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Posts published in “review”

Endorsement: Kamala Harris (reposted)

My favorite presidential endorsement editorial this year is also the shortest, just a single sentence. In Portland, Oregon, the Willamette Week endorsement of Democrat Kamala Harris said (in total): "On the whole, we’d rather this not be America’s last election."

The point was valid, and surely one of the better reasons, but it highlights the sad aspect of this year's presidential campaign: One of the candidates, Republican Donald Trump, is so astoundingly awful in so many ways, ways that would take a library of books to compile, that the reasons to vote for Harris - and there are good reasons - tend to migrate to the back burner. And that's unfair to us as well as to Harris.

But it can hardly be helped, because Trump really is that bad.

Eight years ago I easily compiled a list of 100 reasons not to vote for Trump; overwhelmingly, those reasons still hold up, and the four years of his presidency and the years of his post-presidency have only reinforced most of them and caused the number of additional reasons to explode. And that's even counting as a single reason things like the more than 30,000 lies he told just during his time in office.

He cannot be trusted to put the nation above himself (or his personal enrichment), nor can he be trusted with the nation's security, or the security of the people within our country. He has no respect for our military or anyone else in our government or even, for that matter, his own supporters. (Try searching his recent comments about "fat pig" in one of his recent speeches.) His mind, such as it ever was, is cratering, to the point that we seem to be watching a daily slow-motion collapse. Anyone concerned earlier this year about the age of President Joe Biden ought to remember that Trump would be the oldest person ever elected president.

He appears to have more loyalty to the nations and dictators who would do us harm, than he does to us. When he talks about "us," he talks about building mass concentration camps ("detention centers" - and not just for people here illegally, since the forces he would employ are unlikely to be very precise) and using the nation's military against our people, meaning against anyone critical of him. All of this would demolish our free speech, and press, and right to association, personal security and privacy. Many of his most vigorous supporters are eagerly working on imposing a state religion, with the effective result of an end to true freedom of religion as well. If he is elected and does half of what he says he plans to do (not to mention what's in Project 2025, which was compiled by the people who would lead and develop policy for his new administration), your freedoms are gone. None of us will be safe.

He is an active, imminent and crisis-level threat to the United States of America - to you.  Al Qaeda was never such a threat as he is.

The final evidence of that - which ought to be irrefutable to anyone with a fair mind - should come from all those people who worked with him while he was in office, and now either disown him or outright endorse Harris. The number of people involved in security and foreign policy concerns is disproportionately high among that group. The list of hundreds of prominent Republicans, a list far longer than any comparable collection of party rebels from the past, is far too long for this column; but it can be found easily enough online. No president has ever been so disowned by the people who worked in his administration.

Just one example: John F. Kelly, who served as Trump's chief of staff, remarked of Trump (among other things) "He certainly prefers the dictator approach to government.”

(Memo to J.D. Vance: Maybe you should have checked, before accepting Trump's Veep offer, into what almost happened to the last guy, who was almost hanged by a mob, which outcome Trump remarked would be perfectly fine.)

Or you could ask any of the many Republicans who have turned against their own party because of him, many saying that Trump must be defeated for the Republican Party to regain a sense of decency. Charlie Sykes was a long-time Republican radio talk show host in Wisconsin, but he could not stomach what he sees from Trump. From one of his recent comments:

Leave aside for a moment Trump’s serial lying, fraud, grifts, alleged sexual assaults, criminal indictments and one very public attempt to overthrow an election. Set aside his abandonment of free trade and fiscal restraint. This is a man who has called for terminating “all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution”; who promises a presidency built around retribution; whose campaign has become a bullhorn for bigotry; who is increasingly leaning into fascist rhetoric, and who leads his rally crowds in cheering for Russian President Vladimir Putin and booing Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky. And who now threatens to use the military against political protesters and the so-called “enemy within.”

There's a big and growing crowd of thoughtful Republicans who in no way are thrilled by the idea of voting for Democrat Harris but find they must do what they can to block Trump - to protect the country.

Bret Stephens in the New York Times, a staunchly conservative columnist, said on Monday that though he was "dragged kicking and screaming," he would vote for Harris because "I’d rather take my chances with a president whose competence I doubt and whose policies I dislike than one whose character I detest."

Or, to balance that a bit with Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, "Trump is a Russian-backed wrecking ball fighting to end: The global economy that has made us prosperous; the Western alliance that has kept us safe; American democracy that has keep us free. We cannot let this deranged, traitorous old man win."

Well. What is there left to say about Harris?

She is, for one thing, a safe choice. Put aside for the moment anything else about her, but just imagine a candidate whose career has been that of a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator and vice president, gaining the approval of her constituency (in the most recent case, her party's nomination) to move steadily up through the ranks. That's not the portrait of a radical or of an incompetent.

Her ability in this campaign to build, rapidly, a strong organization, unite a vast array of interests and make regular necessary and sometimes difficult decisions on the fly speaks well of the capability she would bring as president.

She has the strong potential to be a very good president, and no major red flags to the contrary are apparent.

None of the negatives - the legitimate, as opposed to the phony - I have seen about her come close to the downsides of Trump. These are two different universes.

She is clearly strong and intelligent, could represent the United States well on the world stage and at home.

Would she be the perfect solution to all our problems? No. But no president ever is.

I expect she is honest enough, even in the heat of campaign season, to acknowledge that. Her opponent obviously never would.

Eight years ago, I quoted Trump as saying at the 2016 Republican convention, "I alone can fix it." That, I said, is the statement of a man who never should be entrusted with the presidency.

But in this year, if he said "I alone can break it" - break America, shatter our nation into pieces and into a shadow of what it has always been - he might be right. There are people among us, some of whom insist they are patriots, who are fine with that.

It's on the rest of us, now in these days leading up to the election, to make sure that does not happen.

 

Nuclear War

What with all the other things on our plate, many of us have shoved to the side, or into the background, something that used to be - as in, it was when I was growing up - Topic A among serious items for discussion: Nuclear warfare.

This book, Nuclear War by Anie Jacobsen, ought to restore our consideration of the threat to its proper, and much more prominent, place.

She structures this highly readable overview within a fictional but stunningly compelling frame: A scenario for how a large-scale nuclear war could happen today or in the near future, and what would result if it did.

Such a war could happen all too easily, and the consequences could be far more absolute than many of us probably have come to think.

After all, in this day of super-tech capabilities, the prospects for shooting missiles out of the sky should be realistic, shouldn't they? (Look at what Israel has recently done to non-nuclear missile swarms sent from Iran.) But it turns out that no, we don't actually have a decent defense against something like that.

And we must surely have enough safe4guards and backups to keep sanity at the fore? Well, no. One of the scariest elements of the book is its gamed-out time frame: Less than a half hour from an initial missile launch until World War III is well and truly underway. All the critical decisions probably would be made in the span of about 15 minutes. The whole immense global war could be over and done - along with all of us - in a couple of hours. No time to prepare, or even run for a shelter (not that those would do any significant good, given the power of today's nukes.)

The scenario Jacobsen sketches involves an initial nuclear attack on the United States by North Korea, which on its surface suggests something of limited scope. But no: The whole world is rapidly drawn up, and all or nearly all of human civilization, as well as most of the human population on our globe (not to mention immense numbers of other living things) are rapidly wiped from existence.

There's no going back. Since the first person figured out how to create a nuclear weapon, humanity has been stuck with it: We could (in theory) destroy every nuclear weapon, but we can't eliminate the knowledge of how to make a new one.

Jacobsen offers few thoughts on how to improve our situation - that's one weakness in the book - but possibly additional research on blocking the weapons, improving defenses and maybe ultimately finding ways to disarm them could be helpful. Maybe, since you could never say can't-ever to technology.

In the meantime, here's a book with some solid motivation to work toward finding some answers, and avoiding the nobody-wins scenario that would be nuclear war.

 

Regretting Motherhood: A Study

The subject is not new. Way back in 1970 the advice columnist Ann Landers made big waves with her open question to her readers: Parents (or, mainly mothers) if you had it to do all over again, would you choose to have a child (or children)? The waves came when about 70% of the respondents said no. But really, the fact that the question was asked openly was shocking enough.

This is where the Israeli researcher Orna Donath digs in with Regretting Motherhood: A Study. The book is not brand new (it was published in 2017, though I just ran across it in a library search) and focuses on research and subjects in Israel not America or worldwide. But the core points remain. The whole subject of regrets about becoming a parent - she writes about mothers and fathers both in another book but focuses on mothers here - remains taboo, and has become much more of a flash point in the political climate of 2024.

This isn't really a sociological or far less a statistical study; it is closer in approach to a Studs Terkel book, excerpts from interviews with some extensive commentary. Here she interviews mothers (all are or were from Israel) who said that, as Ann Landers posited, they wouldn't do it again, and regretted having become a mother.

Why then did they become mothers? The reasons were all over the place, but often relate to going with the flows: "These accounts indicate that it is not necessarily motherhood that is perceived as natural, but rather moving forward along life’s course."

It's an almost forbidden thing to say, and many of the women say as much. The subject of sharing their misgivings with their children is raised, and almost all said they hadn't and never would; a few said they did discuss it cautiously with them after their children were adults. Nearly all made a distinction, though: While they didn't want (at least retrospectively) motherhood, that doesn't mean they don't love their children. A few questioned whether they had been good mothers; most thought they were, their underlying attitudes notwithstanding.

But the sensitive question of a discussion with the kids was far from the only concern about discussing the topic openly. (All of the women here had pseudonyms). They often described the negative blowback that came from any reference to being less than a full-throated enthusiastic parent, and some examples of comments - as when someone wrote about the topic online - showed just how fierce that could be. Honesty in this area comes with a price.

That's not to say it shouldn't be discussed. Donath (who sometimes though not usually veers into the programmatic ideological) does not overreach in her argument to suggest what percentage of mothers may feel this way. Certainly many do not. And the voices of those who do, heard here, are widely varying, differing in their experiences in all sorts of ways. Their differences are variety of human experiences.

It's in hearing the stories that normally are never told, because of such powerful forces against, that create the value here. Especially, perhaps, in 2024.

 

 

 

Undue Burden

Critical tears in our social fabric often descend to the status of"issues," become shorthand phrases or even just acronyms ... while the dirty, difficult impacts on actual human lives go unremarked.

In Undue Burden: Life and Death Decisions in Post-Roe America, writer Shefali Luthra has taken mostly the less visible and often rougher road of recounting how a massive policy change made by players in D.C. and certain statehouses actually played out among the Americans those decisions were intended to affect. They affected them, all right, but often in unexpected and frequently tragic ways.

As the title indicates, the issue is abortion, and specifically what happened in the lives of many people - those who were pregnant, working as medical or administrative personnel or in other roles - as the law surrounding what was legal, and wasn't, kept changing at blinding speed.

Many of the impacts are what you might imagine, but many - as emerges through the detailed reporting here - are less obvious. The effects in states where abortion is wholly or almost completely banned might not surprise, but some of the impacts on the still-legal states might: Massively swamped health facilities that limit the ability of patients (for abortion and other health treatments) to obtain care. Some of those challenges might ease up in time as resources shift location, but the unknowns are many.

There are some important impacts that seem to have escaped, at least mostly, news media and other journalistic attention. One example is the effect of abortion bans on medical education; in ban states, medical schooling for many areas of health - not only abortion, and not only reproductive health, but many subjects beyond - will be impaired. The training of a generation of physicians in something close to half the country is about to be badly damaged.

The individual stories are gripping; the tension and risk involved is (in the reading) novelistic.

And like any good book about social changes, there's a nod to what lies ahead. Luthra doesn't, course, try to produce a crystal ball; we'd have to know for sure what the results of November's general elections will be before we could even hazard a guess.

But while Luthra's story may for now lack a second act, the lessons from the first are evident: A lot of people are likely to be badly damaged, and probably will die, as long as our current path is unchanged.

 

Revolutionary Spring 1848-49

At about 750 pages, Revolutionary Spring: Europe Aflame and the Fight for a New World, 1848-1849, may seem a little much in the effort department to justify the time: A tightly-written an detailed review of the many concurrent revolutions erupting across Europe at almost exactly the same time, in the middle of the 19th century - revolutions that nearly all failed and did not revive.

Unless you're already well up to speed with European history of the period, most of the people involved won't be familiar either (though a number of them were striking characters with dramatic story arcs). The best-known probably is Karl Marx, who was merely an observer of the action (he wasn't at all well-known at that time, and is only a minor figure in the book) and often misread the events as they transpired.

What's the point?

The point here, besides filling in a lot of prospective gaps in knowledge of history (it filled some for me), is the usefulness of seeing the dynamic, how these eruptions from seemingly out of nowhere did emerge, what ground was needed to sustain them, what happened at first and why they were crushed.

And the point of absorbing that is the connection with our world today. The dynamics of human society may change over time but human nature often stays much the same, and while the author Christopher Clark makes only a few quick, peripheral explicit references to the state of our world today, a thoughtful read will find parallels between that unusual time and place and ours - with some implicit lessons for what could happen if our future turns darker.

The story here starts at around 1830, nearly a generation after the Napoleonic wars and at a time when Europe's political and governmental structure seemed mostly settled, that being a major goal of a lot of people, not just royalty, after the upheaval of the Frank revolutionary period. But while Napoleon and the politics of the earlier revolutionary time may have been crushed militarily and administratively, with mostly strong monarchies left in place, the ideas and desires that had made them popular in the first place had not gone away. France had a small-scale revolution, resulting in a regime change, in 1830, and the shock waves from it spread across Europe. While modern transportation and communication weren't yet around (no long-distance railroads or telegraphs quite yet) word of what was happening tended to spread fast, resulting in 1848 in a series of revolts, monarchical abdications and radical takeovers in country after country, almost all within a few weeks of each other, even though no one was actively trying to orchestrate it that way. The rebels were acting as a result of receiving distant signals - newspapers and other publications were central to this, as the internet would be now -  but there was no coordination.

The details of how all this happened should in some ways seem startlingly familiar to people in our age. An example: The radical rebels were extremely popular in the capital and main regional cities, and in many cases were able to chase monarchs out of town. But the monarchs didn't have to go far: The people in the countryside were much friendlier to them, and provided a strong base of support when time came, as it did, for the counter-revolution. That's one reason the powers that got removed were able to return. (Clark does make some references to how, later on, many of them would lose their way in years yet to come.)

The background is not simply analytical; Clark threads the historical narrative with accounts from people, famous and unknown, put concrete detail, sometimes of a grisly nature, on the proceedings.

We understand our world better when we can look at it from different angles. In Revolutionary Spring, there's a fresh angle for looking at where we are now, and where we could be going.

(image)

 

Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life

The distance was a bit of dissonance in this case. I attended a book signing and speaking event for an author who lives just a few miles north of where I do. But the book in question had reach around the globe, and the story opened with a scene in Congo - where the author was on board a rickety plane that looked to be about to crash.

He is Nicholas Kristof, a New York Times columnist and for years before that a for4eign correspondent for the newspaper. Obviously he survived the rough landing and, just afterward, he pulled out his satellite phone and called his wife. The idea was to tell her he was okay, but when she came on the line, he decided otherwise: The story was best told in person.

Except, that soon afterward his wife got a call from the home office in New York which included the comment that people there were happy Nick had survived. Oops. The lesson after that, Kristof recounted, was: Immediate transparency about important events is helpful in a marriage.

Kristof's memoir, Chasing Hope: A Reporter's Life, is packed with stories about things learned in the field. He's Harvard and Oxford-educated, but much of what he recounts here - and a lot of the book is devoted to the practical work of researching and writing about places around the world, many remote and some of them extremely dangerous - which plainly constitutes its own form of grad school.

Some of that relates to how to get the work done (how, for example, you get past checkpoints filled with armed soldiers when you're in the4 country illegally). Some of it relates to how people live in places extremely different from the United States (the hazards of introducing himself in certain locales) by his nickname).

But some of it too comes from what you learn when you're on the ground and can see for yourself - which can look a lot different than it does from a distance. That applies not only to distance places in Africa and Asia but even to his home town area around Yamhill, where many of the problems facing parts of rural America can come into sharp focus.

There are plenty of reporter memoirs out, and many of them make for lively reading. (In the last few years, I especially liked Seymour Hersh's.) None I've seen, though, has been livelier, or covers more ground, than this one. He talks in detail about life growing up in small-town Oregon, about his time in universities and freelancing articles about places around the globe - an achievement that seemed to me as remarkable as anything else he has done - and dealing with deadly threats, from illness to being in a crowd fire upon by Chinese troops at Tiananmen Square (then frantically running on foot miles back to his residence to send the story so the paper would have its own version).

There's plenty of solid fact and earned wisdom here. And if you're in the mood for an adventure story, you can find a while pile of them between these covers.

Photo/World Economic Forum from Cologny, Switzerland, World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2010, CC BY-SA 2.0.

 

Read Write Own

Most of what I have heard about blockchains has been in the context of cryptocurrency - a topic notable in the last few years for associations with uncertainty and untrustworthiness. (That sound of dismissal isn't entirely warranted, though cases like that of Sam Bankman-Fried give it some rationale.) But what about the technology underlying it? Tech is just a tool, right? Tech can be used for all sorts of things, good and bad.

Chris Dixon, a tech investor and author of the new Red Write Own, makes a strong case that the underlying computing elements - the most key component of which is something called a blockchain - could become the lever for solving many of the worst current ailments of the internet as we know it. And more than that, a sizable slice of the problems of many societies around the world, not least ours.

The book is not large (the main text of the print book I read is just 230 pages) but it is tightly written and argued, and written in plain enough English than non-tech people can follow it regularly. For the most part, you'll understand his points, his concerns and his proposals, reasonably well if you're an active user of the net ... as most of us are these days.

He begins with a quick review of the last 30 years or so if the online world and how it developed into the one we know, transitioning from a system dominated by protocols (meaning, generally, e-mail, websites and a few others services) to one dominated by a handful of tech giants like Facebook, Google and Amazon. Those mega-companies, he points out, started out by building networks of users, which became enormous with time, and transitioned from an effort to add people and groups to their networks, to trying to squeeze as much revenue as possible out of them (the "take"). So much money is being pulled in this current extractive phase, he says (and he's clearly right) that much of the commerce and creativity of our world is being diminished, and our society and democracy are being weakened.

Dixon's answer to this and other related problems relates in large part to blockchains, a subtly different software technology which relies on strict usage rules and open-access, along with openly-accessible information, to do many of these same kinds of things our other networks (like those of the tech giants) have been doing, along with some new things that might be added to the mix. Blockchains could be controlled by users rather than a small group of owners, Bixon points out, and while the operators of them can operate profitably, either as profit or non-profit entities, the built-in incentives would provide for a far smaller take, and few fewer cumbersome and restricting rules, than the current regime imposes.

The possibilities seem large,  and by the end of the book he even offers plausible ideas for how we might more effectively cope with such challenges as artificial intelligence and deepfakes. Dixon's approach is basically a solution through ongoing research and business development, but this is no libertarian tract: He sees a need for regulation and guardrails as well. It is in all a broad-minded view of how we might work out way out of what seems a muddy swamp.

If you get concerned and depressed at times about where the internet, and our tech future, may be headed, pick up this book. The solution it offers may not materialize (Dixon describes himself as optimistic but not a prognosticator), but it could. And it demonstrates the way answers to our problems may be developed, possibly in the not too distant future.

Review: What It takes

The book What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer, came out in 1992, and I originally read it not too long after - somewhere around, in other words, 30 years ago. For various reasons it seemed  a good idea to give it another spin, and it was. Would be for you, too.

I don't say that lightly, because the book sure isn't light either, running well over 1,000 pages. But it has resonance today, both directly and because the backboard for thought it offers.

The context is the presidential campaign, underway now; and the presidential campaign of 1988, which is the subject of the book as seen through the eyes and lives of six of its participants. The idea here was to work out what it takes to run for president - or at least, that's how most of it reads: What it takes to actually do the job of president as opposed to campaign for it is, of course, a very different story.

All of these candidates were well-known at the time, and all were major contenders, but two probably have the most connection to Americans now. One was the candidate who went all the way and became president, for one term, George H.W. Bush. The other is our president as of 2024: Joseph R. Biden.

The book is structured as a loose interior group biography, shifting from one candidate to another, sometimes comparing and contrasting, sometimes simply bouncing around, but written in a style neither academic nor journalistic but instead intended to reflect the different mindset and personalities of the candidates. You can quickly tell, for example, if you're reading about Robert Dole as opposed Dick Gephardt just from the tone and the word choices. For Bush, for example, while there are scary and even near-death experiences (when his plane was shot down in the Pacific) and tragedy (the death of his infant daughter), much of the sensibility reflects a take on the world that things come together as they should, and things just wonderfully fit together. Most of the time.

The Biden story is almost a variation on that, but a distinct variation. Unlike Bush, Biden came from a background much closer to hard-scrabble, but his sense of confidence and optimism suffuses, most of the time, everything else. The shattering tragedy he faced in the book's narrative - the death in a traffic accident of his first wife and daughter, shortly after his first election to the U.S. Senate - does not seem to have changed his fundamental stance toward life: He knew where he was supposed to go, what he was supposed to do, and what it would look like and feel like when he got there. He envisioned himself from an early age as becoming president, and simply never let anything get in the way.

(That was not true only about the presidency. A revealing and even hilarious section concerned a house he bought around the time of his Senate election and the almost wild lengths he went to to get it the way he wanted it. Or somewhere close ...)

What It Takes isn't a true bio of any of the six candidates (the others I haven't mentioned was Gary Hart, who had his own spectacular collapse story in that election cycle, and Michael Dukakis, who won the Democratic nomination but lost the general election to Bush) it does get inside their heads enough to press a reader into considering, at length: What makes a person do this? Why run? What's the motivation, what keeps it going, and what does it take to prosper in such a difficult environment in which there can be, after all, only one winner?

The Biden sections (certainly nowhere near a hagiography but not terribly critical either) are worth a fresh review, in the context of that long-ago election, today because of this election year. But it's also worth using what that 1988 campaign has to suggest abut Biden's Republican opponent today, and what it takes to run for the presidency ... and fulfill the responsibility, once won.

(image/US Air Force)

 

Review: Making It in America

The United States was renowned for generations as the manufacturing center of the world, and now ... well, it isn't. Why is that?

The reasons are many and intertwining. Ideologues have no shortage of villains to suggest, but most of those answers feel - and are - too thin, failing to account for much of what really ails American manufacturing in this new century. Most of what pass for criticisms too often fail to propose serious answers, either.

Making It in America: The Almost Impossible Quest to Manufacture in the U.S.A., written by Rachel Slade, looks at the question not from a macreconomic viewpoint but from the micro side: The story of how one business has tried to launch a serious manufacturing operation, and the obstacles it faced.

There is some philosophical agenda here, both on the part of the writer and the business founders. The founders of a company in Portland, Maine, set up to manufacture hoodies, came to it from an atypical standpoint: The husband in the founding couple was a veteran labor union organizer, and that shaped some of his attitude toward business (by no means as negative as you might expect), perspectives the author evidently shared. But the question raised was a useful and pertinent one: Can a company in today's American prosper while making good products (in this case, in the area of clothing) while acting with social responsibility and while taking care of the workforce (which quickly became unionized), customers and business partners?

The answer, on the basis of the story told here, is yes, but not at all easily, and only with some luck and some kind of edge. Ben and Whitney Waxman, the two founders, got their edge is considerable part from Ben's extensive national labor connections: The bulk of the hoodies the company produced were sold, early on at least, to unions and union members. They had some good luck, too, sometimes in odd and unexpected places: The pandemic, which at first seemed like a business-killing disaster for them, wound up helping them enormously by providing a mass market for masks and other health goods they were able to produce.

Making any and all of this work was never easy, however, and the company repeatedly came close to collapse. (This business case story does not lack for drama; it could be made into a mini-series.) Many of the problems they ran into concern business structures, supply chains and distribution blockages: You have to be either well connected or extremely well capitalized, in many cases, to do business either with other businesses that provide materials for what you're producing, or help you sell it once it's made. The Wamans multiplied their challenges with a self-imposed restriction: Their hoodies would be made entirely of American-made components, and some of those components were hard to find from American sources, at any price. Upshots from this included the fact that their hoodies wound up on the expensive side, which was somewhat more acceptable to buyers who were big on American-made or union-made products, but wouldn't necessarily be elsewhere.

The story has some complexity, in that there aren't any easy or simple villains to the core manufacturing story (though the author and the business founders do have their targets in a more general sense). But it does get into the realities of American business in a practical way that those operating from a more theoretical or ideological perspective may be less likely to perceive.

(image/Wikimedia Commons)