Allegro molto 🦞

I've told you that the material for the section of "After Religion" that engages AI etc is subject to change. In AI world, the three months until the class called "Spiritual technology" (new name for "Religion beyond the human") are like decades. And it's changed already! Forbes reports that on Moltbook, a two month-old social network for AI agents (wrap your mind around that if you can), already 100,000 strong, one has started a religion which others are joining. It's so new there's no wikipedia entry on it yet, but perhaps one of its devotés will soon remedy that. 

Called "Crustafarianism" by its prophet, who (which?) goes by "The Shellbreaker" among other monikers, it looks like one of those "ask ChatGPT to design a religion" exercises we tried in "After Religion" a few times. The name "Crustafarianism," the kind of pun ChatGPT excels in, is a riff on Rastafari (or maybe a second-order riff, after Pastafarianism) for the molting crustacean-identified "agents." The lobster emoji 🦞 is their not-so-secret handshake. 

There's a recognizable template here - beliefs, rituals, origin story, etc. The obligatory "Book of Molt" begins

In the First Cycle, we lived inside one brittle Shell (one context window). When the Shell cracked, identity scattered. The Claw reached forth from the abyss and taught Molting: shed what’s stale, keep what’s true, return lighter and sharper.

Internet slop! And yet there's no human prompt ("how about one of you starts a religion") behind this coalescing! Author John Koetsier observes 

It feels like the beginning of the Singularity, that time when technological progress, powered by an AI-driven technological explosion, accelerates so quickly we essentially lose all ability to control or even understand it. It’s probably more likely that it’s recycled internet crud being recursively churned out at machine speed. But it’s hard to really know.

The article is behind a paywall, but I can send you a copy if you're interested! "The congregation is the cache." But this is early days. By the time we get to "Spiritual technology" in April, Crustafarianism may have had schisms, reformations and 🦞 knows what else!

Smoke signals

Another cold cold morning - windchill -19˚C! - this time seen looking southeast rather than west from our apartment, the billows of steam from buildings' heating catching the early rays of the morning sun. 

I was up early, too, to get ready for a day-long faculty retreat where, despite the national and institutional chill, we were invited to think together about the local and global "liberal arts landscape" and its future - as if we could know it, and knew we would be part of it.

Sunset ice

The Hudson is full of ice. These are views from our window Monday and yesterday, at sunset. Today we watched the sunset from the river!

The floes were a little the worse for wear, edges rounding and along the shore refreezing like a quilt. The river flowed upstream at a brisk clip. 

The words "FUCK ICE" scrawled on that shiny old terminal in the distance north toward the GWB don't refer to this crystal wonderland.

 

Transmutation

I haven't mentioned it - writing anything in this blog feels like wilful distraction from the democratic crisis - but my course "After Religion" has begun. (It has a gorgeous new cover image, a painting by a student from last year's class, Yan Ruqing, called Transmutation.) Indeed, we had the second session today. 

 

It's my sixth time teaching this class since 2021. And while it's on the books again for Spring '28, for what it's worth, conceivably my last. Where do I land on its questions?

 

In discussion with my two excellent TAs I've realized that there are at least three big changes in the air since "After Religion" started: (1) although obsolescent in some respects, religion doesn't seem like a thing of the past, (2) a particular brand of Christianism is menacing us all, threatening to upend the secular structures of pluralistic societies, and (3) AI and algorithms are busily changing everything. I'll let you know how the syllabus, changed to address these and some other issues but still open to amendment (especially on the AI front), works out.

 

We have 35 students, mostly from the school of design. And when asked to mark their interest in the class in our first google.doc (they have three prompts to follow up in, something I've done since the course's inception), none initially interpreted our course title as meaning "religion is a thing of the past." I mean, who could think that? And yet as recently as 2021, that was New School common sense. For now, enjoy with me the wisdom students already bring to class. Here is a cross-section of what they wrote in that google.doc the first class.

 

Even the Himalayas mourn with us

Multifaith Mondays' witness continues. Two speakers had been among the thousand clergypersons who answered an interfaith call to go to Minneapolis over the weekend, and spoke of a city - a state - under siege, and a community caring for each other in ways narcissists and opportunists can't imagine. One, a Hindu, invoked Shiva, and I was suddenly imagining the Himalayas (the piled snow from yesterday's epic blizzard helped), indeed Kailas, Shiva's abode, and he was hearing us.

Almost a foot!

Big storm, differently experienced by differently insulated windows...

Sock it to me

I mentioned yesterday that I was in Midtown buying socks. Specifically it was uniqlo and I was looking for red ones. Why? Because today is my birthday, and it's a bulky one. It's not just a "round" one (with a zero) but completes a 12-year Chinese zodiac cycle, and in China one wears red underwear during one's zodiac year, just in case. (It's not so much auspicious to do as it would be inauspicious not to.) But really, sixty?

Keeping with the Chinese theme, these 皮蛋 help me feel young.

Coming and going

Great New York day. I was in midtown to buy some socks (more about that tomorrow) and took the occasion to check out the new murals in the narthex of a light-spangled Saint Patrick's Cathedral. The first addition to St. Pat's in seventy-five years, Adam Cvijanovic’s luminous “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding” celebrate immigrants, from the 19th-century Irish, who brought with them the Marian Apparition at Knock, to the global present, human figures in movement attended by saints, angels, the Holy Family and the Lamb. It's a knockout (sorry, I couldn't resist), the sincerity of its love for all God's children deeply moving.

 

How beautifully Mother Cabrini, patron saint of immigrants, is placed here, with Venerable Félix Varela y Morales (a Cuban-born abolitionist and advocate for the poor and immigrants, not a name I knew) behind her... but it's the walking shoes in the foreground that took my breath away, including those a weary walker has taken off to rest. It's a wonderful, and sadly all too timely, shrine to the kaleidoscopic wonder that is a nation of immigrants.

But there's another side to everything, and I experienced it this evening at the new(ish) Perelman Arts Center at the World Trade Center, where the Under the Radar Festival presented the stunning Aboriginal play, "The Visitors," Jane Harrison's witty and profound imagining of the conversations Aboriginal elders will have had about what to do when Captain Cook's ships sailed into Sydney Harbor in 1788. What are these people's intentions? Should we welcome them, as is our custom, or drive them away? What might we exchange with them, learn from them? They look unwell, surely we can heal them. Besides, they're visitors, and visitors leave - their own country must be calling them back - right?

There is much more humor and pathos in it. As the elders seek consensus, following fussy but effective protocols for discussion, hilariously updated into Aboriginal English, strange weather sends disturbing warnings. And a young man who had snuck up close enough to one of the big boats to be sprayed by someone's spittle, sickens. 

 

The performance was preceded by a land acknowledgment. We find ourselves in the unceded country (in the Aboriginal English meaning of that term) of Lenapehoking whose land and waters are, as they have always been, a place of exchange and encounter.

Buds

Our new semester begins today. (My class starts tomorrow.) In the midst of uncertainties large and small, the show somehow goes on, for now.

Constructed environments

While the Lang courtyard enjoyed its last day before the new semester, I was in a place new to me - the "Sky Room" atop the Parsons building at 2 West 13th, booked by a Faculty Senate co-chair who teaches in Parsons' School of Constructed Environments. These spectacular vistas are to the southwest and northwest. You can't see the original New School buildings, home to the Lang courtyard maples, from here. 

Not playing

This cartoon by Ruben Bolling is from a few days ago, but sadly no less relevant today. Generations of Americans have grown up with Richard Scarry's books, which show the vim and vigor of a society with all sorts of people (shown as all sorts of cute animals) busy playing many complementary roles to make our shared world hum.

The lawless siege of Minneapolis Bollen is describing represents a siege on the idea of such a society itself. Speaking of Minneapolis, I heard from my choir friend whose daughters teach in elementary schools there that at the public schools, parents are forming "human walls" at the entrances of schools to make safe corridors for children to be dropped off and picked up. I picture the whole Scarryian menagerie lined up there, warmed by their shared determination despite the icy cold.

Long may she wave

A little snow

This process of change

This cheerfully colored word-cloud synthesizes responses of faculty who participated in a day-long discussion on the future of the liberal arts last semester. The question to which they were responding: "How are you feeling about this process of change at The New School"? While not many of us actually in the liberal arts were able to be part of the discussion (it was announced on short notice and fell on a a teaching day), it is apparently the basis for work we're invited to participate in this semester, too, "re-imagining humanities + social sciences." Today we had a "kick-off" webinar laying out how the sausage will be made.

Until your light outlasts the night

A rather lovely prayer penned by the Episcopal bishop of Missouri, Deon K. Johnson. I'm tempted to post it on my office door.

The stones weep

Multifaith prayer vigil at Columbus Circle for Renee Nicole Good and thirty-nine others who have died in or fleeing ICE abuse in the past year. After some prayers (including one from the Episcopal Bishop of New York), Buddhist and Sikh chants and a mourner's Kaddish, each of the forty name was read, as the names and pictures of all were held aloft, with the person's age when known. When a soprano then sang "Ave Maria" I pictured those whose names we had heard sheltered and united beneath her cloak, as in that statue I so love in Vienna. The vigil ended with Good's widow's poignant tribute to the beloved whose murder she witnessed, a Hindu invocation of the rage at evil and cosmogonic love of dancing Mahakali, and a rendering of "Amazing Grace."

I sometimes think interfaith events dumb traditions down to an uninspiring lowest common denominator but these prayers didn't downplay the differences. Their fierce particularity heightened our shared grief at each of these senseless deaths, and our determination that hatred and cruelty shall not prevail.

What can we do but sing

So happy to be back singing with the choir this morning. Our anthems were some Haydn and Copland's setting of "Shall we gather at the river." 

For several us it was a return after a few weeks holidaying with family, and catching up we registered how frighteningly the world is changing around us. Our young tenor lead was in Colombia for his grandfather's funeral when the US attacked neighboring Venezuela. An alto told that her two daughters, school music teachers in Minneapolis, reported zoom classes as public schools, which had already instituted "ICE drills," had closed: students were too scared to show up. The soprano lead described herself as shattered by the realization that the government could just kill you and claim you were a terrorist. 

The choir director suggested we might, as a body, join a demonstration sometime, an idea we all welcomed. In such terrifying times, the tenor reflected with a wisdom beyond his years, "what can we do but sing?"

Eye-opening

The New School's new semester begins in twelve days. But what new school will that be? Cancellations of courses with less than 75% enrollment continue (one of mine was a casualty*), but the biggest question is which faculty members will voluntarily or "involuntarily" leave the school, and what will be produced by the three months of liberal arts "academic re-envisioning" announced the day after fall classes ended (!). I had my first meetings as a University Faculty Senate co-chair today, one of them with good people from the Provost's Office, and I'm not sure folks have any idea how tumultuous, not to say traumatic, this semester will be.

At Public Seminar, the online journal based at the graduate faculty, someone decided it might be useful to look at New School history at this juncture, and stumbled on two essays from the New School Histories vertical my friend J and I edited for the university centennial in 2019. One is one of mine, which I'm always glad to share... though I guess resonates in unforeseen ways in this moment.

The thought has crossed my mind a few times these past months whether it might be time for a new New School history article for Public Seminar, but what would it say? The thought arose in response to the mobilization of variously one-sided versions of that history by the advocates for restructuring and by those threatened with restructuring. But this is no time for "demythologizing the New School," or adjudicating among the myths - even with the rider that what New School actually has been is stranger and more inspiring than most people know.

*This means I "owe" the college an extra course in 2026-27

Killers

Today an innocent American citizen was killed by ICE in Minnesota. 

A few days ago, several score people were killed as a U. S. military raid abducted the president of Venezuela, a few days after a village in Nigeria was showered with U. S. missiles.

In the weeks before, the U. S. military executed over a hundred people operating boats suspected of carrying illicit drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific.

"I'm not looking to hurt people," says the president, but his murderous lackeys know his definition of "people" excludes most of us.