Entry tags:
A break from the news..linkages
1. Meet the Modern Day Pagans Who Celebrate Ancient Gods
Deep in the woods, a group of Modern Day Druids are Practicing Ancient Celtic Rites
The priest raises his arms, palms upturned. “Lord Taranis, hear our prayer!” he bellows, voice bouncing off the stone pillars and into the darkening fields beyond. The fire’s crackle fills the stone circle. We stare through the flames, past the boundary of our sacred space, to the patina of white looming over the white sky – Mount Adams, close and huge.
It is high summer, and we are at White Mountain Druid Sanctuary in southern Washington State. Under the immensity of the mountain, a couple of ramshackle barns stick up from the hayfields. Our priest, a straight-backed, snow-haired man, is delivering a homily on the attributes of the thunder god. Taranis, a powerful thunderbolt-tossing deity, is being honored at today’s solstice celebration because of his association with light, weather and sky.
Arms raised, the priest pauses. We lean forward, breathless. The fire cracks again. The teenage girls on the edge of the circle, who might be high on mushrooms, giggle quietly to themselves. Finally the priest grins and lowers his arms.
“Well, I forgot that part, darn it.” With a shrug, he reaches into his white robes and pulls out a small piece of paper. His voice is wry, sing-songy, full of mirth. “I should have practiced more!”
Everyone laughs as the priest consults his paper. “Sorry, I’ve got it now,” he says, resuming the formal diction – few contractions, quick and clear consonant sounds – that he uses for his rituals. Throwing his arms into the air, he intones, “Lord Taranis…” and completes the rest of the homily uninterrupted.
To get to the Sanctuary in the foothills of Mount Adams, I rattled down a gravel road and parked beneath some prayer flags tacked to a barn. A sign on the building read “DRUIDS HERE.” There is a large wooden lodge with bed-and-breakfast facilities, meditation huts, and a stone circle straight out of Stonehenge, where, upon my arrival, about fifty people were pouring whiskey into deep wells and speaking Gaelic. They were blowing horns and beating drums and generally having a hell of a good time.
2. How the Internet Is Changing Language As We Know it
Towards the end of the last decade, a distinctive minimalist style emerged among the users of the micro-blogging site Tumblr. Capital letters were largely dispensed with, save for EMPHASIS; punctuation became notable by its absence; hashtags were used mostly for irony (#wild). It didn’t take long for the site’s users – who skewed young, female and literate compared with the rest of the internet – to provide their own meta-commentary on what was happening. One post, from 2012, gained more than half a million likes:
when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
Or as other users put it:
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE
It has always seemed to me that any concerns about what the internet is doing to our collective mental health must be set against the poetry that it has simultaneously unleashed – the sheer range of textual innovation and expression that you can find on Tumblr or Twitter or even TikTok, the way three dots, or a question without a question mark, or “idk lol” can become loaded with meaning. It’s a point that the sociolinguist Gretchen McCulloch argues eloquently in her book Because Internet: Understanding How Language Is Changing (Harvill Secker), which features, among other delights, a fascinating analysis of Tumblr punctuation. Far from being a crude mishmash of emojis and acronyms, she writes, “internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language”.
In the past, McCulloch notes, it was only novelists, playwrights and screenwriters who had to worry about how to elicit emotional responses with their writing. For the generation who have come of age on the internet – the “full internet people” in her terminology – this is a fundamental skill. It’s something you have to learn if you want to have any kind of social life. Does it follow, then, that the internet is producing an entire generation of would-be novelists, playwrights and screenwriters? Or are novels, plays and screenplays the wrong places to be looking anyway?
Here is a typical tweet from![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
333333333433333, an account run by the American writer Darcie Wilder: “i thought i wanted a community of like-minded artists. then i found media twitter. and now i only wish for death”.
3. What is it Like to be a Bee
We all know what it’s like to be ourselves—to be conscious of the world around us, and be conscious of that consciousness. But what consciousness means more generally, for other people and other creatures, is a hot potato tossed between philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and anyone who’s ever wondered whether it feels the same to be a dog as it does to be an octopus. In general, we think that if you have some kind of unique, subjective experience of the world, you’re conscious to some extent. The problem is that in trying to envisage any consciousness besides our own, we run into the limits of the human imagination. In the case of honeybees, it’s hard to know if interesting behavior is reflective of an interesting experience of the world or masks a more simple stimulus-response existence. The lights are on, but is anyone home? To examine these questions means to take a ride on that hot potato—from philosopher to scientist and back again and again and again.
More and more, scientific research seems to suggest that bees do have a kind of consciousness, even as myths and misconceptions about their capacities persist. In a TED Talk, cognitive scientist Andrew B. Barron of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, described how he had had to be lovingly “talked down” from a “pearl-clutching” moment after someone asked him whether bees actually have brains. They do, of course.
Understanding what their consciousness might look or feel like is probably a fool’s errand. It’s really hard to imagine what it’s like to be almost anything or anyone other than what you are, says philosopher Colin Klein, also from Macquarie University, who has worked extensively alongside Barron. With people, it’s much easier. “You can talk to them, you can read fiction, there are a lot of things you can do—but it takes a certain amount of work to get into that space and in particular to realize what you experience, what you don’t experience, what your horizons look like,” he says. But the more different the experience of the organism you’re trying to imagine is, the harder it becomes. “You can start to think at least in what senses the experience of something like a bee might be different from ours”—how they structure the world around them, say, or whether they experience “space” the way we do.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” suggests that being “like” something else is possible only if the target is conscious of the world around it. “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism,” he writes. Or, “fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” On top of that mindscrabble, our ability to imagine ourselves as another being is limited by the world that we know—as people. We might be able to imagine having webbed arms and hands, like a bat, or five eyes, like a bee, but the specific senses and abilities these animals possess are frankly inconceivable. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task,” he adds. Moreover, “I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it.”
Despite these difficulties, what we want to know, Klein and Barron wrote in an op-ed in The Conversation in 2016, is whether bees and other insects “can feel and sense the environment from a first-person perspective.”
4. Scandal and Death in the Afternoon, An Oral History of the American Soap Opera
Part I: The Addiction Begins (1932–1963)
They started out on radio—live, 10- to 15-minute chunks of ongoing romance, anguish, and high drama, all aimed squarely at housewives and sponsored, as their moniker suggests, by soap conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. The first of the half hour–long television soaps, As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, premiered on the same day in 1956. And there was no turning back. Soaps quickly garnered a freakishly dedicated audience that was in agony every Friday when their “stories” left them with a cliffhanger.
The genre’s first auteur was an eccentric writer, producer, and former actress named Irna Phillips. She invented her first daytime network radio serial in 1930 at the age of 31 and then went on to create many of the biggest titles in radio and TV. In the same years she churned out 2 million words a year. And in doing so, she single-handedly invented most of the conventions that have defined soaps for the past century.
Ken Corday, executive producer, Days of Our Lives (1985–present), and a second-generation soap man (son of Days co-creators Ted and Betty Corday): Irna Phillips was the grand pharaoh of soap operas. She really cooked up all of it. She was a brilliant woman who lived a very secluded life. She only traveled by train; she never stayed above the second floor of any hotel. All of us knew about her quirks. But her imagination was so vivid that she was able to personify so many aspects of life and get them down on the page—and then into people’s homes.
Tim Brooks, former NBC executive, TV historian: There was a lot of experimentation going on in those days; stations and networks were just getting up and running. They were all trying to figure out this new medium. Soaps were a big part of that process. What could be done with them dramatically? And how much could they make? No one knew.
Ken Corday: My earliest memory is picking out the logo for As the World Turns with my father at the Museum of Natural History—that incredibly famous film clip of the Earth turning around and around. I was about 5. The show went on the air in 1956.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, soaps were increasingly welcomed into the daily lives of American women. Fans identified so strongly with the characters that the line between reality and fantasy often blurred. No matter what your life was really like, the life of a soap character was infinitely more interesting.
Sam Ford, co-editor, The Survival of Soap Opera: I had a high school teacher who came home from school one day, and her mother was talking to her aunt on the phone, saying, “You won’t believe what happened to Joe!” She listened to the conversation, and it was getting worse and worse, and she thought, “My God, which neighbor could she be talking about?” Of course, they were discussing soaps.
William Reynolds, writer, presidential historian, The Edge of Night superfan: In 1961, on The Edge of Night, a character was killed saving her toddler from an oncoming car. The switchboards lit up so much at CBS that the actors who played the husband and wife on the show appeared as themselves at the end of an episode a few days later to explain why the character was killed. Nothing like this had happened before, or since, on a daytime or nighttime show.
Between 1951 and 1959, 35 soaps had premiered— most produced in New York City—and the need for actors was overwhelming. While the genre was often derided for offering some of the worst acting ever broadcast, most of the thespians actually came from Broadway or film. It took a special performer to memorize a 44-page script up to five days a week for 50 weeks a year.
Don Hastings, actor (Jack Lane, The Edge of Night, 1956–1960, and Dr. Bob Hughes, As the World Turns, 1960–2010): Almost all of us came out of the theater or radio. There was no such thing as a “soap actor.”
Chris Goutman, executive producer, As the World Turns (1999–2010): I’ve been with the best theater and film actors who’ve been thrown into day roles on shows and who just couldn’t hack it.
William J. Reynolds: I always remember the episode where Lobo Haines kidnapped Mike Karr (actor Forrest Compton) on The Edge of Night in 1972. Karr was taken to a warehouse, tied up, and blindfolded, and because Compton was blindfolded, he couldn’t see the teleprompter, and he skipped a whole act’s worth of dialogue. This was aired live.
Don Hastings: It was murder. There were a lot of actors who would do one show and quit.
Erika Slezak, Daytime Emmy award–winning actress (Viki Lord, One Life to Live, 1971–present): (Producer) Doris Quinlan said to me, “I’d love to have your father (Tony award–winning actor Walter Slezak) on the show, but I can’t afford him.” I said, “Well, just ask him.” He spent three days on the show. He said it was the most difficult, nerve-wracking thing he’d ever done. We rehearsed all day and then taped at 4:30 p.m. He was used to six weeks of rehearsal. I was really worried about him because he kept saying, “It’s so hard! It’s so hard!”
Chris Goutman: One actor wrote his lines on the rim of his plate during restaurant scenes. You just hoped he would spin the plate in the right direction, so he’d get his lines right.
Jacklyn Zeman, actress (Bobbie Spencer, General Hospital, 1977–present): There were no makeup changes or hair changes during a show. That’s why we’d have full makeup on when we were shown in bed. The scene before might have been in a restaurant. During the commercial break you had only two minutes to get your negligee on—that was it. People didn’t understand why we all looked so glamorous while lying in bed. It wasn’t because we were too vain to take off our makeup; it’s because we didn’t have time.
5. 30 Fascinating Early Bands of Future Music Legends
Even rock’s biggest names had to start somewhere. Flip through this (way) back catalog of stars’ early projects and you’ll find yourself in a topsy-turvy bizarro-world where Michael Bolton and Billy Joel fronted metal bands, Debbie Harry and the Cars were folked-up singer-songwriters, Madonna was a post-punk drummer and Ronnie James Dio was a Sixties teen idol. By the time you’re done there are more questions than answers. Did Neil Young and Rick James really play in a Motown band together? Did Lemmy really wear a priest’s collar onstage every night? Why were Radiohead so into saxes?
Read on to hear 30 fascinating early bands from future music legends. Brace yourself, because it might get weird.
Bruce Springsteen’s Sixties Garage Band the Castiles
In a tale later immortalized in his song “The Wish,” the Boss received his first electric guitar for Christmas 1964: a $60 Kent purchased by his mother, who took out a loan to get it for him. Springsteen promptly formed a band, the Rogues, bashing out rhythm guitar on tunes like “Twist and Shout” (the first song he ever played live) with some high school friends. Unfortunately his beloved solid body, which rarely stayed in tune, became a sore point. “I got thrown out of my first band because they told me my guitar was too cheap,” he later said.
A better opportunity would soon come knocking – literally. George Theiss, another neighborhood kid with rock & roll aspirations, was in the process of putting together a group. Named for Theiss’ preferred brand of Conti Castile shampoo, they called themselves the Castiles. The loosely formed gang set up shop at the Freehold home of Gordon “Tex” Vinyard and his wife, Marion, a big-hearted and patient couple who took fledgling local groups under their wings. The lineup began to coalesce in the spring of 1965, but they still needed a lead guitarist. “George Theiss, who was dating my sister, Virginia, knocked on my door, told me he had a band, wanted to know if I played lead guitar,” Springsteen remembered. “I told him that I did, which I barely did, and he took me over to Tex’s house and I met the other guys from the Castiles.” Skeptical of his soloing abilities, Vinyard told him to come back when he learned more tunes. Overnight he learned five off the radio. After returning the next day to demonstrate, he got the job.
Though accounts vary, Springsteen recalls his first gig with the Castiles taking place in the summer of 1965 at the Angle-Inn Trailer Park in nearby Farmingdale. “It was a summer afternoon cookout social for the residents,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run. “We set up in the shade under the overhang of a little garage and stood in front of an audience of maybe fifty souls. Our equipment was at its most primitive. We had Bart [Haynes]’s drums, a few amps, and a mic plugged into one of the extra channels of our guitar amplifiers. … We had only one option: to play. Play until they liked it, until they could hear it and, most important, until they DANCED!” They got them dancing, and over the next few years they played upwards of 120 gigs, performing everywhere from teen clubs, school dances and wedding receptions to supermarket openings, drive-in movie theaters, Marlboro State Hospital and even a converted stable.
On May 18th, 1966, Springsteen made his first studio recording at Mr. Music Inc., a low-tech facility tucked in a Bricktown shopping center that allowed customers to make what were essentially vanity recordings. Over the course of half an hour, the band completed two original songs – “Baby I” and “That’s What You Get” – written by Theiss and Springsteen in the back of Vinyard’s 1961 Mercury on the way to the studio. Given their hasty composition, the tunes are simple garage-rock fare, mixing Stones, Animals and Them poses with all the tough-guy bravado a bunch of 16-year-olds could muster. Four copies of these studio acetates survive today, as does a tape made of the band’s September 1967 show at a church-owned youth center in Freehold called the Left Foot. The earliest live recording of Springsteen known to exist, it offers a glimpse of the Castiles’ set list, which blended Top 40 covers with more obscure cuts (see Moby Grapes’ “Omaha,” the Yardbirds’ “Jeff’s Boogie,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and even “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix).
Late 1967 saw the band play a series of recurring gigs at the famed Café Wha in New York City’s Greenwich Village, but internal bickering began to take its toll by the following year. Relations were further strained when some of the bandmates were arrested for possession of marijuana, an apparent first in sleepy Freehold. “It was a town scandal, trouble all around and the finale of the Castiles’ great three-year run,” Springsteen wrote. “Our band was fraying anyway. George and I had begun to have some tension between us and the bust gave us all a final out. My epic elementary school of rock was closed forever.”
Elton John’s Sixties R&B Group Bluesology
“Beyond dreadful!” That’s how Sir Elton John describes “Come Back Baby,” the debut single released by his band Bluesology in 1965. Even though he was barely 18, the young pianist then known as Reginald Dwight was already an old pro. Having learned to plink out tunes by ear at age three, he began his classical training just a few years later. As a teen he earned money playing a weekly residency at the Northwood Hills Hotel pub in the London suburb of Pinner “every Friday, Saturday and Sunday for a whole year. And during that whole period, I don’t think that I ever missed a gig,” he recalled. “I used to sing Jim Reeves songs, Cliff Richard songs, anything that was popular.”
Bluesology began as an offshoot of the Corvettes, a previous band formed with neighbor Stuart Brown around 1960. Brown and John composed the nucleus of Bluesology, which endured semi-regular lineup shifts but stayed loyal to the R&B sounds being spread across the capital by the likes of Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies and John Mayall. Later, inspired by brassy soul records on Stax and Volt, they augmented the lineup with a trumpet and saxophone. Eager to pursue music full time, John dropped out of school in March 1965, just weeks shy of his birthday. “As a semi-pro group we got quite a bit of work, and we were ambitious and dedicated,” John recalled. Their rhythm & blues prowess earned them invitations to back American soul artists on their European tours, and much of the next 18 months was spent on the road accompanying acts like the Isley Brothers, Major Lance, and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells.
6. How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood
7. Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics
Horgan: You have a doctorate in physics, but you became a philosopher. Why? Did you decide physics is too hard?
Albert: Well, yeah - in a sense. What was too hard (in particular) was getting somebody to hire me to think about the sorts of questions that interested me in a physics department that was located in a place where I wanted to live. Thinking about foundational questions - which were the sorts of questions that I was interested in, and the sorts of questions that I felt I was good at thinking about - was very much out of fashion, and very much frowned upon, in most physics departments back in the early 1980's. But not so in philosophy departments. So what it came down to, at the time, was that if I wanted to work in a physics department I was going to have to live in South Carolina, but if I was willing to work in a philosophy department I could live in New York.
Horgan: Good choice. What is the point, in our scientific age, of philosophy?
Albert: I'm not sure I see the connection. It's like asking, “What is the point, in our scientific age, of ice cream?" People like it. People - or some people - want to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together. And it happens (moreover) that the business of trying to figure that out has had obvious and enormous and innumerable consequences for the history of the world. And if the thought is that what goes on in university science departments has lately somehow taken that function over, then that's just clearly and wildly wrong - and the fact that it's wrong, as I explained in my answer to your previous question, was part of the reason why I moved from a science department to a philosophy department.
Horgan: Ice cream? Mmm. What is philosophy’s chief contribution to humanity?
Albert: Clarity. Wonder. A certain kind of anxiety. The obvious and enormous and innumerable consequences for the history of the world that I mentioned above. I don't know.
Horgan: You demolished Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing in 2012, pointing out that a quantum field, which Krauss said generated the cosmos, isn’t nothing. Here’s my question: Will science ever tell us why there is something rather than nothing?
Albert: I can't see how that would work. The question itself - the question (that is) of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” - seems to me to be predicated on a false or confused understanding of what it is to explain something, or what it is (at any rate) to explain something scientifically. Scientific explanations (that is: scientific answers to “why” questions) are ways of showing us how to get from certain aspects of how things are to other aspects of how things are. One explains certain aspects of how things are in terms of certain other aspects of how things are. One explains (for example) where a projectile eventually lands in terms of its initial position and velocity, and its mass, and the atmospheric conditions, and the gravitational conditions, and the laws of physics. One explains the rise of Trump in terms of the stagnation of wages, or in terms of the ubiquity of reality TV, or I don't know what. And so there need to be certain aspects of how things are already on the table (you might say) in order for anything like a scientific explanation even to get started. And I can't imagine what those would be - the ones that are already on the table - in the case of an “explanation” of why there is something rather than nothing.
Horgan: I’ll take that as a no. You’ve spent a lot of time pondering quantum mechanics. Have you figured it out yet?
Albert: Yup. Sort of. I think I understand it much better than I used to, and better than I used to imagine I ever would.
Horgan: What’s your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics, and why?
Albert: Once upon a time, physics aspired to offer us an objective and literal and realistic and comprehensive and mechanical account of what the world is actually like. And that aspiration suddenly began to look quaint and naïve and hopeless, in the early decades of the 20th century, under the fantastic assault of quantum mechanics. And the interpretations of quantum mechanics that I like (although “interpretation” is really the wrong word here - since the various so-called “interpretations” on offer are really different physical theories, which often make different empirical predictions) are the ones that show, by explicit example, that an account like that can still be had - interpretations (that is) like Bohmian Mechanics, and theories of spontaneous localization. And among those I have no favorite. I think all of them are interesting, and promising, and since they make different predictions about the outcomes of certain performable experiments, it will be up to those experiments, and not to philosophers like myself, to decide which of them, if any, are actually true.
But there is a further puzzle here - something (as it were) more fine-grained, something that it has only fairly recently occurred to people to wonder about. All of the “interpretations” I mentioned above make crucial use of something called the quantum-mechanical wave-function. And there is a question - even once we have settled on one or another of those “interpretations” - about what sorts of things quantum-mechanical wave-functions are. And various possible answers to that question have been hotly debated for 15 or 20 years now. Everybody has always agreed that the simplest and most flat-footed and most obvious way to think about what wave-functions are is to think of them as concrete physical objects. But the space that wave-functions live in, the space (that is) that we would be obliged to think of as the fundamental physical space of the world- if we want to think of wave-functions as concrete physical objects - happens to have a gigantic number of dimensions. And this has always seemed to everybody to amount to a problem. And I have lately become convinced that it is nothing of the sort. I have lately become convinced that (as a matter of fact) it is the key to the whole business. It turns out that if you imagine that the fundamental physical space of the world is something other, and larger, and different than the three-dimensional space of our everyday experience, then everything that has always seemed uncanny about quantum mechanics suddenly becomes clear and straightforward and understandable and in some sense to have been expected. Anyway, that's the work that I was thinking of in my response to your previous question. [For more details see this preprint.]
Horgan: Why does quantum mechanics inspire so much New Age nonsense?
Albert: Precisely (I guess) because quantum mechanics had for so long been understood - incorrectly - to have overthrown every hope of understanding the world in an objective and literal and realistic and mechanical way.
Horgan: Is consciousness a solvable problem?
Albert: I sort of feel the ground coming out from under me when I try to think about that. I can't understand how physics could possibly give us a fully satisfactory account of consciousness, and I can't understand how physics could possibly fail, at the end of the day, to give us a fully satisfactory account of consciousness.
Deep in the woods, a group of Modern Day Druids are Practicing Ancient Celtic Rites
The priest raises his arms, palms upturned. “Lord Taranis, hear our prayer!” he bellows, voice bouncing off the stone pillars and into the darkening fields beyond. The fire’s crackle fills the stone circle. We stare through the flames, past the boundary of our sacred space, to the patina of white looming over the white sky – Mount Adams, close and huge.
It is high summer, and we are at White Mountain Druid Sanctuary in southern Washington State. Under the immensity of the mountain, a couple of ramshackle barns stick up from the hayfields. Our priest, a straight-backed, snow-haired man, is delivering a homily on the attributes of the thunder god. Taranis, a powerful thunderbolt-tossing deity, is being honored at today’s solstice celebration because of his association with light, weather and sky.
Arms raised, the priest pauses. We lean forward, breathless. The fire cracks again. The teenage girls on the edge of the circle, who might be high on mushrooms, giggle quietly to themselves. Finally the priest grins and lowers his arms.
“Well, I forgot that part, darn it.” With a shrug, he reaches into his white robes and pulls out a small piece of paper. His voice is wry, sing-songy, full of mirth. “I should have practiced more!”
Everyone laughs as the priest consults his paper. “Sorry, I’ve got it now,” he says, resuming the formal diction – few contractions, quick and clear consonant sounds – that he uses for his rituals. Throwing his arms into the air, he intones, “Lord Taranis…” and completes the rest of the homily uninterrupted.
To get to the Sanctuary in the foothills of Mount Adams, I rattled down a gravel road and parked beneath some prayer flags tacked to a barn. A sign on the building read “DRUIDS HERE.” There is a large wooden lodge with bed-and-breakfast facilities, meditation huts, and a stone circle straight out of Stonehenge, where, upon my arrival, about fifty people were pouring whiskey into deep wells and speaking Gaelic. They were blowing horns and beating drums and generally having a hell of a good time.
2. How the Internet Is Changing Language As We Know it
Towards the end of the last decade, a distinctive minimalist style emerged among the users of the micro-blogging site Tumblr. Capital letters were largely dispensed with, save for EMPHASIS; punctuation became notable by its absence; hashtags were used mostly for irony (#wild). It didn’t take long for the site’s users – who skewed young, female and literate compared with the rest of the internet – to provide their own meta-commentary on what was happening. One post, from 2012, gained more than half a million likes:
when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing
it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river
Or as other users put it:
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE
It has always seemed to me that any concerns about what the internet is doing to our collective mental health must be set against the poetry that it has simultaneously unleashed – the sheer range of textual innovation and expression that you can find on Tumblr or Twitter or even TikTok, the way three dots, or a question without a question mark, or “idk lol” can become loaded with meaning. It’s a point that the sociolinguist Gretchen McCulloch argues eloquently in her book Because Internet: Understanding How Language Is Changing (Harvill Secker), which features, among other delights, a fascinating analysis of Tumblr punctuation. Far from being a crude mishmash of emojis and acronyms, she writes, “internet writing is a distinct genre with its own goals, and to accomplish those goals successfully requires subtly tuned awareness of the full spectrum of the language”.
In the past, McCulloch notes, it was only novelists, playwrights and screenwriters who had to worry about how to elicit emotional responses with their writing. For the generation who have come of age on the internet – the “full internet people” in her terminology – this is a fundamental skill. It’s something you have to learn if you want to have any kind of social life. Does it follow, then, that the internet is producing an entire generation of would-be novelists, playwrights and screenwriters? Or are novels, plays and screenplays the wrong places to be looking anyway?
Here is a typical tweet from
333333333433333, an account run by the American writer Darcie Wilder: “i thought i wanted a community of like-minded artists. then i found media twitter. and now i only wish for death”.3. What is it Like to be a Bee
We all know what it’s like to be ourselves—to be conscious of the world around us, and be conscious of that consciousness. But what consciousness means more generally, for other people and other creatures, is a hot potato tossed between philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and anyone who’s ever wondered whether it feels the same to be a dog as it does to be an octopus. In general, we think that if you have some kind of unique, subjective experience of the world, you’re conscious to some extent. The problem is that in trying to envisage any consciousness besides our own, we run into the limits of the human imagination. In the case of honeybees, it’s hard to know if interesting behavior is reflective of an interesting experience of the world or masks a more simple stimulus-response existence. The lights are on, but is anyone home? To examine these questions means to take a ride on that hot potato—from philosopher to scientist and back again and again and again.
More and more, scientific research seems to suggest that bees do have a kind of consciousness, even as myths and misconceptions about their capacities persist. In a TED Talk, cognitive scientist Andrew B. Barron of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, described how he had had to be lovingly “talked down” from a “pearl-clutching” moment after someone asked him whether bees actually have brains. They do, of course.
Understanding what their consciousness might look or feel like is probably a fool’s errand. It’s really hard to imagine what it’s like to be almost anything or anyone other than what you are, says philosopher Colin Klein, also from Macquarie University, who has worked extensively alongside Barron. With people, it’s much easier. “You can talk to them, you can read fiction, there are a lot of things you can do—but it takes a certain amount of work to get into that space and in particular to realize what you experience, what you don’t experience, what your horizons look like,” he says. But the more different the experience of the organism you’re trying to imagine is, the harder it becomes. “You can start to think at least in what senses the experience of something like a bee might be different from ours”—how they structure the world around them, say, or whether they experience “space” the way we do.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous 1974 essay, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” suggests that being “like” something else is possible only if the target is conscious of the world around it. “The fact that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there is something it is like to be that organism,” he writes. Or, “fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.” On top of that mindscrabble, our ability to imagine ourselves as another being is limited by the world that we know—as people. We might be able to imagine having webbed arms and hands, like a bat, or five eyes, like a bee, but the specific senses and abilities these animals possess are frankly inconceivable. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task,” he adds. Moreover, “I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it.”
Despite these difficulties, what we want to know, Klein and Barron wrote in an op-ed in The Conversation in 2016, is whether bees and other insects “can feel and sense the environment from a first-person perspective.”
4. Scandal and Death in the Afternoon, An Oral History of the American Soap Opera
Part I: The Addiction Begins (1932–1963)
They started out on radio—live, 10- to 15-minute chunks of ongoing romance, anguish, and high drama, all aimed squarely at housewives and sponsored, as their moniker suggests, by soap conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble and Colgate-Palmolive. The first of the half hour–long television soaps, As the World Turns and The Edge of Night, premiered on the same day in 1956. And there was no turning back. Soaps quickly garnered a freakishly dedicated audience that was in agony every Friday when their “stories” left them with a cliffhanger.
The genre’s first auteur was an eccentric writer, producer, and former actress named Irna Phillips. She invented her first daytime network radio serial in 1930 at the age of 31 and then went on to create many of the biggest titles in radio and TV. In the same years she churned out 2 million words a year. And in doing so, she single-handedly invented most of the conventions that have defined soaps for the past century.
Ken Corday, executive producer, Days of Our Lives (1985–present), and a second-generation soap man (son of Days co-creators Ted and Betty Corday): Irna Phillips was the grand pharaoh of soap operas. She really cooked up all of it. She was a brilliant woman who lived a very secluded life. She only traveled by train; she never stayed above the second floor of any hotel. All of us knew about her quirks. But her imagination was so vivid that she was able to personify so many aspects of life and get them down on the page—and then into people’s homes.
Tim Brooks, former NBC executive, TV historian: There was a lot of experimentation going on in those days; stations and networks were just getting up and running. They were all trying to figure out this new medium. Soaps were a big part of that process. What could be done with them dramatically? And how much could they make? No one knew.
Ken Corday: My earliest memory is picking out the logo for As the World Turns with my father at the Museum of Natural History—that incredibly famous film clip of the Earth turning around and around. I was about 5. The show went on the air in 1956.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, soaps were increasingly welcomed into the daily lives of American women. Fans identified so strongly with the characters that the line between reality and fantasy often blurred. No matter what your life was really like, the life of a soap character was infinitely more interesting.
Sam Ford, co-editor, The Survival of Soap Opera: I had a high school teacher who came home from school one day, and her mother was talking to her aunt on the phone, saying, “You won’t believe what happened to Joe!” She listened to the conversation, and it was getting worse and worse, and she thought, “My God, which neighbor could she be talking about?” Of course, they were discussing soaps.
William Reynolds, writer, presidential historian, The Edge of Night superfan: In 1961, on The Edge of Night, a character was killed saving her toddler from an oncoming car. The switchboards lit up so much at CBS that the actors who played the husband and wife on the show appeared as themselves at the end of an episode a few days later to explain why the character was killed. Nothing like this had happened before, or since, on a daytime or nighttime show.
Between 1951 and 1959, 35 soaps had premiered— most produced in New York City—and the need for actors was overwhelming. While the genre was often derided for offering some of the worst acting ever broadcast, most of the thespians actually came from Broadway or film. It took a special performer to memorize a 44-page script up to five days a week for 50 weeks a year.
Don Hastings, actor (Jack Lane, The Edge of Night, 1956–1960, and Dr. Bob Hughes, As the World Turns, 1960–2010): Almost all of us came out of the theater or radio. There was no such thing as a “soap actor.”
Chris Goutman, executive producer, As the World Turns (1999–2010): I’ve been with the best theater and film actors who’ve been thrown into day roles on shows and who just couldn’t hack it.
William J. Reynolds: I always remember the episode where Lobo Haines kidnapped Mike Karr (actor Forrest Compton) on The Edge of Night in 1972. Karr was taken to a warehouse, tied up, and blindfolded, and because Compton was blindfolded, he couldn’t see the teleprompter, and he skipped a whole act’s worth of dialogue. This was aired live.
Don Hastings: It was murder. There were a lot of actors who would do one show and quit.
Erika Slezak, Daytime Emmy award–winning actress (Viki Lord, One Life to Live, 1971–present): (Producer) Doris Quinlan said to me, “I’d love to have your father (Tony award–winning actor Walter Slezak) on the show, but I can’t afford him.” I said, “Well, just ask him.” He spent three days on the show. He said it was the most difficult, nerve-wracking thing he’d ever done. We rehearsed all day and then taped at 4:30 p.m. He was used to six weeks of rehearsal. I was really worried about him because he kept saying, “It’s so hard! It’s so hard!”
Chris Goutman: One actor wrote his lines on the rim of his plate during restaurant scenes. You just hoped he would spin the plate in the right direction, so he’d get his lines right.
Jacklyn Zeman, actress (Bobbie Spencer, General Hospital, 1977–present): There were no makeup changes or hair changes during a show. That’s why we’d have full makeup on when we were shown in bed. The scene before might have been in a restaurant. During the commercial break you had only two minutes to get your negligee on—that was it. People didn’t understand why we all looked so glamorous while lying in bed. It wasn’t because we were too vain to take off our makeup; it’s because we didn’t have time.
5. 30 Fascinating Early Bands of Future Music Legends
Even rock’s biggest names had to start somewhere. Flip through this (way) back catalog of stars’ early projects and you’ll find yourself in a topsy-turvy bizarro-world where Michael Bolton and Billy Joel fronted metal bands, Debbie Harry and the Cars were folked-up singer-songwriters, Madonna was a post-punk drummer and Ronnie James Dio was a Sixties teen idol. By the time you’re done there are more questions than answers. Did Neil Young and Rick James really play in a Motown band together? Did Lemmy really wear a priest’s collar onstage every night? Why were Radiohead so into saxes?
Read on to hear 30 fascinating early bands from future music legends. Brace yourself, because it might get weird.
Bruce Springsteen’s Sixties Garage Band the Castiles
In a tale later immortalized in his song “The Wish,” the Boss received his first electric guitar for Christmas 1964: a $60 Kent purchased by his mother, who took out a loan to get it for him. Springsteen promptly formed a band, the Rogues, bashing out rhythm guitar on tunes like “Twist and Shout” (the first song he ever played live) with some high school friends. Unfortunately his beloved solid body, which rarely stayed in tune, became a sore point. “I got thrown out of my first band because they told me my guitar was too cheap,” he later said.
A better opportunity would soon come knocking – literally. George Theiss, another neighborhood kid with rock & roll aspirations, was in the process of putting together a group. Named for Theiss’ preferred brand of Conti Castile shampoo, they called themselves the Castiles. The loosely formed gang set up shop at the Freehold home of Gordon “Tex” Vinyard and his wife, Marion, a big-hearted and patient couple who took fledgling local groups under their wings. The lineup began to coalesce in the spring of 1965, but they still needed a lead guitarist. “George Theiss, who was dating my sister, Virginia, knocked on my door, told me he had a band, wanted to know if I played lead guitar,” Springsteen remembered. “I told him that I did, which I barely did, and he took me over to Tex’s house and I met the other guys from the Castiles.” Skeptical of his soloing abilities, Vinyard told him to come back when he learned more tunes. Overnight he learned five off the radio. After returning the next day to demonstrate, he got the job.
Though accounts vary, Springsteen recalls his first gig with the Castiles taking place in the summer of 1965 at the Angle-Inn Trailer Park in nearby Farmingdale. “It was a summer afternoon cookout social for the residents,” he wrote in his 2016 memoir, Born to Run. “We set up in the shade under the overhang of a little garage and stood in front of an audience of maybe fifty souls. Our equipment was at its most primitive. We had Bart [Haynes]’s drums, a few amps, and a mic plugged into one of the extra channels of our guitar amplifiers. … We had only one option: to play. Play until they liked it, until they could hear it and, most important, until they DANCED!” They got them dancing, and over the next few years they played upwards of 120 gigs, performing everywhere from teen clubs, school dances and wedding receptions to supermarket openings, drive-in movie theaters, Marlboro State Hospital and even a converted stable.
On May 18th, 1966, Springsteen made his first studio recording at Mr. Music Inc., a low-tech facility tucked in a Bricktown shopping center that allowed customers to make what were essentially vanity recordings. Over the course of half an hour, the band completed two original songs – “Baby I” and “That’s What You Get” – written by Theiss and Springsteen in the back of Vinyard’s 1961 Mercury on the way to the studio. Given their hasty composition, the tunes are simple garage-rock fare, mixing Stones, Animals and Them poses with all the tough-guy bravado a bunch of 16-year-olds could muster. Four copies of these studio acetates survive today, as does a tape made of the band’s September 1967 show at a church-owned youth center in Freehold called the Left Foot. The earliest live recording of Springsteen known to exist, it offers a glimpse of the Castiles’ set list, which blended Top 40 covers with more obscure cuts (see Moby Grapes’ “Omaha,” the Yardbirds’ “Jeff’s Boogie,” Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and even “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix).
Late 1967 saw the band play a series of recurring gigs at the famed Café Wha in New York City’s Greenwich Village, but internal bickering began to take its toll by the following year. Relations were further strained when some of the bandmates were arrested for possession of marijuana, an apparent first in sleepy Freehold. “It was a town scandal, trouble all around and the finale of the Castiles’ great three-year run,” Springsteen wrote. “Our band was fraying anyway. George and I had begun to have some tension between us and the bust gave us all a final out. My epic elementary school of rock was closed forever.”
Elton John’s Sixties R&B Group Bluesology
“Beyond dreadful!” That’s how Sir Elton John describes “Come Back Baby,” the debut single released by his band Bluesology in 1965. Even though he was barely 18, the young pianist then known as Reginald Dwight was already an old pro. Having learned to plink out tunes by ear at age three, he began his classical training just a few years later. As a teen he earned money playing a weekly residency at the Northwood Hills Hotel pub in the London suburb of Pinner “every Friday, Saturday and Sunday for a whole year. And during that whole period, I don’t think that I ever missed a gig,” he recalled. “I used to sing Jim Reeves songs, Cliff Richard songs, anything that was popular.”
Bluesology began as an offshoot of the Corvettes, a previous band formed with neighbor Stuart Brown around 1960. Brown and John composed the nucleus of Bluesology, which endured semi-regular lineup shifts but stayed loyal to the R&B sounds being spread across the capital by the likes of Alexis Korner, Cyril Davies and John Mayall. Later, inspired by brassy soul records on Stax and Volt, they augmented the lineup with a trumpet and saxophone. Eager to pursue music full time, John dropped out of school in March 1965, just weeks shy of his birthday. “As a semi-pro group we got quite a bit of work, and we were ambitious and dedicated,” John recalled. Their rhythm & blues prowess earned them invitations to back American soul artists on their European tours, and much of the next 18 months was spent on the road accompanying acts like the Isley Brothers, Major Lance, and Patti LaBelle and the Bluebells.
6. How Being Bullied Affects Your Adulthood
7. Making Sense of Quantum Mechanics
Horgan: You have a doctorate in physics, but you became a philosopher. Why? Did you decide physics is too hard?
Albert: Well, yeah - in a sense. What was too hard (in particular) was getting somebody to hire me to think about the sorts of questions that interested me in a physics department that was located in a place where I wanted to live. Thinking about foundational questions - which were the sorts of questions that I was interested in, and the sorts of questions that I felt I was good at thinking about - was very much out of fashion, and very much frowned upon, in most physics departments back in the early 1980's. But not so in philosophy departments. So what it came down to, at the time, was that if I wanted to work in a physics department I was going to have to live in South Carolina, but if I was willing to work in a philosophy department I could live in New York.
Horgan: Good choice. What is the point, in our scientific age, of philosophy?
Albert: I'm not sure I see the connection. It's like asking, “What is the point, in our scientific age, of ice cream?" People like it. People - or some people - want to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together. And it happens (moreover) that the business of trying to figure that out has had obvious and enormous and innumerable consequences for the history of the world. And if the thought is that what goes on in university science departments has lately somehow taken that function over, then that's just clearly and wildly wrong - and the fact that it's wrong, as I explained in my answer to your previous question, was part of the reason why I moved from a science department to a philosophy department.
Horgan: Ice cream? Mmm. What is philosophy’s chief contribution to humanity?
Albert: Clarity. Wonder. A certain kind of anxiety. The obvious and enormous and innumerable consequences for the history of the world that I mentioned above. I don't know.
Horgan: You demolished Lawrence Krauss’s A Universe from Nothing in 2012, pointing out that a quantum field, which Krauss said generated the cosmos, isn’t nothing. Here’s my question: Will science ever tell us why there is something rather than nothing?
Albert: I can't see how that would work. The question itself - the question (that is) of “Why is there something rather than nothing?” - seems to me to be predicated on a false or confused understanding of what it is to explain something, or what it is (at any rate) to explain something scientifically. Scientific explanations (that is: scientific answers to “why” questions) are ways of showing us how to get from certain aspects of how things are to other aspects of how things are. One explains certain aspects of how things are in terms of certain other aspects of how things are. One explains (for example) where a projectile eventually lands in terms of its initial position and velocity, and its mass, and the atmospheric conditions, and the gravitational conditions, and the laws of physics. One explains the rise of Trump in terms of the stagnation of wages, or in terms of the ubiquity of reality TV, or I don't know what. And so there need to be certain aspects of how things are already on the table (you might say) in order for anything like a scientific explanation even to get started. And I can't imagine what those would be - the ones that are already on the table - in the case of an “explanation” of why there is something rather than nothing.
Horgan: I’ll take that as a no. You’ve spent a lot of time pondering quantum mechanics. Have you figured it out yet?
Albert: Yup. Sort of. I think I understand it much better than I used to, and better than I used to imagine I ever would.
Horgan: What’s your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics, and why?
Albert: Once upon a time, physics aspired to offer us an objective and literal and realistic and comprehensive and mechanical account of what the world is actually like. And that aspiration suddenly began to look quaint and naïve and hopeless, in the early decades of the 20th century, under the fantastic assault of quantum mechanics. And the interpretations of quantum mechanics that I like (although “interpretation” is really the wrong word here - since the various so-called “interpretations” on offer are really different physical theories, which often make different empirical predictions) are the ones that show, by explicit example, that an account like that can still be had - interpretations (that is) like Bohmian Mechanics, and theories of spontaneous localization. And among those I have no favorite. I think all of them are interesting, and promising, and since they make different predictions about the outcomes of certain performable experiments, it will be up to those experiments, and not to philosophers like myself, to decide which of them, if any, are actually true.
But there is a further puzzle here - something (as it were) more fine-grained, something that it has only fairly recently occurred to people to wonder about. All of the “interpretations” I mentioned above make crucial use of something called the quantum-mechanical wave-function. And there is a question - even once we have settled on one or another of those “interpretations” - about what sorts of things quantum-mechanical wave-functions are. And various possible answers to that question have been hotly debated for 15 or 20 years now. Everybody has always agreed that the simplest and most flat-footed and most obvious way to think about what wave-functions are is to think of them as concrete physical objects. But the space that wave-functions live in, the space (that is) that we would be obliged to think of as the fundamental physical space of the world- if we want to think of wave-functions as concrete physical objects - happens to have a gigantic number of dimensions. And this has always seemed to everybody to amount to a problem. And I have lately become convinced that it is nothing of the sort. I have lately become convinced that (as a matter of fact) it is the key to the whole business. It turns out that if you imagine that the fundamental physical space of the world is something other, and larger, and different than the three-dimensional space of our everyday experience, then everything that has always seemed uncanny about quantum mechanics suddenly becomes clear and straightforward and understandable and in some sense to have been expected. Anyway, that's the work that I was thinking of in my response to your previous question. [For more details see this preprint.]
Horgan: Why does quantum mechanics inspire so much New Age nonsense?
Albert: Precisely (I guess) because quantum mechanics had for so long been understood - incorrectly - to have overthrown every hope of understanding the world in an objective and literal and realistic and mechanical way.
Horgan: Is consciousness a solvable problem?
Albert: I sort of feel the ground coming out from under me when I try to think about that. I can't understand how physics could possibly give us a fully satisfactory account of consciousness, and I can't understand how physics could possibly fail, at the end of the day, to give us a fully satisfactory account of consciousness.
no subject