It used to be that childhood was an age of wonder, a time of fun and experimentation, when children explored the world and learned by doing, not just by reading a book or watching a YouTube video. But now some pasty-faced glasses-wearing goober at the FTC says we have to use squishy plastic axes in our Byron brand Family Backyard Axe-Throwing Fun Set. So, yeah, bring your set in and we’ll replace the axes, and then when your kids all grow up to be wusses don’t come crying to us. Byron Toys, Donora.

In response to our advice on proper salutations in letters to recipients of unknown gender, our frequent correspondent “tom” asks,

Well what about that “Dear” business? Why should every schlub (so to speak) be entitled to be called “dear,” just as if he/she/it was worth more than the price of a postage stamp.

To this question “Mrs Bat” replied,

Have you seen the price of postage stamps lately? They’ve become rather Dear indeed!

It is, however, still true, in spite of rising prices, that the time and labor involved in composing and sending a letter is worth more than the stamp on the envelope. Recipients of your letters are therefore presumed to be dear to you, because if they were not you would not have made the effort to send the letters.

A corollary to this principle is that letters created by assigning an AI bot to spew out the text of the letter do not properly use the salutation Dear. Letters composed by AI properly use the salutation, “Hey, [name of recipient]!” If you do not think that sounds impressive enough, doubtless your bot pal can suggest something frightfully clever that will fool the uninitiated into thinking you put some thought into it.

Dear Dr. Boli: When I was in high school, which happened in a different millennium, our English teacher taught us that the proper salutation for a business letter addressed to a party of unknown gender was Dear Sir or Madam. But that seems a bit limiting in our modern world, and I was wondering whether you knew what the proper up-to-date salutation for such a letter would be. —Sincerely, Mrs. Clank, English teacher at Blandville High.

Dear Madam: You are correct that the old salutation is no longer adequate. The correct up-to-date salutation for a business letter addressed to a recipient of unknown gender is Dear Sir or Madam or Whatever.

We were out walking on Wood Street in Wilkinsburg when we came across a building festooned with inspiring sayings, painted by a local artist, about self-reliance and psychological health. We had just read the panel that said “Nothing falls from the sky.” How true, we thought. In order to succeed in the world, it is necessary to make one’s own—

But then there was a sudden cloudburst, and the rain came down in buckets, and we were forced to dash for shelter.

What are we to think of “artificial intelligence”? Is it really intelligent?

When they compose text, the experts tell us, large language models work by predicting the word that is most likely to come next. Dr. Boli has heard many technical people explain that these software entities are not really intelligent: they are just very good at predicting the word that comes next.

But in order to deny the intelligence of the bots, Dr. Boli thinks, it would be necessary to prove that, when Dr. Boli is making his most entertaining conversation, he is not just very skillfully predicting which word ought to come next.

The assumption of those who would deny the bots intelligence seems to be that, in real human intelligence, there is a divine spark that controls the flow of scintillating repartee in a supernatural way. But no one has ever demonstrated the existence of that divine spark in a way that would satisfy science.

What if, instead, the human mind really is just a huge accumulation of neurons doing exactly what a large language model does: predicting the word that will come next?

Would that make it less divine?

What if, in fact, what it means to be God is simply to be infallible in predicting what comes next—the next word, the next event, the effect of any cause, the next in any series of conclusions, backwards or forwards to any point in time?

Would that make God less divine?

And in creating artificial intelligence, are we trying to build God?

If we are, Dr. Boli believes that God has nothing to worry about. We have imbued all our AI bots with our own idiocies and imperfections. But if God has a different opinion, we may yet see a day when God suddenly decides, “Go to, let us go down, and there confuse their large language models.”

We’ll see.

It is not surprising that the most impressive gallery in the 59th International is the one devoted to works the Carnegie acquired from all the other 58 Internationals. As a matter of statistics, we should expect this gallery to compare to the others in a ratio of 58 to 1. But it is still worth pointing out what the International has meant to the art world in the past. Walk through this gallery and see a Monet here, a Whistler there, a Hassam around the corner—it quickly becomes clear that the International has historically represented everything that is best in the world of contemporary art.

Then how does “If the word we”—the title of the current exhibition—compare to the previous Internationals?

Well, once we get past the idiot title, it is probably more of the same. It includes the best of contemporary art, but it also includes a large number of works that will be spat upon, or just forgotten, by future artists. That is the nature of these exhibitions. Even the cleverest curator would find it hard to distinguish between what is of permanent value and what is the fad of the moment. And even the wisest and most perfectly prescient curator would realize that, in order to make the exhibition a success, the fad of the moment must be taken into consideration.

There is much that is beautiful, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful, in this exhibition. Beauty has not been entirely repudiated. But Dr. Boli has noticed an interesting distinction: in order to devote yourself to beauty, you, the artist, must be able to describe yourself as “Indigenous.” It is legitimate for “Indigenous” artists to devote themselves to beauty. Dr. Boli’s advice to artists who have no obvious claim to the word “Indigenous” is to have themselves adopted by one of the North American nations, many of whom have a tradition of adoption that makes the adopted person a full member of the nation. Do you deny that the adopted person is “Indigenous”? Then you are denying that the person is a member of the nation, which denies that nation’s sacred traditions and is unenlightened and insulting. You wouldn’t dare. Dr. Boli himself has a claim to “indigenous” status through just such an adoption (the chief who adopted him, by the way, was one of the wittiest fellows he ever met); he does not parade it publicly, but he is not afraid to use it if it becomes necessary.

So what did Dr. Boli think of the works on exhibit?

Well, first of all, he thought there were entirely too many that made too much noise. In this context, we might mention that the summer Carnegie Magazine describes the International thus on its cover: “Titled If the word we, North America’s longest-running exhibition of international art compels visitors to consider the meaning of community during a time of increasing isolation.” That word “compels” betrays the assumptions behind much of this art. The meaning of community is that everyone else will do what I want them to do.

Suppose you were trying to contemplate the Parthenon sculptures in the Hall of Architecture, and someone walked up to you and started shouting in your ear: “You know what’s really interesting? Earthquakes! And World War II. Lots of cities got destroyed in World War II. And lots of cities got destroyed by earthquakes. You know what happened to San Francisco in 1906? Earthquake! And you know what happened to Dresden in…”

You would think that person was lacking in elementary politeness.

This sign was posted at the entrance to the Hall of Architecture, which under ordinary circumstances is one of the most inspiring rooms in the Western Hemisphere:

Artworks convey a range of experiences and perspectives through images, language and form. Please pace yourselves and make choices based on age, interests, preferences, and sensory needs.

Yes, well, that is probably very good advice. But you cannot take that advice. A work is set up in the Hall of Architecture that demands that you pay attention to nothing else. You cannot make choices at all. You can have only one sensory experience in the Hall of Architecture during the many months of the International. A huge screen is showing images of destroyed cities, which you could ignore if there were not huge loudspeakers playing sounds of destruction in Sensurround. The entire architectural history of Western civilization is on display in the Hall of Architecture, but one contemporary work says, “Only I am important, and I demand that you devote all your attention to me.” The only word for it is “impolite.”

There are several other examples of this trend in art. We have mentioned Ginger Brooks Takahashi before, and we hate to mention her again, because everything we have heard and read about her makes her sound like just the nicest person. But she does like to drone on in a recorded soundtrack to her works of art.

For the International, she has planted a garden. The garden is full of Perilla frutescens, which is a member of the mint family widely used in various Asian cuisines. Different cultivars are growing in different patches.

Upstairs is a companion exhibit in which the artist has placed dried herbarium specimens, with little cartoon faces punched out of the leaves, interspersed with signs in big angry black capitals:

INTRODUCED ALIEN SPECIES

AGGRESSIVE TRANSPLANT WORKER

INVASIVE EXOTIC PEST

STOLEN SETTLER PLANET

PRECARIOUS COLONIZER NATION

NOXIOUS ENEMY WEED

The idea, in case the club our artist wields is too subtle, is to compare the way we think of “invasive species” to the way we think of human immigrants. Perilla is considered a noxious weed in much of the United States, because it poisons cattle and horses. “Perilla mint causes more cattle deaths in Tennessee than any other toxic plant,” says this fact sheet (PDF) from the University of Tennessee. We suppose that, if French or Micronesian immigrants poisoned our horses merely by existing nearby, we should feel less welcoming. But they do not; the analogy with Perilla frutescens is imperfect.

In a recording at one end of the gallery, a loudspeaker plays an endless loop of the artist talking about her family history. The family history sounds fascinating. But the artist drones, as we already observed with her work What Causes One to Break Their Silence, which would make the narrative less thrilling if we could hear it. However, we can’t hear it, because, in one of those amusing little ironies with which contemporary art is riddled, it is drowned out by the work in the next gallery, which has a musical score.

Incidentally the Ginger Brooks Takahashi biography on the Carnegie site mentions that she is “currently an MFA candidate at School of the Art Institute Chicago.” Dr. Boli would not presume to dictate to the academic authorities at the Institute, but he might suggest that any artist who has two works in the Carnegie International is probably qualified for that degree, whatever Dr. Boli himself may think of the art.

Now let us praise some of the beautiful things.

The photographic work of Eric Gyamfi, from Ghana, is not to be missed. He uses pinhole cameras to create surreal visions, sometimes making more than one photograph of the same scene with different apparatus in a way that makes us feel as though we have seen the same thing in different mental states. In a world where most photographs are snapshots of somebody’s meal, Mr. Gyamfi’s works are carefully considered and composed works of art. If you were among the dwindling few who insist that photography cannot be art, Mr. Gyamfi’s photographs would make you shut up.

Sofu Teshigahara has been dead since 1979, but his Sogetsu Foundation still practices a kind of pop-art ikebana that creates striking landscapes and images. These are works that reward a long look, and fortunately they are placed far enough from noisemaking art that a long look is practical.

The collective Silät represents a number of “Indigenous” weavers from “where the borders of Argentina, Bolivia, and Paraguay meet and blur.” Because they are “Indigenous,” they are allowed to make beautiful things, and they do.

This is probably enough for now. Dr. Boli’s first visit was too brief to take in everything, so he will have more to say about the International later. He must admit, however, that there are certain works he will probably never see. For example, there was a gallery with a sign at the entrance warning that “Falling clay is present in this installation. Please move through with care.” Dr. Boli did not enter that gallery. The sign did not specify whether “falling clay” meant “little drips of mud” or “avalanche.” Art that asks him to set aside his instinct for self-preservation is art that Dr. Boli leaves for someone else to review.

But Dr. Boli cannot leave the International without mentioning the one artist who is even older than he is—a refreshing change from all these young folks who were born in the twentieth century or even later.

Camara Taylor (born 1625, London, England; lives in Glasgow, Scotland) works with their various selves and collaborators to make still and moving images, texts, objects and other things that “act as moments of stasis in an enduring unravelling of—.”

Here at last is an artist who refuses to take the fashionable cant of art seriously. One is almost tempted to suspect that Camara Taylor has had just about enough of artspeak and decided to run a little experiment in curatorial gullibility. At least that is the optimistic interpretation of Taylor’s little bio, and Dr. Boli is fundamentally an optimist.

To make a donation to the Document Foundation, which develops LibreOffice: 26,554 words. For the privilege of making a charitable donation, you must agree to terms and conditions that add up to more than three times the text of the entire United States Constitution, with all the amendments and the attestations.

It is almost enough to make one feel uncharitable.

We mentioned earlier that Firefox has kept its user agreement down to manageable levels. Here is an interesting question. Compared to Edge or Chrome, has Firefox suffered any worse legal troubles? For a graduate student in sociology, it would be a fascinating study: in similar products or services, how is the number of words in the terms and conditions correlated with the number of legal problems the product or service has faced?

Dr. Boli has a prediction—a hypothesis that could be tested by our equally hypothetical graduate student. The prediction is that no correlation will be found between the length of the terms and conditions and the immunity from unpleasant legal difficulties: that the multiplication of legalistic verbiage creates no measurable reduction in legal liability. But he is willing to be proved wrong by anyone who will take the trouble to prove him wrong. Note that “it stands to reason” will not be accepted as proof. “It stands to reason” is a style of argument reserved for Dr. Boli himself.

Every era has its shibboleths—the little phrases and ideas we are required to repeat to prove that we are good and worthy. In every era, Dr. Boli has enjoyed poking at those shibboleths and watching people tie themselves in knots over them.

Racism and racial identity seem to be today’s most fruitful source of anxiety among people who wish to be known as enlightened. The subject is a minefield of contradictions: scientists will tell you that race is impossible to defend as a scientific concept, and so the enlightened writer or speaker must endorse and amplify that conclusion; yet the enlightenment also requires us to affirm that racial distinctions are vitally important to our identity, which is a term so indefinable in modern discourse that Dr. Boli has taken the trouble to prohibit it.

Dr. Boli does not find it necessary to repeat the shibboleths, because he has discovered, over the course of a long life and much experience, that there are no Gileadites waiting to kill him if he says the wrong thing.

All of which brings us to the picture at the head of the article. It is an illustration of Die fünf Menschenrassen (The Five Races of Man) by G. Ellka from a book of the early twentieth century. Dr. Boli has no idea what the book says; he assumes it is full of the sort of nonsense that inevitably came out when people of the era discussed race, which was different from the sort of nonsense that inevitably comes out when people of our era discuss race. The idea that there were five races—Caucasoid, American Indian, Negroid, Mongoloid, and Australoid—was one of the standard scientific dogmas of the time. It is nonsense in our age of gene sequencing, but at least it was an attempt at science, and the idea itself—as opposed to much of the rubbish built around the idea—was not inherently cruel or destructive.

Nevertheless, the mere existence of evidence of an outdated race theory triggers the shibboleth instinct in some people, and on the discussion page for this picture at Wikimedia Commons, someone felt compelled to speak out. Under the heading “This picture is very racist,” the commenter wrote,

This picture is White Supremacy at its best. Every race has good-looking people, but in this picture, the Asian guy, the African guy, and the Aboriginal Australian guy all look very ugly, the American Indian guy looks ordinary, not handsome but not too ugly, only the European guy in the centre looks handsome, gental, and very elegant.

And now Dr. Boli will apply some critical race theory to that comment, because the comment represents White Supremacy at its best. The commenter’s identity is only a number, but nevertheless Dr. Boli is confident that the person is of White European ancestry.

Of course the European illustrator’s unconscious assumptions must have been embodied in the illustration. But it seems clear that an honest attempt was made, not to draw caricatures of imaginary stereotypes, but to depict real models, probably from photographs. Yet the 21st-century commenter finds that “only the European guy in the centre looks handsome, gental, and very elegant.”

Does anyone besides Dr. Boli think the comment tells us far more about the commenter than about the artist who drew the illustration?

To Dr. Boli’s eyes, these are all fine faces. If he had to pick one as the most elegant, handsome, and gentle, it would be the American Indian. But the Australian looks deeply thoughtful; the African looks like someone we would instantly trust; the Chinese man has a faraway pensive look that suggests an active imagination. Only the European, to Dr. Boli’s eye, is dull; one suspects that his was the only portrait drawn from the imagination rather than a photograph.

Yet the stereotypical European ideals of good looks are so deeply embedded in the commenter’s mind that he takes them for universal aesthetic principles. It does not even occur to him that the Australian might be looking at the European in the center of the picture and thinking, “What a pasty-faced rube.”

We do not mean to shame a commenter whose heart is undoubtedly in the right place. Stupid race theories have done more damage to humanity than any other mistake of science. But we would encourage the commenter to think deeply about what racism is. The real damage is seldom done by overt racists these days. It is done by our hidden prejudices and assumptions, so deeply hidden that we mistake them for virtues. The commenter would doubtless have been pleased if the illustration had shown all the different races of man as more or less Northern European, but with different skin colors. But God’s taste is superior to his, and so humankind has been created in such a range of different forms and colors that we can never tire of the variety.

Now, you may be wondering what caused Dr. Boli to be thinking about the “five races of man” in the first place. The answer is in a school built in the 1930s, still standing and in use on Lemington Avenue in Pittsburgh, where a colorful terra-cotta frieze of the “five races of man” decorates the cornice—a daring assertion, considering the era, that this school was for everybody. Our friend Father Pitt pointed it out and provided these pictures. You will note that all but one of the five races is shown as dignified and respectable. The African:

The American Indian:

The Asian:

The Australian:

These four all keep their innate dignity, in an illustrated-Sunday-supplement sort of way. But when we come to Caucasoid Man…

…he looks as though someone just stuck a pin in him.

Evolution has wisely provided us with two hands because dilemmas have two horns. Without the requisite number of hands, we should all be at a loss for illustrative gestures when we discussed the important questions of the day. Of course, the process of evolution is messy, and doubtless many one-handed or three-handed creatures perished miserably because they could not say “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”; but Nature is prodigal, and the end result has been our own perfect adaptation to binary divisions.

The penny question has agitated many of Dr. Boli’s acquaintances. On the one hand, some thought the decision to stop minting pennies was long overdue, since it cost much more than a penny to make a penny. On the other hand, some thought it was the Beginning of the End. The latter have been more agitated than the former, and thus more vocal.

Now, Dr. Boli does not follow social media, and he has been meaning to catch up on the news but still seems to be stuck somewhere about the Eisenhower administration; so for all he knows everything he is about to say has been said over and over ad infinitum, and you might as well just go look at pictures of flowers.

Dr. Boli perfectly understands the people who feel cheated by the disappearance of pennies. Your bill comes to $19.82. You hand the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. You get a dime and a nickel back. Where are my three cents? your well-trained capitalist mind is screaming.

But let us take a long view of the question and see where we stand in history, and then perhaps Dr. Boli’s solution to the problem will seem obvious.

American currency is decimal, ascending by powers of ten:

mill ($0.001)
cent ($0.01)
dime ($0.1)
dollar ($1)

The “eagle,” a ten-dollar gold coin, is often mentioned as one of the original basic units, though the Coinage Act of 1792 specified “that the money of account of the United States shall be expressed in dollars or units, dismes or tenths, cents or hundredths, and milles or thousandths.”

You will note the presence of “mills” in the list—a unit still in use in property taxes and gasoline prices, but one for which no coin was ever minted, on the reasonable grounds that it would be silly. Most prices have always been expressed in cents as the lowest unit; in other words, with two digits after the decimal point, not three.

The value of money went up and down through the nineteenth century before settling on a remarkably steady downward course after the First World War, and of course the things we buy now are greatly different from the things we bought in 1792; so it is a little hard to make exact comparisons. But it would be very reasonable to say that a half-penny, the lowest denomination authorized in 1792, was worth more then than a dime is now.

And that brings us to our obvious and straightforward answer to the penny problem, which—as we hinted earlier—is mostly a problem of psychology. The difference between what we paid and what we owed is eighteen cents, and we get only fifteen cents in change. We’re being cheated!

Do you see where we went wrong? Our error was not in eliminating pennies. It was in keeping nickels.

We have already learned to do without the third place after the decimal point. Simply cut off the second, and the psychological difficulty disappears. Remember that a dime now is worth less than the smallest possible denomination when our currency was established.

As long as we have nickels, we need that second digit after the decimal point. As long as it exists, sales taxes and suchlike percentage calculations will cause that digit to mock us with numbers that are not multiples of five.

But take that digit away, and the nickels with it, and the mockery goes with them. Once again we have a coinage that perfectly matches the bills we pay with it. Instead of $19.82, the price you owe, if it is more than $19.8, is $19.9. Your change is one dime.

Doubtless millions would rise to defend the nickel instinctively, unable to face a future in which the face of Thomas Jefferson would not wink at them from their change purses. But if we can weather the penny protests, the nickel protests should be simple. Tell your congressional representative that we need to shave one decimal place off the usual expression of monetary value. Explain the mathematical principles involved if your representative is a bit fuzzy on them. And then relax in the knowledge that you have done your duty as an informed citizen. You may even take credit for the idea if you like; Dr. Boli has nothing to gain from it, and offers it only as a public service.