3QD Is Looking For New Writers: Deadline is Friday

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

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Equality and Three Philosophies of Marriage

by Tim Sommers

In Bowers v Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court Case that affirmed the government’s right to criminalize sodomy, Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted there that there was no “right to homosexual sodomy.” This was disingenuous in more than one way. First, the statue in question criminalized sodomy in general and not homosexual sodomy in particular. But, more fundamentally, no one was arguing for sodomy as a basic right. They were arguing for a basic right to be free to make their own decisions about their own bodies, consensual intimate relations, and families – including intimate relations and the families shared by people of the same sex.

Such a right, if it exists, is unenumerated. That is, it’s not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, the Ninth Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The tricky bit, of course, is how to know which other rights might be retained by the people though unenumerated.

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Douglas cited a “line of decisions” that established a “penumbra” of privacy. He was much lampooned for his language, “penumbra” in particular, but there’s a relatively straight forward line of reasoning available here. One way to derive an unenumerated right is to show that it is implied by, or follows from, an enumerated right. The enumerated right of citizens to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers and effects (the 4th), for example, makes no sense without the underlying assumption that you have a right to be in control of your person in the first place. Further, the “liberty” and “property” that the 14th Amendment says shall not be denied “without due process of law” surely includes the right to some degree of control over your own body.

One of the few things that Justice Alito gets right in the Dobbs (2022) decision (allowing States to criminalize any kind of abortion and, to some extent, birth control) is that he doesn’t describe the issue primarily as “privacy” – but rather as an appeal “to a broader right to autonomy.”

The relevant string of cases that develop and extend this right to autonomy and, yes, privacy, too, includes (at a minimum) Loving v The State of Virginia (the most aptly named SCOTUS case in history since it decriminalized interracial marriage), Griswold v Connecticut (access to birth control for married people), Roe v Wade (abortion decisions are left to pregnant people), Lawerence v Texas (reversing Hardwick, it decriminalized same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v Hodges (legalized same-sex marriage). Defenders of this tradition argue that it, like the Bill of Rights itself, this is not part of a haphazard list of freedoms, but what follows from a cohesive conception of liberty. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.” Read more »

Monday, January 20, 2025

Rather than OpenAI, let’s Open AI

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

In October last year, Charles Oppenheimer and I wrote a piece for Fast Company arguing that the only way to prevent an AI arms race is to open up the system. Drawing on a revolutionary early Cold War proposal for containing the spread of nuclear weapons, the Acheson-Lilienthal report, we argued that the foundational reason why security cannot be obtained through secrecy is because science and technology claim no real “secrets” that cannot be discovered if smart scientists and technologists are given enough time to find them. That was certainly the case with the atomic bomb. Even as American politicians and generals boasted that the United States would maintain nuclear supremacy for decades, perhaps forever, Russia responded with its first nuclear weapon merely four years after the end of World War II. Other countries like the United Kingdom, China and France soon followed. The myth of secrecy was shattered.

As if on cue after our article was written, in December 2024, a new large-language model (LLM) named DeepSeek v3 came out of China. DeepSeek v3 is a completely homegrown model built by a homegrown Chinese entrepreneur who was educated in China (that last point, while minor, is not unimportant: China’s best increasingly no longer are required to leave their homeland to excel). The model turned heads immediately because it was competitive with GPT-4 from OpenAI which many consider the state-of-the-art in pioneering LLM models. In fact, DeepSeek v3 is far beyond competitive in terms of critical parameters: GPT-4 used about 1 trillion training parameters, DeepSeek v3 used 671 billion; GPT-4 had 1 trillion tokens, DeepSeek v3 used almost 15 trillion. Most impressively, DeepSeek v3 cost only $5.58 million to train, while GPT-4 cost about $100 million. That’s a qualitatively significant difference: only the best-funded startups or large tech companies have $100 million to spend on training their AI model, but $5.58 million is well within the reach of many small startups.

Perhaps the biggest difference is that DeepSeek v3 is open-source while GPT-4 is not. The only other open source model from the United States is Llama, developed by Meta. If this feature of DeepSeek v3 is not ringing massive alarm bells in the heads of American technologists and political leaders, it should. It’s a reaffirmation of the central point that there are very few secrets in science and technology that cannot be discovered sooner or later by a technologically advanced country.

One might argue that DeepSeek v3 cost a fraction of the best LLM models to train because it stood on the shoulders of these giants, but that’s precisely the point: like other software, LLM models follow the standard rule of precipitously diminishing marginal cost. More importantly, the open-source, low-cost nature of DeepSeek v3 means that China now has the capability of capturing the world LLM market before the United States as millions of organizations and users make DeepSeek v3 the foundation on which to build their AI. Once again, the quest for security and technological primacy through secrecy would have proved ephemeral, just like it did for nuclear weapons.

What does the entry of DeepSeek v3 indicate in the grand scheme of things? It is important to dispel three myths and answer some key questions. Read more »

Sunday, January 19, 2025

Virtual Alienation

by Katalin Balog

Daedalus and Icarus by Antonio Canova, Museo Correr, Venice

In the past, when I asked students if they would want to enter the Experience Machine – a fictional contraption thought up by the philosopher Robert Nozick – they would generally say no. In the Experience Machine, one would have virtual experiences: for example, of a life blessed with mountains of pleasure, great love, monumental achievements. But one would lose touch with one’s actual life. My students did not want to leave their actual lives behind. In the last few years, things have changed. Most of them now proclaim their readiness to ditch it all for the virtual pleasures of the Experience Machine.

My students’ recent eagerness for the virtual is a symptom of our culture’s alienation from the world. During my life, I have witnessed the slow but unstoppable advance of commodification and technology, which has brought us to the threshold of escape from the world – certainly in fantasy, but perhaps in reality, sometime soon.

1 Consuming Experiences

When I was young in my native Budapest, we – my family and friends – didn’t think of life in consumerist terms. We couldn’t, as it was communism, and there was not much to consume – but in any case, the idea of collecting pleasant experiences seemed frivolous and alien. Beautiful Budapest was run down, its buildings still showing bullet holes decades after the war. Tourists didn’t crowd around its “attractions”. It was our city. Sure, we listened to music and attended plays, there were parties where everyone wanted to be, we bought ice cream and cakes, but we didn’t make a habit of maximizing pleasurable, beautiful, or edifying experiences; we didn’t have a plan that would ensure the best results. Much was left to chance and improvisation, as life in those days was hard-scrabble, and things could – and often would – go wrong. Everyday necessities were sometimes hard to obtain, and we had to stand in line a lot. People were generally rude and wielding whatever little power they had in a hostile manner. Our goal was just… to live our life and have the experience that comes with it. But we were also not fazed or annoyed by unexpected obstacles in the way a more committed consumer or tourist would be. Of course, some people I knew went skiing and climbing in remote and beautiful places; that was a thing one could do as well. But most of the time, normal people did normal things, and that was our life. Communism, for a while at least, constrained the consumer in us. I am not idealizing this state of affairs – I was in the underground resisting the oppression that maintained it; just pointing out the difference it made in our attitude to life.

I noticed the contrast between this and what was normal in the West especially clearly when, after moving to New York, I was already between worlds. Read more »

When The Worm’s In The Core, Let It Eat

by Mike Bendzela

By “worm” I mean not earthworm but larva of the infamous lepidopteran, Cydia pomonella, or codling moth. The pom in its species names comes from the Latin root “pomum,” meaning “fruit,” particularly the apple (which is why they’re called pome fruits), wherein you’ll find this worm. It’s the archetypal worm inside the archetypal apple, the one Eve ate. (Not. The Hebrew word in Genesis, something like peri, just means “fruit.” No apple is mentioned. And please, give the mother of all living a break.)

The imperative Let in the title is a bit rich, given that this worm does not need your permission to decimate the core: It will do so anyhow, once you have let it in. Short of destroying the apple, there is nothing you can do about it.

This worm is quite the animal. In spite of humanity’s scorched earth campaign against it in orchards worldwide, this worm persists. There is great irony in this: Persistence proceeds not just from chemical resistance but from the simple fact that, in addition to poisoning this worm, we continually feed it. It basks in our attentions, however antithetical. Plant an orchard, it is there. In the presence of so much fruit, the fruit-eater becomes, well, fruitful.

We’re quite chummy with this worm in our tiny northern New England grove. Decades (which seem centuries) ago, we planted a few dozen heritage seedlings and counted on our organic virtue to see us through seasons of pruning and growth, to autumns of cider and pies. We patrolled the orchard with backpack sprayers full of kaolin clay mix (basically diluted kitty litter) hoping to impede and disrupt the worm’s feeding. Seeing holes in fruit, we immediately zapped them. To no effect.

It took some time and training to learn that prophylaxis is key. Read more »

Friday, January 17, 2025

Rise and Fall of the Balloon Doctor

by Steve Szilagyi

“Everyone who knew him realized he was unique.”

Andreas Grüntzig’s plane blew a 38-foot-wide crater in the Georgia dirt where it crashed. Investigators needed several days to collect and identify the remains of the famous physician, his second wife, Margaret, and their two Irish setters, Gin and Tonic. People who write about Grüntzig after his death compare him to a shooting star, a comet, or the incautiously winged Icarus. This is to be expected when the subject is a high-flying medical hero who dies hitting the earth at an estimated 300 miles per hour.

The journal Cardiology called Grüntzig “the father of modern cardiology.” His story is told in engrossing detail in David Monagan’s book Journey into the Heart, whose introduction declares, “Grüntzig, once derided as another charlatan, changed the course of medicine … His work inspired an arc of discovery that has never stopped rising.”

Grüntzig invented balloon angioplasty, today one of the most commonly performed complex medical procedures. The technique has been adapted for use throughout the body, but its marquee application is the treatment of coronary artery disease, a leading cause of death and disability worldwide.

Balloon angioplasty is not an obvious idea. A catheter (thin, flexible wire) with a small, deflated balloon at its tip is inserted into the target artery and guided to the site of the blockage. Once in place, the balloon is inflated, compressing the plaque against the artery walls and restoring blood flow.

If not for Grüntzig, there is no guarantee balloon angioplasty would ever have happened. He alone, it seems, had the vision to imagine the device, the diligence to build it, and most crucially, the power of personality to win over a hostile and skeptical medical world. Read more »

I’m Going to Die

by Carol A Westbrook

A big blue garbage truck

The big blue behemoth of a garbage truck came barreling toward me. I knew I was going to die. I was in the middle of an intersection about to make a left turn. One moment the intersection had been clear, with the truck about a half mile distant.

In the next moment, the truck had sped up and was almost on top of me. I couldn’t turn in any direction without driving into traffic. I had about three seconds left to live…

This day, possibly the last day of my life, started out as a normal spring day in April. My husband, Rick, and I had errands to run in Michigan City. We were driving our cars in tandem to the tire store, so we could drop his car off for new tires and drive home together. He was in front of me and made the left turn; I followed. As I explained above, I was caught in the intersection with no place to turn.

I was about to be hit by a truck, and there was a good chance it would kill me.

I didn’t panic. I was not afraid to die. I just relaxed and waited for the end.

Car Crash on left side

Time moved slowly. I was never unconscious, but I have amnesia for a good part of the event. The car was struck on the left side, which triggered the left side airbags. The impact pushed the car into the next lane, where it was struck on the right front fender. I don’t remember hearing or feeling the first impact, but I do remember the second. By this time, Rick had reached my car, and looked in to see if I was okay. He was the first person there. I told him I was fine except for chest pain (due to hitting the steering wheel). The paramedics arrived shortly thereafter, and soon I was settled in an ambulance with oxygen. I was taken to a nearby hospital where I spent 2 days, until I no longer needed oxygen. Afterwards, recovery was fast, and (eventually) the insurance company totaled the car and sent me a check to cover the purchase of an equivalent, replacement car.

It takes a close call like this to realize how poorly prepared one is for death, and to give some thought to what death might be like. Read more »

Thursday, January 16, 2025

The Normalization of Sexual Violence

by Andrea Scrima

1. Bloodthirsty

Swedish journalist Kim Wall in a 2015 portrait taken in Trelleborg. Wall died aboard Danish inventor Peter Madsen’s submarine.

I have a morbid personality; sometimes I stay up late at night, googling serial killers and rapists. In the light of the computer screen, scrolling through articles on websites published by amateur sleuths, I feel the dark pull of the unspeakable deed. But my fascination isn’t for the blood and gore; there is no thrill bubbling up inside, no voyeuristic kick. Nor am I moved by an urge to understand the killers’ psychological predicament or the geometry of their desire. The pull I feel is not toward their person or otherwise banal lives, but that point of no return when the not-yet-killer gives in to the irresistible urge, forfeits his allegiance to society, and defects to the other side. How strong does that urge have to be?

I worry. The brain is an organ, it’s unreliable, prone to illness; a sick brain thinks sick thoughts. There was a point in the killer’s life, I think, when he or she hadn’t yet committed the crime, a point when it would have been possible to stop and reflect on the inevitable consequences—not a life of adventure and freedom, but the monotony of prison, of incarceration and boredom, isolation, enforced celibacy. Could this happen to me—could something push me over that tipping point, and I’d find myself a moment later in a foreign land? I am horrified by physical violence; a bloody scene in a movie makes me turn my head away. The mirror neurons in my body tingle in response when I see someone else’s wound. What happens to people who lose this visceral reaction, who grow numb and enter a realm in which the divide between the self and the other is so absolute that they live as though in a vacuum, sealed off, in communion with their darkest compulsions, indifferent to the living reality of another human being’s existence?

I scroll through reports of repulsive deeds: the Danish inventor who murdered the young journalist who came to interview him because he was convinced that the rush he would experience at the very moment he was annihilating her would be superior to all the orgasms he’d had previously; the Coloradan who strangled his wife and smothered his two children in the expectation that the life he would then be free to live with his girlfriend could be happy and carefree, unencumbered by child support payments and filled with the real-life equivalents of the emojis and exclamation marks that decorated his love letters to her. Unremarkable, contemptible people on nearly every level. In the first case: megalomania and a history of power issues and abusive relationships; in the second, murderous intent hidden behind a mild-mannered demeanor and a stupidity so dumbfoundingly obvious that the footage of his interrogation at the hands of a brilliant woman detective deftly guiding him toward claims that proved effortlessly refutable is almost a pleasure to watch. And yet: there’s something I’m not getting. What is it that draws me in? Read more »

Richard Flanagan’s “Question 7”

by Adele A. Wilby

The Australian author Richard Flanagan is the 2024 winner of the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for his book Question 7. The book is a brilliant weaving together of memory, history, of fact and fiction, love and death around the theme of interconnectedness of events that constitute his life. Disparate connections between his father’s experience as a prisoner of war, the author H.G. Wells, and the atomic bomb all contributed towards making Flanagan the thinker and writer he is today. The book reveals to us his humanity, his love of family and of his home island of Tasmania; it is what Flanagan expects of a book when he says, ‘the words of a book are never the book, the soul is everything’, and this book has ‘soul’.

The book opens with Flanagan visiting the site of Ohama Camp where his father was interned as a slave labourer in the undersea coal mines in Japan during World War II. There is ‘no memorial, no sign, no evidence’ of the camp or the suffering that existed on that spot; all that remains is a ‘love hotel’, but his visit to this site establishes the first link in a chain of interconnected events in his life.

Flanagan’s father never expected to survive the cruelty of the guards and the grinding work as a slave labourer in the coal mines, yet faraway in Europe, unbeknown to him, scientific minds were actively working on the idea of a bomb with extraordinary lethal potential, a bomb that would save his life and have  a profound impact on the  future of humanity and shape world events. The Japanese city of Hiroshima became the experimental testing ground for this atomic bomb and tens of thousands of ‘unknown souls’ perished, ‘vaporised’, by the force of the energy of such a lethal weapon. The atomic bomb brought the war to an end, saved Flanagan’s father’s life and ultimately brought Flanagan himself into existence. Read more »

Wednesday, January 15, 2025

A Review of “Inclusion in Linguistics”: What were Oxford University Press thinking?

Two non-academic books.

by David J. Lobina

A new year, and a new opportunity to write on some more contentious topics (and/or be cancelled), my new year’s resolution in 2024. I wrote about universality and diversity last year, as well as on the identity conditions of, well, identities, and I now start the year 2025 by reviewing a book published by Oxford University Press on inclusion in linguistics. I should warn any potential readers that this is possibly the worst book I have ever read in my career, and that it is hardly about inclusion to boot, but to understand what I mean by this one will have to read the 4000-word review I have written. I would say enjoy, but…(NB: the review is due to appear on LinguistList at some point, unless they change their minds).

*

The volume Inclusion in Linguistics showcases the work of over 40 authors across 20 chapters on what is perceived to be a lack of inclusion in the field of linguistics, with North America as the main focus of attention (with some exceptions). Edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, this collection of papers is part of a project that includes the volume Decolonizing Linguistics, also published by Oxford University Press. The overall project started in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement and its stated aim is to achieve equity and justice in linguistics on the basis of race, disability, gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, Indigeneity, and global geography (p. 2). As an instance of a social justice endeavour, therefore, the contributions are mostly focused on the sort of actions needed to achieve greater inclusivity in the field, and in these very terms, the editors encourage readers to use both volumes as guides for scholarly work as well as for pedagogical purposes, with further material to be had on a dedicated website.

I shall very briefly summarise each chapter first and then I will engage with parts of the content below, where I shall name the respective authors when pertinent to do so. The volume itself is divided into 4 thematic parts. Part 1 focuses on intersectional models of inclusion; Part 2 details possible institutional pathways to achieve more inclusion in linguistics; Part 3 is devoted to some of the resources available to teachers and lecturers to build more inclusive classrooms in schools and universities; and Part 4 outlines various examples of inclusive public engagement in the field. The background to the overall project is chronicled in the book’s preface whilst the Introduction describes the general approach as well as each contribution, with the Conclusion highlighting the lessons learned. Read more »

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Auto Correct?

by Richard Farr

After I moved from the UK to the US it took me only a couple of years to cede to my friends’ pleas and start driving on the right. When in Rome, and all that. But I still like to irritate Americans by maintaining that we Brits are better at this essential mechanical skill. I mean, when we drive, we drive. Or, OK, we drive while texting, shaving, putting on makeup, or having sex. However, we absolutely draw the line at driving with a gallon of Coke in one hand and a three-pound tub of fries clutched between our sweating thighs, while using a dripping Deluxe Double Bacon MegaBurger with Extra Pepper Jack as the sole point of contact with the steering wheel. 

My wife still teases me about my unwillingness to eat while driving, and conceivably I’m wrong to suspect that getting a spear of dill pickle in the eye increases accident rates on American roads. But on a related safety issue my prejudices have been given support recently both by unimpeachably anecdotal evidence and, better yet, a random video I found on YouTube. 

The typical American freeway has three to five lanes. (If nineteen, you’re in L.A.) Widespread laws ban trucks from the far left lane. A large majority of states have at least something on the books requiring all traffic to move over unless exiting or overtaking. Even those members of the Union in a primitive stage of legal development (Hello CA! Hello MA!) at least encourage this behavior, because everyone who’s ever thought about it agrees that “lane discipline” improves both efficiency and safety.

Yet many American drivers seem never to have thought about it. Whether burger-steering at the speed limit or at that most annoying 4 mph less, they love to camp out in the middle lane or even the left one, sometimes for days at a stretch, strenuously exercising their Constitutional right never to look in the mirror or exhibit any awareness of the traffic around them. Recently on I-5 near Seattle my car and several others were stuck for miles, at sixty-something in a seventy limit, behind three cars that were flying next to one another as if in formation, one per available lane. It was like trying to shop in a hurry at Costco on Saturday.

A video explainer by Christophe Haubursin and Joseph Stromberg, available on Youtube, confirms my darkest suspicions: this one particular national driving tradition / habit / symptom / affliction / pathology, so immediately striking to foreigners, (a) messes with the national blood pressure averages, (b) makes Eisenhower’s magnificent highway system far less efficient than it might be, and (c) kills large numbers of people.  Read more »

Monday, January 13, 2025

Hard Times and The Forgotten Man: Remembering the 1930s

by Mark Harvey

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
—Langston Hughes

Dust Bowl, Oklahoma

The years from 1930 to 1945 were some of the most trying times in American history. Our forebears suffered close to ten years of The Great Depression and then, with next to no pause, were thrust into five years of World War II. It’s no wonder that so many men and women of that generation who survived those struggles came away with a quiet stoicism and other-worldly courage. I have a nostalgia for a time I never saw because I knew many of the people who were shaped by those times, and I miss them.

George Orwell said, “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” That’s one affliction I don’t suffer from. I consider the generation that weathered The Great Depression and World War II to be, for the most part, a cut above any generation since. I don’t think it was necessarily their innate character, but rather their mettle shaped by the age.

Having read a number of letters written to the White House during The Great Depression (from a wonderful collection in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man by Robert S. McElvaine), I know that the times led to much bitterness and suffering. How could it not? But a tender humility and reserve also runs through much of the correspondence. Many of the writers address the president or first lady as if they were intimate family who might somehow wrangle them a job or free them from their desperate situation. One thirty-one-year-old woman expecting a baby writes,

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I know you are overburdened with requests for help and if my plea cannot be recognized, I’ll understand it is because you have so many others, all of them worthy…. We thought surely our dreams of a family could come true. Then the work ended and like “The best laid plans of mice and men” our hopes were crushed again.

A widow with a fourteen-year-old son writes to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she has a spare coat to get through the winter and even offers to pay for postage if the first lady will send her one. A woman with seven children and just sixty-five cents to her name writes to Franklin Roosevelt asking for help to feed children too proud to beg for lunch.

In reading these letters, it’s clear that many of the writers truly believed Eleanor or Franklin would actually send them a winter coat or give them a job. Read more »

On the Road: Where to Go, and Maybe Avoid, in 2025

by Bill Murray

The same media that warned us against Donald Trump now warn us against tuning out. Though our side has lost, we must now ‘remain engaged’ with the minutiae of Mike Johnson’s majority and all that, strap in, batten down and pay attention.

I was persuaded by media warnings against Donald Trump. Now that we must rise and shine and juice our kale, celery and Granny Smiths over Morning Joe at peril of losing our democracy, I am not so sure.

Last month The Atlantic declared “Decivilization May Already Be Under Way.” The Atlantic is perfect for an article like that. What do you bet the only difference between Jeffrey Goldberg and his readers is, somebody juices his apples and kale for him. Well, that, and that even his friends call him ‘Jeffrey.’

‘Decivilization’ is just overwrought. Except, when I raise my eyes to my bookshelves I find How Civil Wars Start, Why Nations Fail, How Democracies Die, Why Liberalism Failed, Liberalism Against Itself, Tyranny, Inc. and Autocracy, Inc.

Wait! Wait! Wait! What am I doing!?

It’s clearly time for a break. Not because I’m abandoning America. Not to flee MAGA (well, not entirely). It’s time for a little recentering and for the solace of a road trip. So where to go? Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Fire in the Brain

God is a fire in the brain Nijinsky said
which is as close to the truth as
anything a dancer might dance
with a bonfire burning in his head

God may put you in a trance
with the fluttering of cardinal wings
or with the way the moon looks
mounting the mountain’s back
on the other side of the river
—a bright hole in the dark
a splinter of hope
a sliver

Sometimes beyond the blazing bars
of your incarceration
you hallucinate stars

You surmise the sun’s a substantiating eye
but fear that every distance is not near
(not close enough to make the untellable clear)

You dream days
You dream nights

Sometimes you lie without a clue
in the hour of the wolf
waiting for the wolf to bite,
or waiting for the blue to light.
When it does you see crocuses

You taste a cloud of honeysuckle
that sweetly drifts across the yard
where at a certain spot
between the garden and the shed
you swear paradise is here
—precisely here where a skunk
shredded grass the night before
grubbing while you were in bed,
grubbing with a skunky conflagration
in her head

God may burn a brain and brand it
God may shrink it or expand it

This is the bed in which
our ignorance reposes which,
by every blister on our brain,
is both a bed of coals
and roses

by Jim Culleny, 1/22/11
from Odder Still
Lena’s Basement Press, 2015

__________________________________________

(Fire in the Brain is one of 120 poems in my book Odder Still, available at Amazon)

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Sunday, January 12, 2025

A Review Of Jonathan Birch’s “The Edge Of Sentience”

by Mike O’Brien

I recently read a post by Agnes Callard discussing a philosophical novel (how dreadful) entitled “The Man Without Qualities”. The titular character is an essayist, a figure standing in stark contrast to philosophers. The essayist seeks novelty and surprise, the ephemeral glitters of new and interesting “perspectives”. He lacks the courage for the philosopher’s burdensome and risky enterprise of seeking long and hard for answers that may never reveal themselves. “Thinking long and hard”, writes Callard, “makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise”.

I was already conscious of the distinction between the writing that I do, and what is done by the philosophers whose work I discuss. But it stings a little more when someone else points it out. Thanks, Agnes.

Casting “The Man Without Qualities” as a cautionary tale of stunted intellectual life, Callard writes that “[t]he book … shows us what it is like to be a thinker without a quest; perpetually idle in spite of all one’s ceaseless, restless intellectual activity.”

Such a description could find no more unfitting targets than Jonathan Birch and his latest book, “The Edge of Sentience”. This publication, like the rest of Birch’s voluminous output, exemplifies the ethic of philosophy as productive work, rather than some kind of divine communion, or clever puzzle-building, or sly apologetics. Birch clearly explains his project to the reader, and frequently re-iterates the book’s key principles and criteria to keep that project firmly in view. He is not trying to surprise or dazzle, or hide gems for only the most insightful and subtle readers to discover through exegetical pilgrimage. This book is not trying to showcase Birch’s talents or seduce the reader into sharing Birch’s prejudices, but rather seeks to clearly convey relevant information and to articulate a consistent set of proposals with reasonable chances of implementation in public institutions. “The Edge Of Sentience” is a book with a public agenda, and Birch executes it well. A recent review in Nature called it “a masterclass in public-facing philosophy”, in case my opinion isn’t authoritative enough for you. Read more »

Biodiversity, Latitude and Conservation: An Essay on Ecological Patterns

by Hari Balasubramanian

Ecology is quite distant from my academic work in engineering, but I’ve developed a great love for it in recent years. To learn the basics, I’ve tried many books and articles, but I often turn to the college-level biology textbook Principles of LifeLike many academic texts, this one is not suited for cover-to-cover reading – at over 1000 pages, it is too heavy even to hold comfortably! Still, every time I’ve flipped through its pages, there’s been something interesting to reflect on.

My favorite figure (below) is from the book’s ecology section, and it leads us to the biodiversity theme of this essay. The biological diversity of a region can be quantified in many ways. One intuitive measure is the number of distinct species of a taxonomic group in the region — for instance, the number of species of birds, mammals, or primates found there.

The bar graph on the right shows how the number of butterfly species in the swallowtail family (x-axis) varies by latitude in the Americas (y-axis). In the formal taxonomic system, the family is called Papilionidae and it contains over 550 species. The graph tells us that the number of swallowtail species in the Americas – and hence swallowtail diversity – increases as we move from the higher latitudes in the north and south toward the equator, where it peaks. It’s fascinating that the species count distribution follows a bell curve centered around the equator, but it’s skewed towards the north, perhaps because North America contains more land area. Read more »

Fish Soup

by Barry Goldman

Because I serve as an arbitrator for FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, I have a Disclosure Report posted on the FINRA website. That 11-page document shows my employment history, education and training, and it lists every place I’ve had an investment account, every agency where I’ve served as an arbitrator, every professional organization I belong to, and it provides a link to each of my FINRA decisions.

Parties who have cases with FINRA can review that report when they are selecting their arbitration panel. If I am selected to serve on a panel, I am required to complete a more case-specific Arbitrator Disclosure Checklist. That 14-page document requires me to disclose:

  1. any direct or indirect financial or personal interest in the outcome of the arbitration;
  2. any existing or past financial, business, professional, family, social, or other relationships or circumstances with any party, any party’s representative, or anyone who the arbitrator is told may be a witness in the proceeding, that are likely to affect impartiality or might reasonably create an appearance of partiality or bias;
  3. any such relationship or circumstances involving members of the arbitrator’s family or the arbitrator’s current employers, partners, or business associates; and
  4. any existing or past service as a mediator for any of the parties in the case for which the arbitrator was selected.

There’s more. The duty to disclose is ongoing. We could be four days into a hearing when a witness appears who I recognize from a previous case. I have a duty to disclose that fact when it occurs. FINRA arbitrators are required to complete training programs periodically, and the organization produces several publications. The thrust of those training programs and many of the publications is the importance of disclosure. The rule is to disclose anything that may appear to present a conflict of interest. The threshold is low: if the potential for the appearance of a conflict occurs to us, we are required to disclose it.

There are two reasons for this. Read more »