by Christopher Hall

Despite writing my doctoral thesis on Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, a work most notorious for its poorly optimized optimism, I am something of a natural pessimist. Pessimism is at the right moments a potent tool for clarity (as is, even I have to admit, optimism, though not surprisingly I think this is the case more rarely), and so it is disappointing that the moment when I could have used it the most, my generally bleak perspective on things failed me. During my Masters, the professor who would eventually become my thesis advisor told me that, given the pathetic job prospects, a Ph.D. was not a good idea. Well, in your mid 20s, no obstacle, current or future, seems like it can become an indurated part of your fate if you choose for it not to. I was neither ambitious nor greedy, and I was willing to work anywhere for peanuts; so, the jobs would be there. Well, they weren’t, and in the midst of massive writer’s block and a crisis of faith concerning what literary criticism actually does, my prospects for an academic career tanked. I’m not sure if I can accurately say “I should have listened” as I am gainfully employed in a place where my degree is nominally required. But I don’t teach literature. And the writer’s block quickly metastasized into reader’s block; I still read, of course, but the urgency is gone (and the multiple distractions of the internet age are not helping.). Ah well, there are worse things, etc., and what does one want with being “well-read” anyway?

I suppose the actual question I’m wondering about is why I ever thought I could make being well-read a career. As the English degree craters, and the idea of the university itself is under assault in the United States and elsewhere, those of us who remain interested in literate culture are sensing in its decline some correlation with the current apoplexy, if not direct causation.

But I am allergic to any argument which is centered in the “use” of the humanities, at least if we understand “use” purely in the sense of “useful.” The disjunction between the “use” of the STEM disciplines and the “uselessness” of the humanities means that the world will stand study of the sexual habits of the pink fairy armadillo, not necessarily because it might lead to some new patent or product, but because it seems to be the price necessary to pay to keep science “going.” There can be no such argument for a study of sexual politics in Middlemarch. And the attempts to provide a “use argument” for the humanities have all, to my mind, fallen flat. “The humanities make you a good critical thinker;” is there any discipline out there that advocates for naivete among its practitioners? Hopefully there are not too many engineers out there taking everything they see at face value. “The humanities make people better democratic citizens;” well, if reading Rochester, Beckett, Byron and other assorted depressives and nihilists have made me a better citizen, I am not aware of how. Read more »

by Chris Horner

In daily life we generally get by without invoking explicit moral positions or judgements. This is because, for the most part, the norms and taboos of the quotidian life are just embedded in what we do or say. This isn’t to say we all adhere to them all the time – far from it. But when we see such behaviours our responses will range, according to seriousness, from tutting to calling the police. At one end we have the norms and taboos of basic politeness, at the other the serious stuff about harm. But this mainly happens without anyone needing to invoke an explicit moral a code, since our responses are embedded in the ‘ethical substance’ of everyday life.

But there are times when we may ask ourselves whether a norm or taboo or a rule is right. We seek justifications. Then we might ask about the consequences of following a rule, or of the red lines that might mark real moral obligations and limits. Things that appear as  ‘common sense’ can turn out to be abhorrent – it was once ‘common sense’ to think that women shouldn’t be educated or that some races were ‘obviously’ superior to others. So, we need to be able to critically reflect. Even then moral philosophers like Kant and JS mill are unlikely to come up. It’s more likely to be the ‘Golden Rule’ (do unto others as you would have them do unto to you) or the ‘what would happen if we all did that?’ Such reflections conduct have their place. We should reflect on what we do, and maybe change it, or call for change.

But everyday ethical life isn’t based on such things. It is the other way around: moral talk is rooted in ethical life, most of which happens without much reflection. We don’t go around with propositions about morality ‘in our heads’, as it were. We just live our social lives. Moral maxims and theories are reminders of what we should consider, what matters, and we reach for them we when feel stuck. Explicit ‘moral talk’ is parasitic on that other stuff of everyday life – the practices and institutions that we don’t put into question most of the time, what Hegel calls Sittlichkeit. Read more »

by O. Del Fabbro

Why do we fight? That question has been asked by so many in the history of mankind: philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, political theorists have come up over and over again with explanations as to why humans fight.

Nir Eisikovits, Professor of Philosophy at the University Massachusetts Boston, and founding director of the Applied Ethics Center, has in his recent book publication tried to answer that question in his specific, and very unique way: Glory, Humiliation, and the Drive to War.[1] Eisikovits’ main claim is that glory and humiliation are similar to a “two-stroke engine”, that is they are in “conjunction with each other”. To put it more simply: being subject to humiliation is so injurious that ending or reversing that state results in obtaining glory. The cycle of the two-stroke mechanism between glory and humiliation is what keeps the war machine running.

Until recently the German political scientist Herfried Münkler would have disagreed with Eisikovits. Especially Westerners live in post-heroic times according to Münkler. Drone warfare and more generally hybrid warfare allow societies to wage war without being explicit about it, and more importantly, there is no need for heroes anymore, if battles are fought remotely. Only lately, with the integration of drone warfare in classical warfare in Ukraine, has Münkler taken a step back and self-criticized his earlier statements. Eisikovits for his part is spot on, when he highlights how psychologically challenging remote drone warfare is for the pilots, and how they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).[2] Münkler believed that times had changed, that because wars in the 21st century are fought with new technologies and societies are more peaceful now, heroes are no longer needed and glory is of no importance anymore. Eisikovits proceeds the other way around. Wars might have changed technologically, but the drive to war has not changed. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

“…another kind of net, that language, the one the world gives us to cast so that we might catch in it a little of what it is and what we are, and we are, among other things, the poverties of the language we inherit.”  Robert Hass, “Families and Prisons,” What Light Can Do.

These days when night and cold come so soon one wants nothing more than to huddle around a fire, read for awhile, then go to bed – but the world has its obligations.

I was walking the dog in the cold night air, almost remembering what I wanted to remember, and then it came to me, the opening paragraph of James Joyce’s “Araby.”

The first time I read it was magic, the feel and look of the winter air, the awareness of the intensity of one’s aliveness in it, and Mangan’s sister:

When the short days of winter came dusk fell before we had well eaten our dinners. When we met in the street the houses had grown sombre. The space of sky above us was the colour of ever-changing violet and towards it the lamps of the street lifted their feeble lanterns. The cold air stung us and we played till our bodies glowed. Our shouts echoed in the silent street. The career of our play brought us through the dark muddy lanes behind the houses, where we ran the gauntlet of the rough tribes from the cottages, to the back doors of the dark dripping gardens where odours arose from the ashpits, to the dark odorous stables where a coachman smoothed and combed the horse or shook music from the buckled harness. When we returned to the street, light from the kitchen windows had filled the areas. If my uncle was seen turning the corner, we hid in the shadow until we had seen him safely housed. Or if Mangan’s sister came out on the doorstep to call her brother in to his tea, we watched her from our shadow peer up and down the street. We waited to see whether she would remain or go in and, if she remained, we left our shadow and walked up to Mangan’s steps resignedly. She was waiting for us, her figure defined by the light from the half-opened door. Her brother always teased her before he obeyed, and I stood by the railings looking at her. Her dress swung as she moved her body, and the soft rope of her hair tossed from side to side.

Yes, the paragraph described me too, though I was far in time and space from “dark odorous stables.” (Actually, there were some old stables around where I lived then, used for garages for awhile, but now mostly storage sheds filled with mysterious things.)  

Then I remembered the girl next door, a year or two older than I who had once been the babysitter for me and my brother, but when I had caught up a little bit, passed puberty, and we were both going to high school, she walked ahead of me all the way while I shuffled behind and never said a word. But I certainly thought of her in my own way. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

This book is essential reading or anyone who is trying to make sense of what is happening in America (and, alas, in much of the rest of the world) today. It traces the intellectual roots of Trumpism back to its fascist (or perhaps more accurately Nazi) roots. It anatomizes the extraordinary coalition of the superrich and the disaffected that has made the Republican Party what it is today, explores the contribution of apocalyptic religion to the cult of Trump, and details the organizational networks that hold this coalition together. Most disturbingly, it shows that Trumpism is a symptom of a much larger and more deeply rooted phenomenon that will not disappear with Trump. More encouragingly, it points to inherent contradictions within the coalition that may yet prove its downfall. Finally, it urges those who value democracy to be active and organize at all levels. To which I would add, join a Union. It is the Faculty Union, not the University Administration with its $52 billion endowment, that is fighting Trump’s attempt to seize control of Harvard. [Update: the University has now rejected Trump’s demands.]

The author has been studying the phenomenon she describes here for over 15 years, and has written two earlier related books. This one manages to cover an enormous territory, from which I can here only present a few impressions, with a large cast of actors, combining together detailed discussion of organizations and arguments with firsthand accounts of political and religious gatherings, and the sometimes colorful biographies of many of the leading characters. It is as close to being an enjoyable read as the subject matter permits, skillfully navigating its complex narratives through some 250 pages of text, backed up by over 700 references, most of them with web links.

The book appears to have gone to press after Trump’s 2024 electoral victory, but before he took office. Its analysis helps make sense of the Trump regime’s most extraordinary behavior, such as its fondness for spreading measles, its assault on the academic and governmental research base that has served the US economy so well, its betrayal of Ukraine, and the Orwellian rewriting of American history that un-persons or sidesteps people as diverse as Colin Powell and Harriet Tubman. In each case, we can with the aid of the book understand what is going on. Simply put, Trump is an accomplished mafioso, and rewards his power base. The book does not however prepare us (how could it?) for the full impact of Trump’s own megalomania and erratic policy-making.

I have only one slight criticism, which may perhaps merely reflect my own interests. There is little discussion of the connections, dating back to before 1980, between biblical creationist organizations and the doctrinaire illiberal Right of which Trumpism is the latest aspect, or of the links that have been forged between these organizations, with their theological and pseudoscientific denial of climate change, and leading right-wing political think tanks. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra 

“How are you?” asked my aunt about a year ago in my living room in New Delhi, her tone languorous and inquisitive, her gaze perched on my face. Having recently moved back to India after about 28 years in the U.S., this deceptively simple question both thrilled and discomfited me. I was used to being in the U.S. where people routinely asked, “How’re you doin’?”—a greeting that always put me on the defensive. I’d always try to justify my existence by magnifying whatever I was doing with my life at that moment and try to make it sound important. That day, just as I’d grown accustomed to doing in the U.S., I rattled off the things I was doing to my aunt, which, at the time, weren’t a whole lot. I was visiting my ailing mother in the hospital, reorganizing things in the house, and getting in touch with friends. There was a great deal of leisure at that time, I must admit. (I can feel my stomach muscles contract as I write this—I feel guilty confessing to indulging in leisure. I feel I must legitimize my leisure time, make it sound somehow “earned.” See how conditioned I am?)

My aunt furrowed her eyebrows, confusion washing over her face as she said, “Priya, I didn’t ask you what you were doing. I wanted to know how you are.” And then I spilled out all my feelings about my mother’s illness, my move to India, and my various conundrums. At that time, I also began thinking about how much language reveals about a culture, and how everyday expressions in American English signify America’s devout veneration of action, motion, and productivity.

Besides “how’re you doing?,” there are numerous expressions in American English that reflect this obsession with action and ceaseless motion, this deeply ingrained notion that the value of doing vastly supersedes the value of being. “What’s happening?” “What are you doing this weekend?” “What are your plans for the summer?” The underlying implication is always the same—are you active enough to matter? Are you doing enough to validate your existence? (When I lived in the U.S., the pressure to do sometimes became so overwhelming for me that I started conjuring up grand plans for the weekend. Instead of admitting that I intended simply to veg out in bed and watch some Netflix, I’d say things like I was planning to see an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Friday, listen to a fabulous new jazz sensation in the West Village on Saturday, followed by dinner at a cozy Peruvian restaurant.)

Now back to language. What’s one of the first questions people ask each other when they first meet in America? Read more »

by Lei Wang

“In bardo again,” I text a friend, meaning I’m at the Dallas airport, en route to JFK. I can’t remember now who came up with it first, but it fits. Neither of us are even Buddhist, yet we are Buddhist-adjacent, that in-between place. Though purgatories are not just in-between places, but also places in themselves.

In The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, a book by travel writer Pico Iyer on, among other things, the charm of airports, he quotes Geoff Dyer, who quotes the architect Vincenzo Volentieri:

“Birds in flight… are not between places, they carry their places with them. We never wonder where they live: they are at home in the sky, in flight. Flight is their way of being in the world.”

For a homing pigeon, home is a verb. I try to remember this as my flight is delayed, with bardo extended until 2am. The planes keep malfunctioning: two so far, with need for another. “We’re waiting as fast as we can,” I overhear. But bardo is better than dying.

My best friend loved bus rides as a child, because en route from one destination to another, one could do frivolous things, like listen to music or read a book that wasn’t necessary for school. It was a little bit like being sick: a time of respite from ordinary demands, as you and your paused ambitions travel to the kingdom of wellness.

During travel, you are “off the hook” in a way: you have a reasonable excuse for not getting back to people, a kind of natural digital detox. Internet is opt-in, not opt-out. You are already doing something everyone seems to agree is difficult and uncomfortable, and so distractions are socially sanctioned: juicy novels, non-arthouse movies, guilt-free fast food.

An airport is a free pass for ShakeShack, or for those early morning flights, a sweet and savory McGriddle. Of course, there are those who partake of salads and yogurt and honey crisp apples from home even en route, probably the kind of people who use the word partake. Read more »

I was startled for a moment before realizing that our neighbors had taken their child out of this suit before hanging it out to dry.

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by Ken MacVey

Do corporations have free will? Do they have legal and moral responsibility for their actions?

Many argue that legal and moral responsibility must rest on free will. If there is no free will there cannot be such a thing as legal or moral responsibility. But consider these two questions and their potential  answers.

Do corporations have free will? Answer: No.

Do corporations have legal and moral responsibility for their actions? Answer: Yes.

Both answers intuitively sound plausible. On reflection these two answers, when taken together, logically  imply  legal or moral responsibility may not necessarily have to rest on free will. But maybe something is wrong with these answers. Maybe corporations do have free will of some sort. Or maybe any responsibilities corporations are said to have really rest on human stakeholders who do have free will. And if that is right, what are the implications for the legal and moral responsibility of corporations as their decisions become increasingly driven by AI instead of by people?

Under American law corporations are considered to be artificial persons. They are artificial in the sense that they are creatures of law. They are persons in the sense that they can be legal actors or agents. They can own property, enter contracts, sue and be sued, and file for bankruptcy. They have rights. They have First Amendment rights to free speech. They are entitled to compensation under the Fifth Amendment if their property is taken by eminent domain. They have legal obligations—such as paying taxes. Corporations can also commit crimes, even manslaughter. For example, Pacific Gas & Electric a few years ago pled guilty to 84 involuntary manslaughter charges stemming from a horrific fire in Northern California that PG&E caused. Corporations can have goals—sometimes they are recited in mission statements. They can take stands—such as endorsing by corporate resolution a ballot measure.

Historically corporations were not always  legally treated as persons or as entities that could be charged criminally. Originally under the common law ( Anglo-American judicial  precedents developed  over hundreds of years) corporations could not have what is called mens rea, the “guilty mind” required for charging a crime. Nor could corporations commit an actus reus, or a wrongful physical act, also required for charging a crime. Judges ruled that corporations did not have minds so they could not have wrongful intent or a “guilty mind.” Judges would emphatically note that corporations do not have mouths to speak with, eyes to see with, hands to touch things and people with, thus they could not commit the  “actus reus” or physical act required for being charged with a crime.  As Supreme Court Chief Justice Marshall observed in 1819 in another context  “a corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

I am in Del Mar having breakfast with two of my adult children who are telling me what sort of man I should date, and I wonder when did we switch roles. When did I stop being the one they were a little apprehensive about introducing a new person to and I  became worried about their approval? Is it because I am too open with them? Am I too accepting of everything they do? Not that at their ages, I would want to control them or anything, but still. Is it because the last guy I dated was too enthusiastic about building an addition to my house to live in after a few weeks of our meeting, even though a few things were starting to not go well? Is it because in my euphoria of having found love again, I briefly looked at every red flag presented to me and just filed it away in a very far away part of my brain? Or is it because my daughter saw who he was when they first met when he told her that he is a silo and can move easily between different groups. Did she sense that he was all compartmentalizing and barriers, to my openness and connections?

I don’t stay with those questions long enough, because we are surrounded by the Lululemon crowd at this beautiful outdoor cafe. What Tom Wolfe called the Social X-Rays are brunching, and unlike my kids and me, they did not order extra pancakes on top of their regular orders. We seem to have to taste as much variety as possible, so every order has an extra side order. This crowd though is slightly less social x-ray and more face-fillers and pouty-lipped. A part of me is envious of their toned bodies and their casual Southern California relaxed vibe, workout outfits, and flip-flops, and another part of me is amused at the whole face thing. After our meal, which looked amazing but tasted quite bland, we went to the beach and soaked up all the sun we could for one day before two of us had to go back to the East Coast to attend a funeral.

Michael was my brother-in-law and became my brother-in-love. From the first time I met him in 1984, while his mother disapproved of her middle son’s relationship with me, and his sister warned her brother not to eat the food I made in case I added some sort of sorcery to it, Michael was all kindness and acceptance. He was amused, yet not surprised by his younger brother’s choice, and welcomed me and my children to his family without any questions. He was curious about me and my history, wanting to know more about how I grew up in Iran and France, my catholic school experience, my learning English days, and my religious and national holidays. He and his wife hosted us at their house in Pittsburgh and we all still remember the pizza they bought that was so rich, it was wrapped in newspaper to absorb the grease.
Michael was one of the most intelligent men I have known. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for the people of a nation to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with their Executive, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Americans are created equal, that they are endowed by their Constitution with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, the Executive is chosen among Men and Women, deriving his or her just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Executive becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Executive, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Executives lawfully appointed should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such an Executive, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of the people of these United States; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their present Executive.

The history of the present Executive of the United States is a history of repeated injuries, usurpations and monarchical tendencies, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Checks and Balances, Separation of Powers and Due Process, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has caused the destruction of the United States economy, which until recently was the Envy of the World, and consigned its Citizens to poverty and inflation.

He has eroded the goodwill of the United States among the Nations of the world, turning what was once a most admired country into the world’s pariah.

He has alienated our Friends and Allies and embraced other Tyrants and autocrats. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

The humble 2. It’s not big, like the Brobdingnagian numbers. It’s not nothing, like zero. It’s not the first something, like one. It’s hard to imagine much can be said about the unremarkable two.

Of course, Covid gave us a newfound appreciation for the power of exponential doubling. If you know of a novel disease and have 3 cases yesterday, 6 cases today, and are told to expect 12 cases tomorrow, it is quite something to predict close to zero new cases by April. But I’m just a simple mathematician who finds pulling random numbers from my rear end uncomfortable.

A happier, if apocryphal, tale is about the invention of chess. The story goes back to at least the 11th century: a clever courtier invents chess and presents it to their king. The king so loves the new game that he offers to give the courtier whatever they request. The courtier says that they’d like one piece of wheat for the first square of the chessboard, another two pieces for the second square, another four pieces for the third square, another 8 pieces for the fourth square, and so on for the 64 squares of an 8 x 8 chessboard.

18,446,744,073,709,551,615

grains of wheat for the courtier. That seems like a lot to count and you might rather weigh it out. Even then, it’ll be some work. After all, we’re talking about something like 18,446,744,000 metric tons.

A riddle loved and hated by students when they first learn about the prime numbers is: “What is the oddest prime?”. Sure to generate groans, the answer, of course, is two. Why the oddest? Being the only even prime makes two the black sheep among the primes.

On a questionably more serious note, the largest prime numbers are found using powers of two. As we talked about here at 3QD, last October the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that

2^136279841-1

 is the largest prime number known to humankind. It has 41,024,320 digits. Printing it out would take an 8,000 page book if you wanted to carry it around with you. Read more »

Stephanie Morisette. Hybrid Drone/Bird, 2024.

More here, here, and here.

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by Tim Sommers

Or, rather, the very real threat to Physicalism posed by Philosophical Zombies.

On the one hand, there are the Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Walking Dead, zombies, which are rotting, but animated, corpses that devour human flesh and can only be stopped by destroying their brains. They pose a physical threat.

On the other hand, there are philosophical zombies that pose a much deeper, more unsettling threat to physicalism itself. Philosophical zombies look and act just as we do, but they have no internal, phenomenal mental life. Like celebrity influencers.

Physicalism is, roughly, the view that everything real is either physical or reducible to something that is physical. Arguably, it’s the philosophical view that undergirds modern science. The physicalist slogan that I grew up with was “all concrete particulars are physical.”

That is, there are abstract objects (like numbers or sets) as well as generalizations about concrete objects (say, about horses having four legs). And these are in some attenuated sense real. But any given example of a nonabstract object will be physical. When it comes to the human mind, physicalism does not have to mean that “redness” or “pain” is some particular unitary brain state, but rather that every time you perceive something as red your perception is caused, and constituted, by you being in some particular brain state. That’s called token physicalism or nonreductive materialism.

There are plenty of objections to this view. In a recent 3 Quarks Daily article Katalin Balog discussed the problem of causality. Since most philosophers accept the “causal closure of the physical” – every physical event has a physical cause, so nothing nonphysical can cause something in the physical world – mental events like pain or redness are, at best, epiphenomenal*. Even if they exist, in other words, they are caused by physical events or processes, but they can’t cause anything. Yet, the causal objection goes, isn’t it the fact that I see a light exemplifying the phenomenal property of redness (as philosophers used to say) that causes me to stop?

I want to discuss a different argument, however. The one about zombies, which Balog also mentions in passing. Rather, than being causal this is an objection to physicalism from phenomenal consciousness. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.

There was a meme that circulated a few years back amongst the tweedier of the interwebs which roughly claimed that when it came to literature, great French novels are about love, the Russians focus on existence, and Americans are concerned with money. Like most jokes in that vein, the observation is more funny than perceptive, though it’s not really much of either. Regardless, there is some truth to the quip, one worth considering no more so than right now, the month that sees the centennial of that greatest American novel of upward mobility and conspicuous consumption F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “Let me tell you about the very rich,” promises Fitzgerald through his narrator Nick Carraway, they “are different from you and me.” From Edith Wharton’s The Age of Mirth to Brett Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero, American literature has long focused on money, even if it’s under the guise of “freedom” (the former being a prerequisite for the later anyhow). Whether or not that’s the intrinsic, essential, integral deciding difference and definition for American letters is too sweeping a claim to make, for certainly there are Frenchmen not concerned with love and Russians of a lighter disposition, but for the four new American novels I read this month, and the single English novel concerned with class – which is just money baked for four centuries and dressed in a tuxedo and top hat – money was certainly the major topic of concern.

Sara Sligar’s deft and entertaining new novel Vantage Point, published this past January, imagines inherited wealth as the wages of a historic curse, returning to that earliest and most American of genres in the gothic. Vantage Point’s narrative is loosely based on Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 Wieland; or, The Transformation: An American Tale, arguably the first example of the American novel and one that you’re unlikely to ever heard of unless you’re a specialist, for the simple reason that it’s more interesting than it is good. In Brockden Brown’s original, the titular Wielands are Pennsylvania gentry, cursed by the memory of their father spontaneously combusting in his library overlooking the Schuylkill as a result of his alchemical experiments, only a generation latter to be taken in by the nefarious machinations of a biloquist named Carwin. Read more »

Tell me Something I don’t Know

Don’t tell me the earth’s a sphere
and the sun’s kiss amounts to half-day
terminal bliss with a dark end,

or that seasons have to do with angles,
mystics have to do with angels,
and lovers are about orbiting passions,
that pulse like binary stars across
light years and come in telescopes

Don’t tell me the wind’s a metaphor
for a longing to fill vacuums that
sometimes spit typhoons
or that cardinals seen
in the high reaches of cherry trees
are no more sublime than worms
who burrow among turnip roots
for a living

Don’t tell me the chance of being
is equal to the odds of not being

——tell me something I don’t know

Tell me how to weave
tomorrow into yesterday
without tangling, without
strangling today

Jim Culleny
from Odder Still
Lena’s Basement Press, 2015

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by Daniel Shotkin

Last summer, I wrote an article about Affirmative Action, college admissions, and what it meant for me as a high school senior. At the time, I’d just begun the arduous process of applying to colleges, and I was frustrated. Getting into a ‘top’ college had been my dream for the past four years, but the admissions process I had to go through to achieve said dream seemed to be purposefully designed to be as opaque as possible. So, while many of my friends developed fixations on ‘dream schools,’ I adopted an ultra-cynical view on the whole ordeal—I’d play the admissions game, but I’d expect nothing more than a loss.

But that view has been slightly complicated by a recent development. Last week, I was accepted to Harvard.

As streams of digital confetti floated down my refreshed application portal, I felt like I’d won the lottery. No, it couldn’t be true. Harvard’s acceptance rate sits at a measly 3.6%, meaning to get in, I’d have to squeeze past 50,000 chess prodigies, olympiad winners, and violin virtuosos. Add the fact that my suburban New Jersey public school had only had one accepted student in the past ten years, and such a feat was impossible. But somehow, there I was, mouth agape, mom hollering, and acceptance letter in hand.

So what now? Was my pessimism an overreaction? 

The irony of my situation isn’t lost on me. In discussions with friends, family, and teachers, I’d been the Ivy League’s biggest critic. But I’d also worked hard to craft an application that appealed to their admissions system. How do I reconcile these two truths? To answer that, we first need to understand why a certain Boston-area liberal arts college has such a hold on high-achieving high schoolers. Read more »