This year I spent three months in Western Australia without the notebook I record my reading in, and never caught up again, so I’ve no idea whether I read ‘enough’ in the categories I intended to; nonfiction, fiction in translation, fiction in Irish and French. (I strongly suspect not, though.) I began recording books started/read about five years ago and found it instantly made me more able to give most away afterwards; once the book’s name, author and my impression have been written down, I feel far less need to hold onto it. At first, I kept another notebook and wrote a page or so about each text, but I immediately fell hopelessly behind. I switched to – hold your nose – using a smiley face system in the first notebook to record my impressions. Very occasionally I’ll add a comment like ‘great dismount’, but most books just get :-( :-| :-) or the coveted :-0 which means I was awestruck. It’s actually a neat little system, as seeing each book listed with others I read in the same month jogs my memory of them all, and reminds me of where I was. I also record an R for re-reads, P for poetry, NF for non-fiction and T for in translation. About 60% of what I read is novels written in English, so that dominant doesn’t need a category at all. At the end of the year I tot up the total. It’s edged from around fifty per annum to the high sixties (I don’t include most books or any parts of books read for research, or articles, etc.), which feels low compared to many book-ish people, but a reasonable amount to be getting on with. It’s also … clarifying … to realise that at this rate I’ll likely read – for interest and pleasure – only another two thousand or so books in my life. They can’t all be :-0 of course, but I’m now less likely to persevere with ones I don’t get on with.

Anyway, this is all to say that in 2022 one book swam swiftly through my system leaving no less than two :-0’s in its wake, and merits not just a proper write-up but a strong exhortation to consider getting your hands on a copy for yourself or someone else. On this final weekend before Christmas, I commend to you Pod, by Laline Paull, the most extraordinary, beautiful, dramatic and arresting novel I’ve read this year.

Pod is a novel about dolphins, mostly, told from the points of view of several marine creatures living in the Indian Ocean. Its main character is Ea, a young spinner dolphin who lives in a small, egalitarian and loving pod off an archipelago. Ea can’t spin or hear the ocean’s own soothing music, but she hears and can’t ignore the devastating song of pain and fear sung by a lone humpback whale out in the deep ocean. The pod is sympathetic to Ea’s disability, but her strong feelings of difference propel Ea out of her family group and into the orbit of the autocratic and patriarchal tribe of tursiops, or common bottle nose dolphins, who previously ejected her people from their ancestral home.
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Once in a while, I listen to a book as an audiobook, rather than reading it on paper or on my electronic device. Especially during the pandemic, when I was walking a lot, I loved listening to stories while walking. And clearly, for people who are dyslectic, or who for another reason can’t read easily, they are a real blessing.

But I’ve noted something weird with audio-books that I can’t quite grasp – so perhaps someone here can help me understand what is going on. [click to continue…]

When we renewed our roster of bloggers a little while ago, I mentioned that there would be more announcements to come. Today I’m very happy to say that Macarena Marey will be joining us at Crooked Timber. I met Macarena a few years ago at a workshop in Bayreuth and was immediately impressed by her combination of rigorous scholarship (there mainly on Kant’s poltical philosophy) with passionate commitment. Macarena was born in a little city by the sea in the Argentinian province of Buenos Aires. She’s been living in the city of Buenos Aires since she was 4, so one could say that she is “porteña”. She is a Researcher at CONICET (the National Scientific and Technical Research Council for Argentina) and Lecturer in Political Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires as well as being director of the Centre for Critical Studies and Philosophy of the Present at the Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy and Literature, UBA. She is currently working on problems of political participation and on the work of the first American Marxist, José Carlos Mariátegui. She is the mother of Elías (10) and Galileo (3). Galileo is currently helping her learn a lot about ableism and how to fight it by unmasking autism, while Elías teaches her all about the science of engines in general and Formula 1 in particular. We look forward to reading what Macarena has to say!

Sam Freedman, whose Substack is the only one I subscribe to, recommended an essay by one James O’Malley on this subject. But reading the essay, it struck me as rather obviously wrong-headed, mainly for the reason that the characteristics it identifies as quintessentially “woke” are shared with other political tendencies and currents, albeit in ways that may be rendered less visible by dominant ideologies and frames of reference. Often, the claim that they are new is, to say the least, somewhat suspect, and I think O’Malley misconstrues various aspects of “woke”, most notably intersectionality.

O’Malley mentions six characteristics as defining “woke” they are:

• identitarian deference
• priority of harm reduction over free speech
• a commitment to intersectionality that makes politics totalising
• a prioritization of communitarianism over individual rights
• a scepticism about progress
• a prioritization of “right-side norms” over “accuracy norms”

Let’s take each of those in turn:

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Sometimes you walk all day with a camera and don’t take a single picture you like; at other times you just look out the window and the shot is right there.

The following is a lightly blog-ized version of a Twitter thread. I fear Twitter is going downhill so I really should transition back to blogging. Back to the land!

Start with a Chris Hayes tweet: “he’s a right-wing billionaire who was motivated to buy twitter because he thought it was antagonistic to right-wingers and wants, instead, to make it friendly to them. that’s it. that’s the whole story.”

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Another day, another exhortation to join an “ecosystem” that’s anything but. I could pick a hundred examples, but one that recently caught my eye was an ad placed in the Financial Times by the Singapore stock exchange, SGX Group, promising “multiple growth avenues, one trusted ecosystem”. SGX wants companies to list on its exchange rather than, say, the Hong Kong one which has more or less the same exclusive offer. SGX promises “access (to) Asia through our trusted ecosystem anchored in Singapore.” Ecosystems can be a lot of things. ‘Trusted’, by which they mean centrally policed to achieve defined, lower-risk outcomes, is not one of them. Calling built environments ‘ecosystems’ is common everywhere from financial services to supply chains to – quite a stretch, here – a retirement living complex. But it’s most often used in the tech world to describe the relations between software, services and hardware typically owned by a single company. For example, it’s how Google describes everything that hangs off the Android operating system. These kinds of proprietary and deterministic architectures are called ecosystems so often that we’ve stopped noticing. And that’s kind of the point. We need to start seeing this metaphor again, and what it’s hiding in plain sight. But first, a reminder of what an ecosystem actually is.

An ecosystem is a set of unbidden organisms and the physical environment with and in which they interact. It’s constantly evolving, and the real interest, value and drive for change all come from the emergent properties of the relations between its many parts. An ecosystem is not the plaything of a pampered princeling, like Meta, but a set of living, striving things, both competitive and cooperative, and the place they live. The two kinds of system are almost impossibly different. One is biological, the other technological. One is complex and adaptive, the other only pretends to be.
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The Washington Post has a long piece about a Virginia family whose current (substantial but not huge) wealth derives from their slaveholding forebears and who may now be greatly enriched by the discovery of uranium under their land. There’s an interesting discussion of the arguments for and against reparations

Buried in the middle of the article is something much more interesting, to me at any rate. One member of the family, Edward Coles, opposed slavery. He hid his views until he inherited ownership of 17 enslaved people, then took them to Illinois and freed them. None other than Thomas Jefferson wrote to Coles, seeking to dissuade him.

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To illustrate the claims in this book, I rely on three primary metaphors throughout….The second is of history as molten glass. At present, society is still malleable and can be blown into many shapes. But at some point, the glass might cool, set, and become much harder to change. The resulting shape could be beautiful or deformed, or the glass could shatter altogether, depending on what happens while the glass is still hot. William MacAskill (2022) What We Owe The Future, p. 6

This is the third post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here which also lists some qualities about the book that I admire; the second one is here.)

A key strain of MacAskill’s argument rests on three contentious claims: (i) that currently society is relatively plastic; (ii) that the future values of society can be shaped; (iii) that in history there is a  dynamic of “early plasticity, later rigidity” (p. 43). Such rigidity is also called “lock-in” by MacAskill, and he is especially interested in (iv) “value lock-in.”

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I started cold calling after a student (a CT reader and commenter, who remembers this because I remind her of it [1]), many years ago, having sat silently throughout my senior-level class in political philosophy, explained why she wanted to attend Law School. “I’ve heard that in Law School they cold-call, so that all the students have done the reading, and everyone is engaged. I want to be in classes like that.” She reminded me of the old TV show, The Paper Chase, in which John Houseman, one of those American actors with an inexplicable English accent, would seemingly bully his Law students by constantly trying to catch them out.

Going to Law School solely in order to get cold called seemed a bit eccentric. But I got the point. She’d missed out on a lot of learning – the learning you do when you articulate your thoughts out-loud, sometimes discovering that they aren’t thoughts at all, and other times discovering that they are more interesting and/or more complex than you had realized. My job was to make sure she did that learning – the learning that other, louder, more aggressive students already did – and I had let her down.
At first it was difficult. It is socially awkward to ask a stranger what their thoughts are, especially when both you and they are completely unused to it. What makes it worse is that students enter the classroom expecting the standard norms of the campus to apply – that they can take a back seat and listen (or, more accurately, look as if they are listening), talking only when they feel like it. I wasn’t skilled at cold-calling at all, and for the first couple of years I would often lose my nerve after a few classes, and retreat to my usual, deficient, practices.

I discovered it was easier for me to call on students if I knew all their names. And it was easier to learn all their names quickly if I called on them to talk (who would have thought that it is easier to get to know people by talking with them than by talking at them?). And it got even easier when I realized that the average quality of the talking is higher if the people who always volunteer talk less, because shyer and more reserved students often have valuable things to say. And I discovered that cold calling elicits more diverse perspectives because the willingness to volunteer to talk is not equally spread across all demographics.

But how to avoid seeming like John Houseman? I want to draw them in, not catch them out. After I had started cold-calling routinely a student observer admonished me: “I know that you don’t mind if a student has nothing to say. But they don’t know that. You have to tell them that, and show them that you mean it”.

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At night I just can’t deal with words no more, man, so I draw pictures. I like to have some graphics project I can chip away at – like gardening. For the past year-or-so it’s been: trying to cartoon 100 philosophers in a symmetry-ish, geometry-ish style. I think I’m up to 64 or so. Plus I did Lovecraft, Kafka, Poe. For variety. (Or you can declare them honorary philosophers.)

I’ve shown his stuff off, a bit, here at CT, but I’ll see fit to share more now. You can buy ’em on mugs and stuff, if so inclined. ‘Tis the season!

Speaking of which, I’ve posted good old “Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness”, in readable form, so you can give yourselves a shiver around the fire with that.

As to the philosophers, I like to draw ’em nice – kinda elegant, I hope – then make ’em silly in faux-retro or disco style. Also, repeating wallpaper-style patterns. I like that. So! A small sampler, for your amusement and edification. [click to continue…]