Brooks Riley

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by Michael Liss

My Jefferson is a giant, but a giant trammeled in a net, and obliged (he thought) to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net. —Garry Wills, “Negro President”

Late in his life, uncertain in his health, but sure in his pride, rummaging through the immense library of his memories, his soaring successes, and his every-day regrets, Thomas Jefferson had cause to define the words, his words, that Americans so justly celebrated.

The Declaration of Independence, he wrote in an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, was not original in the sense of creating “new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but was instead “intended to be an expression of the [A]merican mind.”

Such was his grasp of that moment in 1776, such was the reach of his ambitions half a century later, that he could claim his words conveyed just that, in “terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe the place the Declaration has for itself in American historical iconography is unassailable—it, too, commands assent. Lincoln thought so, both in his public words (“[f]our score and seven years ago”) and his private correspondence, as here, in an April 1859 letter to Henry L. Pierce and others:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Of course, politicians, and people, seek validation for themselves and their ideas in the unifying principles and heroes of the past. To say, “I’m with Tom” is to connect oneself to greatness. America, at its best, is a vision that is lit from within by great ideas. Do those ideas still retain their power when the vessel that holds them is a contradiction of the principles themselves? Read more »

by Angela Starita

The state of the world, it’s understood, has led to poor sleep habits and hours of doom scrolling. My own sleep is regularly ruined by my before-bed routine of doing puzzles and then watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts, sometimes for hours. But my nighttime media consumption is rarely news–no suspects running across rooftops or deep dives on Supreme Court decisions. Instead, I’ve constructed a pre-sleep universe of private nostalgia to stanch a stream of saliva that wakes me at three, prompted by a boring list of fears, personal and universal, questions about mistakes made and life’s purpose. (The mighty limbic systems of doom scrollers is beyond my imagination.)

The most effective, most comforting, of my pre-bed listening comes from an app called LibriVox, where volunteers read books “in the public domain,” that is, books more than 80 years out of copyright. The site is driven by the premise that books should be available and free to all, with the inflated tag line “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.”

On the face of it, the available selection is predictable: lots of Dickens and Austen, dozens of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie mysteries. The choices are made by the readers who record themselves, then upload the recordings to the site. Each episode begins with a reader announcing their name and sometimes the title of the book and publisher. Occasionally, the books are read like radio plays with the readers introducing themselves at the start. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, for one, is read by a large group (friends? aspiring voice actors?) who each adopt a nom de lisant, among them Shrimpfish, Gary O., and, to underscore the olde timey nature of reading a book for a phone app, Mr. Beeswax Candle. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Darakht. Boston, September, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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by Jeroen Bouterse

The Brandmauer – the political ‘firewall’ against the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland – is under duress. It has been clear for a while that the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6^th would make government formation there without the AfD either difficult, extremely difficult, or arithmetically impossible. As I submit this column, it looks like the second.

Politicians and commentators are frantically reflecting, not just on the processes driving the electoral successes of the far right and on the future of democracy, but also on the wall metaphor. Some get technical. Asked about the durability of the Brandmauer in an interview with Der Spiegel, Saxony’s prime-minister Michael Kretschmer started lecturing on how fire-resistance is measured. “F60, for example, means that the building component can remain structurally sound for 60 minutes in the case of fire.” The journalist felt compelled to interject: “where are you going with this?”

In a volume of essays on the Brandmauer published this summer, almost all contributions happily explore the image. Some of them even refer, somewhat boldly, to that other wall that is among Germany’s core political memories. The Berlin Wall is the symbol of a failing political system, scared that its people would abandon it. It is also famous for falling at the hands of those people. Journalist Stefan Aust draws the lesson most directly: “just like the ‘anti-fascist protection wall’ did not save the GDR from the democratic collapse of socialism, the Brandmauer will not save the country from [the AfD].”

That it is imagined as a wall has now come to imply that the days of the taboo against the AfD may well be numbered. At best, its effect is temporary. That was Kretschmer’s point, of course; firewalls slow the fire down, but something else is needed to stop the actual fire. Still, this growing consensus on the limits of the Brandmauer does not answer the question of whether German politics presently needs something else in addition to the firewall, or something else instead of the firewall. Let’s try to answer that question here. Read more »

by W. Alex Foxworthy

Recently, following an assignment that required AI use, a student asked me whether it was true that every question she asks a chatbot uses up a whole bottle of water. Like so much information today, she received this claim via a social media video. The video apparently cited a newspaper article which cited a real study. She had also heard people all around her, both in real life and online, talking about the huge amounts of water these systems use. Of course, she could get more information by searching online, asking a chatbot, asking friends and teachers or listening to the many podcasts discussing the issue. In other words, my student has no shortage of information, but what she doesn’t have is a solid way to judge its accuracy, how much confidence a given claim deserves, nor which sources can be trusted. Though many students are now “digital natives,” in the sense that they have grown up with smartphones and tablets, it has been my experience that they are not skilled in navigating the bewildering and fast growing world of information available to us all. 

At the same time, there seems to be a deepening distrust in institutions and authorities as well as widespread disagreement on the factual basis of some of the most important issues in the public discourse. More than ever, I hear from students who don’t see the value of a “well-rounded” education nor in spending time in courses that aren’t directly tied to their career paths. Artificial intelligence has made the question of what an education offers even more urgent, as we now have machines that deliver confident answers on almost any subject (some right and some wrong) and produce content far faster than people can check it. Taken together, these observations have forced me to think about what my role in this educational process is really for. Particularly when it comes to teaching non-science majors, I think what science has to offer are ways of thinking that can be applied across many domains. The framework key to it all is something we now describe with the shorthand “scientific method”: how human beings have learned to test claims about the world and preserve what survives rigorous testing. Of course, most science courses already cover the scientific method: ask a question, form a hypothesis, test it, analyze the results, and draw a conclusion. But the treatment is often superficial, students don’t arrive in my classroom with an intuitive understanding of what it really means, and I think we leave out much of what makes the process work. This essay is my attempt to lay out what the five steps leave out, using my student’s question as an illustrative example. Read more »

Architecture and Light

What would architecture be without light,
or light without architecture, man-made
or that which emerged over eons:
incredible trellises of trees,
their intricate frames of chiaroscuro
on light-slanted walks under
shifting limbs while leaves flash and flutter
through the architecture within skulls,
synapse nets of Rorschach shadows,
their night-borne lightning or, for that matter,
the hidden boney structure that holds it all erect
as it steps into stairwells enriched
by radiated thought and sun?

Jim Culleny, 2/21/22

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by Robert Jensen

Many of the books that shaped my work as a professor, author, and activist came into my life during my first two years of graduate school (1988-90), the most exciting period of concentrated learning I’ve ever experienced. As I write in my new book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, I got to grad school and quickly realized that I was “an undereducated person getting a second chance to learn”:

I didn’t really start thinking—in the sense of a disciplined process of trying to understand how the physical and social worlds work—until I showed up for a Ph.D. program in mass communication at the University of Minnesota in 1988 when I was thirty years old. I had graduated from a perfectly respectable public high school and public college, and I had earned a professional MA at a perfectly respectable private university. I had spent a decade working at perfectly respectable newspapers, exposed to a wide range of public officials and ordinary people. In all those endeavors, I learned a lot about the world. But I had yet to think systematically about how the world works.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned and the books that were important to me at the beginning of that education.

What I learned about being male

Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987 by Andrea Dworkin (1988)

In graduate school I studied freedom of expression, and at the time one of the key debates was over the radical feminist critique of pornography. Like many men, I assumed that the critique had to be crazy, because radical feminists were crazy, because … why? Because I had been socialized to be afraid of feminists. Reading Andrea Dworkin and other radical feminists made me realize that their movement was not a threat to men but a gift, offering us a way to resist the traps set for men by institutionalized male dominance (that is, patriarchy). “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” in this volume may be the most influential essay I have ever read. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

When I interviewed the author George Saunders years ago, he told me that his work was an attempt “to figure out a way that the spiritual would not be full of shit.” A tall order in an age of spiritual materialism—where evidence in favor of actually existing religious institutions is discouraging—but it is an interest I share. Saunders is a practicing Buddhist, while I am merely a perennialist magpie, but I am always on the lookout for ways of looking at the spiritual life that are both profound and articulable. (E.g. not full of shit.)

I have already written about such attempts by René Daumal and Walker Percy, both of whom followed reason to its edge, where it spills into something larger that it is a part of, but for which it cannot account. Michael Pollan also arrives at this limit in A World Appears, which leads him to a consideration of “the view from within,” the phenomenological view, to which I am partial.

This view, of course, is anathema to neuroscientists and eliminativist philosophers. We don’t know yet how positive science can account for consciousness—and have so far lost one bet to David Chalmers about it—but this is a trivial inconvenience, according to this view. We’ll figure it out eventually, like air flight and DNA. This is the commonsense view of scientific progress today.

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head.

So begins Douglas Harding’s delightful 1961 book On Having No Head, which provides one of the strongest and most accessible—if idiosyncratic—cases for the irreducibility of first-person experience ever written. It begins with this seemingly outrageous claim. “I found I had no head.”

Harding dates this discovery to a walk in the Himalayas when he was thirty-three years old, relating it with a British straightforwardness that even Bertrand Russell might respect. Read more »

by Carlota Figueroa

Have you ever heard of a particle’s spin before? If you have, I bet that the first time you were introduced to this concept you were told to imagine a ball that spins on its axis and to take this as an analogy for what a particle’s spin really is. Now, if you’ve taken more advanced courses in quantum physics you were probably told something similar, but with a little addition to the end: “A particle’s spin is like a ball that spins… except that it isn’t a ball and that it doesn’t spin.” Yeah, not very helpful, I know. Spin is one of those buzzwords that get thrown around whenever someone starts to speak about any (and I really mean any) topic to do with quantum physics, from quantum computers to quantum entanglement and teleportation, and for good reason too: most of the coolest concepts in this area have spin as one of their building blocks. Personally, I think it’s great that these topics are being popularised. But it is a disservice to everyone taking an interest to be told about how we can make information travel almost instantly or how new generation computers will reach unimaginable levels of efficiency without explaining to them exactly what it is that makes this possible. I hope that by the time you finish reading you have a slightly better idea of what spin is, and of everything it makes possible.

The reason why the ball analogy is so popular is that spin actually is an intrinsic angular momentum characteristic of a particle. Roughly speaking, when you speak about angular momentum, you are describing the rotation of an object, and it depends on several variables, including the origin, the velocity of rotation and the moment of inertia of that object (this is simply a value that tells you how difficult it is for you to change that object’s existing rotation). Therefore, when we talk about spin, it kind of makes sense to talk about a ball that turns on its axis. However, intrinsic means there is nothing physically rotating for us to watch: no way to read a particle’s spin off its motion. A ball, by contrast, visibly turns fast or slow, clockwise or counterclockwise, and you can make it rotate however your heart desires. Its angular momentum can therefore take any value: it is continuous. Spin is the complete opposite: encoded within the particle, and only ever taking specific values.

This is where the million-dollar question comes up: if there is nothing actually rotating for us to look at, how do we know spin exists? Thanks to our friends Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach, in 1922 we finally got our answer. Their experiment used silver atoms, which are electrically neutral (a charged particle would get deflected so violently by a magnetic field that we would be incapable of appreciating this subtle quantum effect), but which still behave like tiny magnets: thanks to its single outermost electron, each silver atom is effectively a miniature compass needle flying through space.

Now, a compass needle in a uniform magnetic field (meaning, one with the same strength everywhere) only twists to align itself (it doesn’t actually go anywhere) so Stern and Gerlach deliberately built an inhomogeneous field (meaning, stronger in some places than others). In a field like this, a tiny magnet gets pulled upwards or downwards, and how hard it gets pulled depends on the direction its needle is pointing. Here is where classical physics places its bet: the atoms come flying out of a hot oven, so their needles should be pointing in every direction at random, some straight up, some straight down, most somewhere in between. Therefore, the plate at the end of the apparatus should show a continuous smear, a vertical stripe painted by every possible amount of deflection. This should make sense intuitively: if a needle is free to point any way it likes, the force on it can take any value between the two extremes. You can probably infer from the fact that I’m writing this article that this wasn’t what happened… at all. What Gerlach found on the glass plate was that the atoms had split into two distinct lines and nothing in between: half deflected upwards, half downwards, as if every compass needle in the beam had been forced to choose between exactly two settings. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Lots of people enjoy a good puzzle. Take Sudoku puzzles.  Like many good puzzles, the rules of Sudoku are simple. The challenge is to figure out the implications of each possible move and to use those implications to reason our way to the solution. You probably know how this goes: you try to put a 5 in one box, but that leads to problems down the road when that choice forces you into a situation that violates the rules. The only way out is to relent and admit that 5 must go into a different box.

At its heart, mathematics is a vast Sudoku puzzle. Through reasoning, clever observations, and following the implications wherever they go, we learn new things about the mathematical universe. For example, if xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has a solution where n, x, y, z are integers and n > 2, then certain geometric shapes called elliptic curves must have a unique associated function with special properties that make it a “modular form” [1]. Hard work by Andrew Wiles and many others showed that the relevant elliptic curves cannot be associated to a modular form; hence, we must relent and admit that Fermat’s equation has no solutions.

Mathematicians love nothing better than solving a math problem by conjuring new knowledge out of thin air using nothing but creative reasoning. That creativity and use of the human mind are sadly missing from much of our math education.

The problems of puzzles are very near the problems of life. —Erno Rubik

I was recently reminded of the puzzle-like nature of mathematics. In conjunction with the annual Teachers of Teachers of Math conference hosted by my university, my department hosted a celebration of the life and career of our colleague, Gary Musser. Gary was a long-time faculty member in our department who, sadly, passed away this year. I had the pleasure of chatting with Gary and his wife, Irene, when I first arrived at Oregon State. Although Gary retired several decades ago, he and Irene continued to have a deep interest in the department, in mathematics, and in teaching mathematics. In their honor, the department gives the Gary Musser Award each year to support outstanding prospective elementary or middle school teachers.

Why an award for prospective teachers? Well, while Gary’s PhD thesis was on a highly theoretical and advanced area of mathematics, his professional energies were focused on an even harder problem: how to train school teachers to be effective at teaching children mathematics. This problem is doubly hard. After all, young children need a good educational experience in math, and at the same time, the teachers of young children are often not “math people” themselves. Gary understood the importance of solving this problem. He spent his career having a profound effect on how mathematics is taught in Oregon and across the United States.

One of Gary’s strongest-held beliefs was in the importance of puzzles. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

I was on my way to a fun Improv class taught at my senior living quarters. I had been thinking about Leonard Bernstein’s remark “It’s all jazz” before I set out. He was saying something like – from Beethoven to Bebop, music is, in whatever form, the human response in sound to the joys and woes of living in this world, that the attempt to separate “serious music” from “HiDee, HiDee HiDee Ho” was a foolishness, in a way, a refusal of joy.

Then the thought came, “it’s all Improv,” meaning life. The more I thought about it, the truer it seemed.

In Improv, you’re given a situation and you must find language, bodily as well as verbal, to make sense of it, to make it work

We start at the joining of sperm and egg, but they’ve got a moment-by-moment careful script and follow it dividing and multiplying and turning into arms, legs, fingers, toes, head, ears, nose, face, and all that stuff in the skull. Then a miracle. There is a moment when what has been gathered together becomes aware of itself. A term that some Christians call ensoulment. (When that happens or what a soul is is a debate for another time. Let’s just think about it as a center of awareness in a bunch of cells who have been following the blueprint print offered by the DNA erupting out of that first meeting of sperm and egg.)

Life is pretty comfortable until one day you find yourself being squeezed and pushed and shoved and out you come into a world of bright lights, strange shapes, strange freedom and you kick your feet wave your arms open your mouth and an unpleasant sound comes out and it doesn’t stop until you find yourself on a warm place, and the opening that let the sound out enjoys sucking and that sucking brings something good.

Well time goes by and you’re more and more in the world. You become aware of the sounds made by the big others and try to imitate. That they have meaning comes along. Now you’re diapered and dressed and can make those lower parts move and carry you from one place to another and you’re given the prompt “Be a good boy.” So you have to figure out what that means. Read more »

The Ridnauner Bach flowing down its steep and rocky path below the Aglsbodenalm in South Tyrol.

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by Lei Wang

Maple syrup is made by boiling down the much more watery maple sap, the stuff that actually comes from the trees and is only 2% sugar. It takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. My college writing professor used this as a metaphor for the writing process. By this measure, I have 15 pages of my book instead of 600.

I used to think good writing was about beautiful, ornate language; my early blog was full of embellished sentences that meant very little. Someone in my translation class called this act of needless prettifying (as when a translator commits the crime of making the original text fancier than it is) “gilding the yam.” (As opposed to gilding the lily, which is more of a fashion crime.) Then I got over beauty, entered the camp of meaning. But how to determine what is truly meaningful, when so much can be? And thus another writer not inaccurately described my essays as “a smart person sits you down to teach you about life but gets distracted 18 times along the way.”

It’s hard not to gild the yam. I still want to make a flurry of connections in an ADHD pastiche. I have often been better at spontaneous stir-fries than a focused dish; bibimbap is for lazy people. And now I have too many food metaphors.

So much of writing is decision-making: thousands of moments of determining what is actually important instead of trying to stuff everything in. Too much fat in writing is not just overenthusiasm, but usually a sign of something more insidious. For me, it has something to do with trying to prove something, wanting to Show My Work. “Look at my effort!” I want to say, which hasn’t mattered since high school math class. True brilliance is not diffuse light but the pointy kind. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

About this time ten years ago, I was making a wreck of myself by paying an absurd amount of attention to the politics of a country I’m not even a citizen of. Every morning would begin with an inspection of Nate Silver’s 538 to see where the polls were; was it still a sure thing Clinton was going to win in two and a half month’s time? I was no fan of Clinton, and I’m still not, but the alternative was unthinkable. 538 remained cautiously optimistic on this front, but other sources were nowhere near as circumspect. DailyKos, I recall, pegged Clinton’s chances at 90%. At the cusp of the Trump Era – and despite the brief, ineffective Biden moment, the past ten years can’t really be described as anything but – I was relying on the chiromancy of the pollsters to have a better sense of what America’s palm read. Of course, for most of them, they didn’t.

Well, now the unthinkable is our daily bread, and I am no longer obsessed with the polls. My already shaky belief in the Democrats as a functioning political entity entirely collapsed after the failure of the Harris campaign, a moment when farce and tragedy became indistinguishable. I, of course, would prefer that they take over Congress in the midterms, but if they happen not to, my shoulders already have a shrug pre-loaded. This is deeply irresponsible, given the damage that the Trump administration is currently inflicting with utterly malign purpose on the Canadian economy. But I can’t help myself; the words “lost cause,” with all their historical weight, inevitably come to my mind when it turns its focus southward.

If there’s one area where I have been paying some attention, it’s been toward the brewing civil war  within the Democratic party itself. The primary nominations of a few progressives have been enough, it seems, to send moderate Democrats into apoplexy, and they can be heard shouting their rallying cry of “Not Electable” across the land.

Again and again, the Gaza War has emerged as a litmus test for candidates. Israel and Gaza are deeply embedded in the American political consciousness at this point, and that leads to the level of cognitive dissonance in at least some moderate Democrats where they might assert that “criticism of Israel has no place in the Democratic party” and then, seconds later, engage in precisely such criticism.  (Even if we accept that Carville misspoke and meant to say “antisemitism,” it’s at least telling that in at least some part of his consciousness antisemitism and criticism of Israel are necessarily aligned.) Of course, the attitudes of any given country towards any foreign conflict may be proxies for issues closer to home. In suggesting that that is the case here, I hope I won’t be taken to suggest that Americans don’t really care about the slaughter of thousands of civilians. What I mean to say is that, if the Gaza War is indeed acting as a litmus test at the moment, it is part of a story concerning a dueling set political visions that have dominated American politics in the 21^st century. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ken MacVey

The preamble of the US Constitution famously begins with the phrase “We the People”. Who, and how many, constituted this self-identified group? How well founded was this invocation of  “We the People”?

Let’s start by looking at the US population as a whole when the Constitution took effect in 1789. The Constitution itself has provided a mechanism to aid in this assessment. The Constitution required that a census of the United States population be taken every ten years. The first census was in 1790. According to this census as reported in the National Archives, the US population in 1790 was 3,929,214, which should also approximate the size of the  population in 1789. How does this number break down?

How Many Voted to Ratify the Constitution?

The 1790 census broke down its count by categories of “free white males,” “free white females,”  “other free,” and “slaves.”  ( Non-taxpaying indigenous American Indians were excluded from census consideration.) Slaves were counted at 694,000 (rounded) –which would be almost 18% of the US population. Free white females were counted to be  1,541,000  which would be  about 39% of the  total population.  When the Constitution was ratified  slaves and women were not eligible to vote in any of the 13 states. That means about 57% of the counted population was automatically excluded from voting in the 13 states when the Constitution was ratified. If free white males of the age 16 and under are further deducted, then the percentage excluded rises to 77%.

But most of the remaining adult white males and “other free” were not eligible to vote either. The 13 states had additional restrictions that varied state by state—such as requiring ownership of  property, being of a certain Christian denomination, being a taxpayer, or being white. The “other free” identified in the 1790 census consisted of 59,000 and presumably included free Blacks. Five states at the time of ratification allowed free Blacks to vote but they still might not have satisfied other requirements, such as being property owners. It is not known precisely how many in the United States were eligible to vote in 1788-90, but some estimate only  6% of the  total of the 13 states’ populace was eligible. Read more »

by Marianne Janack 

When I ask people if they actually read all the things that they were assigned to read during their college education, they all tell me that they didn’t. And, in fact, I didn’t either.

I got behind in a Nineteenth Century Russian Literature course (so many giant books!) and resorted to the 1980’s version of AI to prepare for the final exam: Cliffs Notes. When I was taking a Shakespeare class, I decided to listen to several plays rather than read them. I had to go to the music library at my university, where I listened to old-fashioned records. The plays were supposed to be listened to at a speed of 32rpm; I listened to them at 72rpm. Hamlet sounded like one of the Chipmunks, as did Horatio, Romeo, Juliet, Henry IV, Richard III, and Falstaff.

In his book The Call of Stories, Robert Coles confesses his own reading shortcuts. Rather than read a book he was assigned in his high school English class, he relied on a plot summary that he’d found. His mother was horrified. The book wasn’t written, she said, to be someone’s quick study. It was meant to teach its readers something about being human.

And, of course, there are many such books. Many of us are assigned them in college or high school. And many of us use some kind of “quick study” shortcut to give the appearance of having read those books. We read the summaries, but not the actual book: more efficient, and it gets the job done.  Or so we tell ourselves.

I kept a diary of what I read over a 24-hour period: I read labels at the grocery store, directions on an aspirin bottle, street signs, emails, an article about how liberal democracy is doomed because written content is being eclipsed by video content, a recipe for something I was considering making for dinner, and several chapters of a book I was reading with several colleagues: Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

I read a lot, and watched no video, but I’m not sure that my reading did much to support my participation in liberal democracy. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Smokebush Blues. August 29, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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