by Mike O’Brien

At the dawn of this new year, I might have chosen to wax hopeful about promising social and technological developments boding well for the future. Or I might have taken a light-hearted detour from my usual concerns, and written about something artistic, literary or otherwise creatively engaging. But no, there will be none of that here. Because this leopard has accepted his spots, and so instead I will be sharing some sobering and morally outrageous tidbits from a 250-page court filing. I really do think grad school broke my brain. Normal people don’t read court filings. Not even all lawyers do (avoid those ones).

The filing in question was submitted to the federal district court in Puerto Rico near the end of November 2022. Entitled “Municipalities of Puerto Rico vs Exxon Mobil et al.”, it is a class action complaint filed by 16 Puerto Rican municipalities on behalf of all municipalities on the island (these being the “class” represented), against the largest investor-owned energy companies (and their collaborators) conducting business in the territory. These defendants include Exxon Mobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, Peabody Energy, and many others besides, along with the network of media, public relations and think-tank enterprises which these energy companies employed for their anthropogenic global warming (AGW) denial campaigns. Puerto Rico is particularly vulnerable to climate change, as a small island territory in the path of “Hurricane Alley”, and surrounded by waters that are experiencing faster-than-average warming. This vulnerability is cited throughout the complaint, characterizing the territory as an “eggshell plaintiff”, analogous to someone with an eggshell-thin skull who suffers great harm from a blow to the head. The defendant may not have known that the victim had such a thin skull, but they ought to have known that hitting people on the head was likely to cause harm, and must suffer the bad luck of being fully liable for the extraordinarily bad consequences. Of course, in the case of the fossil fuel industry and Puerto Rico, the industry’s own data told them that Puerto Rico had the climate-vulnerability equivalent of an eggshell skull. But this is an industry that historically has had no qualms about bashing literal skulls to advance its interests, so figurative skull-bashing ought not to elicit surprise. Read more »

‘Scuze Me for Being Cynical

Media (movies, news, tv), does not mediate,
and often obfuscates, it dilates,
though some do legitimately investigate,
producing news upon which we are left to ruminate,
and so, the public often oscillates and vacillates
—but sly and foxy news, well, just prevaricates,
creates fantasies that stuff its banks, which
some accept while some responsibly repudiate,
or, despairing in ennui, tumble into pits of wine,
beer or other booze, or smokey/pokey stuff like opiates
to vegetate, to hesitate, but dumb as stumps
refuse to cogitate and maybe speculate
that things we see on screen are often
putrid distillates of fucking bucks
that flow to banks where it coagulates,
eventually to seep and ooze and translate
into mansions, yachts, and hidden stakes
in off-shore tax accounts and grand estates
while law, and Justice (being blind), seems
to overlook precipitates of graft monsoons
instead of bringing down her gavel to retaliate for such,
while low-class, low-cash chumps it rushes to incarcerate
and crush for crimes too small by contrast to
unhypocritically, adjudicate.

Jim Culleny
© 4/20/21

by Joseph Shieber

In a recent short post on “ChatGPT and My Career Trajectory,” the prominent blogger, public intellectual, and GMU economist Tyler Cowen sees AI as posing a threat to the future of public intellectuals. (For what it’s worth, Michael Orthofer, the writer of the excellent Complete Review book review website, seems to agree.)

Cowen writes:

For any given output, I suspect fewer people will read my work.  You don’t have to think the GPTs can copy me, but at the very least lots of potential readers will be playing around with GPT in lieu of doing other things, including reading me.  After all, I already would prefer to “read GPT” than to read most of you.  …

Well-known, established writers will be able to “ride it out” for long enough, if they so choose.  There are enough other older people who still care what they think, as named individuals, and that will not change until an entire generational turnover has taken place. …

Today, those who learn how to use GPT and related products will be significantly more productive.  They will lead integrated small teams to produce the next influential “big thing” in learning and also in media.

I share Cowen’s sense that intellectuals (public or not) shouldn’t ignore the rapidly ever-more-sophisticated forms of AI, including ChatGPT. However, I’m not sure that Cowen is right to suggest that AI output will supplant human output – particularly if he’s making the stronger, normative claim that such a development is actually commendable.

There seem to be three reasons to interact with ChatGPT, all of which can be teased out from Cowen’s comments. First, you could treat ChatGPT as a content creator. Second, you could treat ChatGPT as a facilitator for your own content creation. Finally, you could treat ChatGPT as an interlocutor. (Of course, these ways of interacting with ChatGPT are not mutually exclusive.)

Let’s deal with these ways of interacting with ChatGPT in order. Read more »

Flor Garduno. Basket of Light, Sumpango, Guatemala. 1989.

More here and here.

Thanks to Lauren Shaw for showing me this work!

by Rebecca Baumgartner

Parenting is one of the domains where certain people scoff at the idea that reading a book or article could possibly be helpful. “That’s nice and all,” the complaint goes, “but when it comes to real life, all those ideal scenarios fly out the window.” The other group of parents, the ones who gobble up data and theories about child development, feel that any tool or strategy that gets us closer to being the parent we want to be is worth investigating. 

I have fallen into both camps at various times, and I have found it largely depends on the writing skill of the author and the explanatory power of their ideas – but most of all, whether they offer anything genuinely new or perspective-shifting that I couldn’t have figured out on my own amidst the grunt work of being a parent.

A recent NPR article encapsulates the rising industry of telling us what we already know under a trendy label and repackaging common sense as something newsworthy. Starting with the headline of the article – “The 5-minute daily playtime ritual that can get your kids to listen better” – we are already off to a bad start. 

The article discusses the concept of “special time,” which is open-ended playtime where the parent is not telling the child what to do for at least five minutes. This approach is described as a “counterintuitive” concept invented by a specific researcher in the 1970s. It turns out that if you listen to your kid, engage with them as a person, aren’t always barking commands at them, and play with them in a way they find satisfying, they will – wait for it – like you better and be more willing to listen to you. Perhaps shockingly to the researchers, this is solid advice for dealing with pretty much all humans, despite their claim that “the practice often feels awkward for adults at first.” Read more »

by Ada Bronowski 

The weird and wonderful painter Johann Heinrich Füssli (1741-1825), whose most famous work is undoubtedly The Nightmare from 1781, presents an interesting case of dysmorphia. The Nightmare is as disturbing as it is entrancing with its undercurrents of erotic terror and dreamy fantasy, but its surface horror is perhaps not what is most shocking about it. What if the artist’s self-portrait was lurking somewhere across the horse and the goblin?

Neither a historical scene, nor an illustration of a literary reference, the subject-matter of The Nightmare is entirely made up, which, in its 18^th century context, makes it rather unique and draws alarming attention to the mind from which it came. Over the same period, Füssli drew a number of self-portraits which, when confronted with portraits of the artists made by others, betray a notable distance between the way the artist appeared to others and the way he saw himself. In a neat and well-rounded Paris exhibition, Füssli: Entre Reve et Fantastique, currently on show at the Musée Jacquemart-André, a few concentrated rooms spin a twisted tale around the windmills of the artist’s mind.

Füssli made his career in England, but he was born in German-speaking Switzerland and spent the formative years of his youth travelling through Europe, settling for a period of eight or so years in Rome. Ordained as a pastor at age twenty, his penchant for provocation and a passion for art kept him away from the pulpits all his life, to end up as Keeper and professor of drawing at the Royal Academy in London. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tamuira Reid

“A past abortion experience, whether it took place one month ago or decades ago, can be at the root of a range of issues — low self-esteem, relationship problems, disenfranchised grief a slow burn. It doesn’t affect you until later on. [Many] women have had an abortion, but you think you’re alone. You don’t feel you get to grieve it. … It’s a gut-level thing, a tender place. Many have never told a soul. People do not have the same kind of support and validation [to grieve a loss] when they’re disenfranchised, and that is a huge part of abortion grief. The emotional aftermath is so impacted by spiritual, political and ethical values and beliefs. That will really color how they process it and how much they’re able to reach out and get support.” (Abortion Trauma, Psychiatric Times)

When news of the US Supreme Court’s ruling on Dobbs hit New York City, I grabbed my son from school and headed to Washington Square Park, where I would find thousands of other women with a horrible new reality to process. Standing shoulder to shoulder, hoisting our I Am Not Your Handmaid and Bans Off Our Bodies! signs into the sky above us, we chanted and cried, hugged and held.

The SCOTUS ruling wasn’t surprising, as many of us had anticipated such an outcome. But the collective shock we felt that late afternoon – across the city, across the country, across the globe – was palpable. American women had just been sent back to a time where bodily autonomy and privacy isn’t a given.

 Justice Alito’s final draft opinion was foreshadowed by both a leak of his previous draft, and by a relentless, combative line of questioning during the oral arguments in the case; arguments that hinged on vague, unsubstantiated claims of mental health implications for woman post-abortion, namely post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. To abandon stare decisis, SCOTUS couldn’t weaponize a religious, moral, or ideological argument in the same way they could a scientific or medical one. Read more »

by Derek Neal

In 1965, John McPhee wrote an article for The New Yorker titled “A Sense of Where You Are.” The piece profiles the basketball player Bill Bradley, at the time a member of the Princeton basketball team. The subtitle of the essay is the question: What makes a truly great basketball player? McPhee goes on to answer the question, and in doing so, highlights certain characteristics that could apply to great athletes in other sports. What defines a great basketball player, it turns out, can also define a great soccer player or hockey player. I was struck by this while watching Lionel Messi in the World Cup, noticing the similarities between his game and Bradley’s.

McPhee notes how Bradley “starts slowly, as a rule. During much of the game, if he has a clear shot, fourteen feet from the basket, say, and he sees a teammate with an equally clear shot ten feet from the basket, he sends the ball to the teammate.” Messi is also a slow starter. In fact, he often stands around for the first few minutes of the game, strolling leisurely and appearing as if he’s just happened to wander onto a soccer pitch. This exasperates some commentators and fans, much in the same way that Bradley’s coaches “clutch their heads in despair” when it doesn’t seem like he’s putting forth maximum effort. They think that the quality of someone’s play can be measured by how much energy they exert, and that the visible signs of exertion, such as sweating and heavy breathing, indicate a positive performance. This is not the case, and in fact proves just the opposite. A player who must run more than the others does so to compensate for a lack of skill and talent. At best, this player succeeds due to hard work and perseverance; at worst, they become what my dad used to say whenever I or one of my siblings would have a poor game: a chicken with its head cut off, or a dog after a bone. Much has been made of Messi’s walking and standing, but the general consensus is that he does this in order to gain an understanding of where the opposition will be positioning themselves, which then allows him to find space and exploit it for the remainder of the game. In other words, Messi is developing a sense of where he is on the pitch. Read more »

Hilton Hotel at the Munich Airport.

by Bill Murray

After three years of pandemic and a year of war, could things be about to get better? With the defeat of Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, President Xi’s Covid problems in China and President Putin’s all-around debacle of destruction in Ukraine, could the worldwide wave of authoritarianism be breaking? 

If so, the incoming Republican House could be the rump of ugly populism and, for all that that’s fun to write, it could go out kicking up more trouble than anyone wants to see. This Congress will legislate the future of the country until a new president is elected. Hoo boy, how much could they undo in two years?

If last week gave us a preview of the next two years in the U.S. House, they promise to be sort of like watching a YouTube lecture at 2x speed, choppy and distracting. But as the House Republican caucus settles in to comb through the life of Hunter Biden, what might happen in the rest of the world? Undreamt of things, probably. All over the place.

We won’t have to wait too long to learn one thing: the true extent of China’s Covid problem. That should become clearer over the next several months. We know that as it is, untold numbers of rural Chinese people, surely millions, languish in a health care system with only the most basic resources. We also know that when the going gets tough, government controlled data gets scarce, and worryingly, that is precisely what we are seeing now. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

I wake with the dawn. It is January the sixth, and I have spent the last two days languishing in bed, oppressed by an inexplicable ennui that made it quite impossible to get up. So, today, I wake with the dawn. The sky is all blues and pinks, with tufts of cloud. The night has been wet, and I stand in bare feet on my porch and smoke my cigarette and drink my coffee, relishing strangely the damp chill that creeps into my toes. I go inside to write this—because the deadline to write this looms—and I pull up a song from a long time ago in my life: “The New Year” by Death Cab for Cutie. It isn’t a very good song to be terribly honest, but it drips with ire about the concept of the new year, and I have always liked Ben Gibbard’s distaste for the pomp and circumstance that attaches in our culture to January first. “So this is the new year / And I have no resolutions / For self assigned penance / For problems with easy solutions,” he sings. For years, I have been of this mind about the new year—that it is just another day and that it is, frankly, ridiculous to treat it as a magical aperture into the future one desires. It’s setting oneself up for disappointment, I’ve always believed, this whole business of resolutions and new beginnings. It is a mysticism of the calendar, and, like any mysticism, it is wont to fail in its enchantments by the harsh light of day.

But this year I feel differently. The year that has just ended has been the hardest of my twenty-seven years of life. If you’re a regular reader or a friend, you already know that—divorce, acute mental health crisis, the vicissitudes of love and sex, leaving my home of ten years, drugs, pain. An everyday ache that won’t subside. I feel quite unspooled as the new year begins, a bit of twine once neatly wrapped up upon itself in a whorl, now strung about the room and knotted up here and there. Approaching the concept of the new year in this state, in this state of unspooledness, means that I can muster little optimism for what lies ahead; indeed, I can hardly muster the optimism to get out of bed most days. But it is precisely there, in the brokenness of it all, in the lack of drive toward the world and all its promise, that I have found a strange and precious thing. I have found a little bit of hope. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. –Ben Franklin

Watching the Oathkeepers cry during the federal court trials under the charge of sedition, I considered the fate of seditious Loyalists during the Revolutionary War whom they most closely resemble in the topsy-turvy world of contemporary politics. The Revolutionary War was a civil war, combatants were united with a common language and heritage that made each side virtually indistinguishable. Even before hostilities were underway, spies were everywhere, and treason inevitable. Defining treason is the first step in delineating one country from another, and indeed, the five-member “Committee on Spies’ ‘ was organized before the Declaration of Independence was written.^[1]  But the records of the courts handling  treason during the Revolutionary War are handwritten and difficult to read, especially on microfilm, according to Bertrand Roehner, the historiographer I mentioned in my last column, who works at the Sorbonne.^[2]

Historiography is the study of how historical recording and interpretations shift with time as a result of many factors. Roehner helped me collect documentation available on violence in postwar Japan for my 2008 memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, sharing information from his research into Allied Occupation archives in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, and from Japanese and American newspapers. I was specifically looking for evidence of executions of Americans convicted by US forces, but I was also interested in the Japanese response to GIs in that period. What Roehner gleaned contradicted the premise of John W. Dowers’ Pulitzer-winning book Embracing Defeat, which frames the Japanese as meek losers, resigned to their status and reliant solely on Americans for their welfare. Dowers omits the huge demonstrations organized by the Japanese populace that took place periodically, the guerilla snipers and mysterious murders and rail sabotage – as well as the many acts of violence committed by the Americans – rape, automobile “accidents.” Dower had not reviewed or could not access Roehner’s sources, partly due to MacArthur’s policy of total censorship – even the mention of censorship was forbidden – that has only recently been lifted in Japan. While we would like to consider our side of the Revolutionary War terror- and violence-free, carried out by well-behaved Americans, the truth might be that we won the war because we were just as (or more) violent as our opponent — which would explain why 200,000 Loyalists left their homes and went into exile.^[3] Read more »

Poets Talk Time

poets talk time
to get a handle on it,
to hack a place to hold it
to turn it, to fold it
to climb it and mount it
to ride it, to flip it
to hide it, to turn it
to toy with and tip it
to wrench it, to rip it
apart to unlearn it
to kill it, to burn it
to track it in the innards of clocks
to tear it to shreds like a crow on a corpse
to drill it to dig it to bore it
and finally, ignore it

but poets would do well to pour time
like water, or blood & wine
and, savoring,
sip it

by Jim Culleny,
© 2/28/12
.

by Michael Liss

I’ve always liked this image. It’s quiet, it sneaks up on you, brings back old memories of pizza parlors, barbershop walls and drug-store soda fountains.

Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” had been inspired by FDR’s 1941 Annual Message, given at a time when Germany had swept through much of Europe, and democracy was in great peril. While the United States was not then yet at war, and isolationism was still strong, a growing number of Americans could see that our involvement might be inevitable. Roosevelt wanted to define the values that a post-war world would embrace. Drawing from the Constitution as well as from the lived experience of the Depression, FDR called for Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Worship and Freedom of Speech.

This one is Rockwell’s masterpiece. The composition was, according to him, inspired by a town meeting he had attended, where a young man took an unpopular position. Rockwell portrays him with shoulders thrown back a bit as he speaks, as if to project his unamplified voice through the hall. His hard, weathered hands hold the chair in front of him, a copy of a Town Report folded in his pocket. His face is roughened by the sun and wind, he’s flanked by two older men in white shirts and ties, and, on the face of one, there’s a small smile. No screaming, no doxing, and certainly no video captured on someone’s phone, uploaded, and seen by hundreds of thousands of partisans.

Rockwell’s painting gets to the essence of “Constitutional” free speech. However contrary this speaker’s opinion is, it is his right to voice it at a public hearing without fear of punishment. The First Amendment has very few content-based exceptions—the government can intervene only where obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct is involved. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In 2022, I worked harder than before to keep my students’ tables free of smartphones. That this is a matter for negotiation at all, is because on the surface, the devices do so many things, and students often make a reasonable, possibly-good-faith case for using it for a specific purpose. I forgot my calculator; can I use my phone? No, thank you for asking, but you won’t be needing a calculator; just start with this exercise here, and don’t forget to simplify your fractions. Can I listen to music while I work? Yeah, uhm, no, I happen to be a big believer in collaborative work, I guess. Can I check my solutions online please? Ah, very good; but instead, use this printout that I bring to every one of your classes these days. I’m done, can I quickly look up my French homework? That’s a tough one, but no; it’s seven minutes to the bell anyway and I prepared a small Kahoot quiz on today’s topic. (So everyone please get your phones out.)

As a matter of classroom management, some of these questions are more of a judgment call than eating and drinking in class (not allowed, with some exceptions immediately after a PE lesson) but less complicated than bathroom visits (allowed in principle, but in need of limits that I may never be able to express algorithmically). In spite, however, of the superficial similarities between these phenomena – all subject to teacher- and class-specific settlements, informed and assisted by school-wide institutions such as regulations and phone bags – it feels as if more is at stake when it comes to smartphones. I sense more urgency, as if I’m laboring to stop a tide from coming in; as if what I am inclined to view as ‘complex’ and ‘multi-faceted’ and ‘also an interesting challenge, actually’ is actually one big thing only: an external force threatening to infiltrate my classroom and undo what I am trying to achieve there (which is called ‘education’ and which is therefore plainly also one big thing). I don’t feel this way about chewing gum.

To help me make up my mind, I decided to consult a writer who passed away before smartphones were ‘a thing’: media and educational philosopher Neil Postman, famous for his criticism of the role of television in modern culture and education. Though this choice of authority seems to be loading the dice rather heavily in one direction, I did briefly consider the counterintuitive case that Postman might have seen 21^st-century media technology as a step in the right direction. In the end, however, I think the more predictable reading – that, in Aubrey Nagle’s words, mobile media represent “Postman’s fear of TV on steroids” – is the more interesting one, allowing us to apply his broader cultural criticism to our time. Read more »

Lita Albuquerque. Southern Cross, 2014, from Stellar Axis: Antarctica, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, 2006.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

When we began, our gods were junior,
Their profits, and our problems, punier.
The deities who drilled at dawn
Paraded in a pantheon:
Born out of Chaos and castration,
Theirs was a piebald population.
They mingled with a breed of men
And women we’ll not see again,
Who shared those gods’ own groaning board,
Where things were rarely untoward—
Unless you count the odd abduction,
The semi-bestial seduction,
The anthropophagous pot-au-feu,
Or the Promethean pas-de-deux.

But more than this, our gods were many,
Though not, for all that, two-a-penny.
A deathless numen dwelt within
Whatever was, would be, had been,
And granted every abstract noun
Its aegis, buckler, crest, or crown;
Its anvil, lightning bolt, caduceus;
Its cuneiform, and its cartouches.
There was a holiness at large,
A broadly scattered, sacred charge.

But now? Our gods have been compress’d,
And we, in consequence, less bless’d:
From Twelve Olympians downgraded
To single Seigneur. We have traded
That polychrome diapason
For a grimly grayscale monotone.
At best, our world is Manichaean,
Though not as praised in Persian paean.
The tyrants twain who rule this globe
Are those that frame the Book of Job:
A sadist, distant from the Earth,
And Satan, who assays the worth,
In worship and obedience,
Of hominid ingredients. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

A tree in the vicinity of Rumi’s tomb has me transfixed. It isn’t the tree, actually, it is the force of attraction between tree-branch and sun-ray that seems to lift the tree off the ground and swirl it in sunshine, casting filigreed shadows on the concrete tiles across the courtyard. The tree’s heavenward reach is so magnificent that not only does it seem to clasp the sun but it spreads a tranquil yet powerful energy far beyond itself. It is easy to forget that the tree is small. I consider this my first meeting with Shams.

Of average human-height, the tree is non-descript, other than how its heavenward reaching creates an embrace that enricles and enlarges everything around it, so that motion ripples out of stillness, light edges shadows. In a moment such as this, the senses deepen spirit; words fail, words fail. All that we know evaporates, we are left with spirit. Here is the limit of knowledge, the Sufis teach us; no amount of book learning alone can bring us closer to the Divine than the spirit engaged in making a wide embrace. The Divine is an experience, and knowledge is only a part of it. If there is one word that comes close to describing this, it is love. But of course, the word is insufficient. No single word in conventional language can contain love. Poetry, arguably, owes its existence to the impossibility of defining love in the dictionary. In Maulana Rumi’s case, it was Shams who brought this awakening, this great desire for the Divine beloved that colored every thought, action and word that was to come out of him in the future. Read more »