Towards the end of my Ph.D. years at The Ohio State University together with a bunch of graduate students we thought of publishing our own magazine. We struggled to come up with a good name for it so after a lot of back and forth we settled on “The Empy Set”. The OSU graduate advisor found this too nihilistic and wanted us to pick a different name. We nevertheless wrote what inevitably ended up being the only issue of “The Empty Set” and circulated it among the department.

I listened to a fascinating podcast in the “Past, Present, Future” series by David Runciman on the 1726 satire “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift. Runciman gives an excellent summary of the various journeys that Gulliver undertakes in this book; journeys to far away lands were he encounters fantastic creatures and their world: tiny people, giants, talking horses, and the like. In one of these journeys Gulliver finds academics stubbornly determined to strip language of all ambiguity.