In November 2021, Mahbuba arrived in Chicago amid the wave of refugees who fled Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul. Like most of the tens of thousands of Afghans evacuated and relocated to the United States, Mahbuba’s family had ties to the American military and staying in Afghanistan put all their lives at risk. After a month in a military base-turned-refugee shelter, Mahbuba and her family landed in Chicago, a city — and world — completely unknown to them.
But for Mahbuba the change was hard twice-over: Not only was the girl new to the city and country, she had arrived without any formal language. Mahbuba was, in other words, doubly displaced.
How Mahbuba transformed over the following year captures the singular alchemy that comes with finding language; the power in knowing and naming things. Her story also reflects the difference that just a few people — including public school teachers and aid workers — can make, despite limited resources. Because of the lengths a few Chicagoans have been willing to go, an Afghan girl is finding her voice and a new start.
It may not have come as a surprise to those familiar with Lewis’s work that ‘Bruce Le Catt’ was not the pseudonym of an astute critic, but of Lewis himself. The playfulness of Lewis’s writing is well known: for instance, the paper ‘Holes’ (1970), co-written with Stephanie Lewis, is a dialogue between two characters, ‘Argle’ and ‘Bargle’, on the ontological status of holes as found in Gruyère, crackers, paper-towel rollers and in matter more generally. Nevertheless, the attribution of the 1981 paper to a cat seemed to cross a line. It may have been playful, but it was also deceptive, hence the retraction.
Lewis was not the only 20th-century philosopher to publish using an invented persona. The contents page of the book Explaining Emotions (1980), edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, features the essay ‘Jealousy, Attention, and Loss’ by one Leila Tov-Ruach, listed on the Contributors page as ‘an Israeli psychiatrist, who writes and lectures on philosophic psychology’. Some readers might have noticed that this is a rather unusual name – a pun on laila tov ruach or ‘goodnight wind’ in Hebrew – and might have had their suspicions confirmed by the fact that there is no discernible trace of this psychiatrist elsewhere on the medical or academic record. Indeed, as an erratum on the University of California Press website drily notes, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty and Leila Tov-Ruach are indeed one and the same person.
Science has never been faster than it is today. But the introduction of AI is also, in some ways, making science less human. For centuries, knowledge of the world has been rooted in observing and explaining it. Many of today’s AI models twist this endeavor, providing answers without justifications and leading scientists to study their own algorithms as much as they study nature. In doing so, AI may be challenging the very nature of discovery.
But most research has centered on transparent wood as an architectural feature, with windows a particularly promising use, says Prodyut Dhar, a biochemical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi. Transparent wood is a far better insulator than glass, so it could help buildings retain heat or keep it out.
But five centuries or so before the popularity of coffee as a hot beverage, a mysterious ingredient began to appear in Arabic books on medicine and botany. The descriptions of this ingredient were very similar to our familiar coffee. However, instead of bunn, it was called bunk, and rather than drinking this ingredient, it was mostly used for cleaning and freshening the hands.
The lesson for readers is not necessarily to wake up to signs of totalitarianism knocking at our doors, but to empathize with those for whom it has already called.