by Christopher Hall

The “literary thought experiment” is not a particularly well-explored genre. Ursula K. LeGuin’s short story is of course a famous one; we might say that other examples include Swift’s A Modest Proposal and stories by Borges and Ted Chiang. Like thought experiments in philosophy and physics, these challenge us to see how otherwise abstract ideas would function in a context understandable in terms of the “real world.” But the literary element here means that we can’t simply take the thought out of the language in which it is expressed. LeGuin’s story isn’t merely a vehicle for asking readers “Would you stay within a utopia if a single child had to be tortured to maintain it?” Trying to treat LeGuin’s story as a kind of Trolley Problem-with-extra-steps does a disservice to the care and craft with which she has created the statement of the problem itself.

That doesn’t seem to stop people, though. John Smith is concerned that the Ones Who Walk Away might be virtue signalers:

The walkers are not heroes. They are, at best, people who have chosen to feel better about themselves at the cost of doing anything useful. At worst, they are moral narcissists who would rather preserve the purity of their own conscience than remain in the one place where they might be able to justify their flourishing. And the near-universal instinct to lionize them reveals an unflattering truth about how most people think about ethics: we worship the gesture of moral refusal and almost never ask whether it accomplishes anything at all.

“Moral maturity,” in Smith’s view, comes from accepting the presence of suffering in the world. After all, he notes, we already live in a world which, despite not being anywhere close to a utopia, is built on the pain of others, both in the past and present. We are not only bound to live in a world where, as Smith notes, mass suffering only gives us a mediocre mode of life. It is also “philosophically empty” to reject a world based on anyone’s suffering, so long as the level of suffering there is minimized and happiness maximized:

This is the point that almost everyone skips past. The question is not “Would you build a utopia on the torture of one child?” The question is “You already live in a civilization built on the torture of millions of children. Is the utopia you’re being offered in exchange at least better than what you’ve got?”

And the answer is obviously yes.

(I’m not familiar enough with John Smith’s writing to know if there’s an element of satire here or not – I’ll treat it as if there wasn’t.) Not mentioned in his discussion, but obviously implied, is a by-now familiar conservative caution against any ambition to make the world completely pain-free. The effort to eliminate suffering will only result in more suffering, and we have only to look at the results of every attempt at utopian social engineering to confirm this. Read more »

by Lei Wang

I used to be one of those people who used science to try to explain everything. The poetic part of me suspected science wasn’t the only ultimate truth, but I resisted my own knowing. I really did believe at one point that dopamine and oxytocin were the causes and conditions of love, and not just what love happens to imperfectly look like under a scanner for mammals.

Years ago, I argued with an ex-Orthodox Jew about God. Though to all extents and purposes he had left the religion and its practical edicts, he had not stopped studying the scriptures. He was adamant that it was impossible for humans to know God, and I said it was—to the extent that it was humanly possible. (Clearly, though, it was a matter of temporal lobes, right vs. left hemispheres, etc.) Otherwise, were all the mystics lying or deluded?

I wasn’t sure then (or even now, despite everything) if I believed in God as entity or object, however abstract or non-corporeal, but I believe in God as experience. I believe in the sense of God, the way I believe in the sense of love, even if it’s subjective and immeasurable and irreproducible in the lab, the opposite of science yet indisputably real.

The anthropologist and religious scholar T.M. Luhrmann, author of How God Becomes Real, concludes after decades of research that faith is really hard work. “The most important question to ask about religion is not why but how,” she writes. “‘Why’ is a skeptic’s question—a puzzle around the seemingly absurd ideas (a talking snake, a virgin birth) that we find in religions. If we start not with the puzzle of belief, but with the question of whether the effort people invest in their faith helps them to feel that their gods and spirits are real, we are forced to focus on what people do when they worship gods and spirits, and on how those practices themselves might change those who do them.” Read more »

This guy was just walking calmly on the sidewalk. Presumably he could fly to wherever he’s going but he prefers to have a bit of a stroll, I guess. And here is ChatGPT’s comment: “That appears to be a scarlet tiger moth or a very close relative in the tiger moth family (Arctiinae). Looks like it escaped from a particularly stylish lava lamp.”

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by Jim Hanas

I remember the rush the first time I entered Manhattan via cab from one of the airports—I don’t remember which one—and felt the density and the pressure. I recognized the blue scaffolding of the city’s endless refurbishments, as seen on Law & Order, and felt that I was home. (I moved here a few months later.) I was staying with a friend on West 17th Street and within minutes I saw my first celebrity. It was Wallace Shawn. I remember him toddling north on Seventh Avenue, paunchy and—can this be true?—wearing clogs. At the time, only Woody Allen would have been a better sighting, and now—well—I’m glad it was Wallace Shawn. The year was 2000 and I was thirty. He would have been fifty-six, the age I am now.

I had seen My Dinner with André (1981) for the first time less than ten years before, with a college friend, shortly after (or before?) we graduated. It was one of those movies I had avoided—though it was around—because what it was wasn’t legible to me. It seemed like old people stuff, with a sad, late-’70s taint to it. I still can’t watch The Bob Newhart Show—the first one, funny though it may be—without feeling depressed. With its wan colors and necrotic leisure suits, it feels like TV from another, possibly socialist country. (Only M*A*S*H survives that era for me. Military fashions never go out of style.)

But the movie finally caught up with me, circuitously, via Jonathan Demme. From Stop Making Sense (1984) to Spalding Gray’s Swimming to Cambodia (1987), I found myself accidentally stumbling around “downtown”—with no sense of what that was as a scene or a  neighborhood from my childhood home in suburban Cincinnati—which led to My Dinner with André. Prior to that, Shawn appeared as a waiter in Atlantic City (1980)—his first of four Louis Malle films, André being the second—and in Manhattan (1979), as Jeremiah, Diane Keaton’s previous ultra-virile lover whom Woody Allen is shocked to find out is, well, Wallace Shawn.

My Dinner with André is best suited to a certain stage of life, and better suited to some eras than others. I was pleased to see it make it as a mid-life meme for millennials (above), though not surprised. André is an autofiction on the theme of how a person should be, to paraphrase the title of Sheila Heti’s genre-defying turned genre-defining 2013 novel. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

My previous 3QD column ‘AI Part 1: What the Story-Writing Machines Are Doing to Us’ was an edited version of a talk on AI I gave at an interdisciplinary webinar for the publisher Taylor & Francis. At this real-world event I came across as a Luddite because STEM colleagues attending from around the globe were singing from similarly evangelical hymn sheets about the new technologies.

Their excitement is understandable given that AI is accelerating discovery, automating scientific drudge work, and expanding the scale of research questions. I felt out of step even though I​ am far from being a strident techno-pessimist​ and, as I’ll show, know my way round LLMs. Yet the picture in the arts and humanities is a lot darker than the mostly rosy glow these technologies tend to be bathed in for scientists.

I am sure many students, using fine-grained prompts and taking a long time over their essay-based assessments, are achieving higher marks with an almost equal lack of originality to the two Treasure Island AI plagiarists I discussed in my previous column. Universities are scrambling to determine how to respond to AI use in assignments. If LLMs are sometimes levelling the playing field for non-native speakers to get greater access in arts and humanities institutions, they are also having a more pernicious kind of levelling effect. This one doesn’t just impact the admissions process but attainment and feelings of accomplishment further down the line. People might be getting in, but they’re not getting on. Exams are coming back, and viva voce defences at the end of a doctoral degree would be well-nigh impossible for ChatGPT, although never say never.

At one end of the grading spectrum, machine learning makes failure less likely, mitigating struggling candidates’ despair. At the other end, though, the secret knowledge that AI was heavily leant on to write arts and humanities papers must dull a student’s thrill (as well as their neural activity) at receiving a high mark. Cheaters don’t get the dopamine hit of cracking a difficult problem on their own. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Robert Jensen

Bill Rees likes to say that ecological footprint analysis began with an epiphany—when he was 10 years old.

Sitting down to lunch on his grandparents’ Ontario farm with relatives he had worked with that morning, the sweaty kid realized he had played a small part in raising everything on the table—beef, chicken, potatoes, carrots, and a few other items the farm had produced so far that season.

Rees remembers the moment as thrilling. “You know the expression, ‘You are what you eat’? As a child, I realized I am what I eat, and that I grew what I ate,” said the renowned ecological economist, now 82. “I knew deep in my bones that farm work and food made me a product of soil and sun.”

That may seem simple, but how many people think about the importance of soil? Today’s high-energy/high-technology culture too easily obscures our dependence on ecosystems. Rees has spent his career trying to alert people to the consequences of ignoring ecological realities.

With his coauthor and former student Mathis Wackernagel, Rees in 1996 published Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. Perhaps today’s most well-known sustainability metric, Ecological Footprint Accounting (EFA) estimates human demands on the carrying capacity of Earth. Comparing human consumption of bio-resources with Earth’s regenerative capacity, EFA shows that we are in overshoot—consuming resources faster than they can be replenished and generating wastes faster than they can be absorbed.

Rees retired from teaching at the University of British Columbia in 2012 but continues to sound the warning: Modern techno-industrial (MTI) society is unsustainable. Humanity’s total biological resource consumption and waste production exceed ecosystems’ regenerative and assimilation capacities. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

When I went to Singapore last month, I found myself staring at the streets with a kind of baffled fascination. They were so clean that they seemed almost untouched by human life. There were no half-torn love letters plastered to the pavement by some earlier rain, no crumpled receipt skittering in the wind, no faint evidence of a snack eaten in haste, no sign that anyone had ever dropped anything, spilled anything, lost anything, longed for anything in public. There was not even the small, almost ridiculous debris of ordinary life: a noodle slipped from someone’s mouth in a rush, a tissue escaping a handbag, a leaflet stepped into the ground by hundreds of indifferent feet. Everything looked polished, intact, strangely unsullied. It was not only that the city seemed clean. It seemed as though no one had ever really been there, as though all traces had been erased as soon as they were made. Everywhere one stepped, it felt like stepping into something new and traceless, a place from which the usual human residue of living had been meticulously removed. The city seemed not merely clean but continuously renewed, as if it had discovered a way to remain permanently youthful. Nothing appeared frayed. Nothing appeared to have endured.

I could see, very clearly, why this was appealing. I am not immune to beauty, ease, or order. On the contrary, I often hunger for them. There was pleasure in walking through a city that did not look battered by use, neglect, weather, or time. There was relief in not having to brace oneself against visual and sensory assault. Singapore was quiet, elegant, efficient, composed. It looked like a place that had mastered itself.

And yet I felt, beneath my admiration, a curious distance that surprised me.

There are, on paper, many reasons I ought to prefer Singapore to Delhi, where I currently reside. Singapore is cleaner, calmer, greener, more efficient, more orderly, more breathable. It does not assault the nervous system in the way Delhi so often can. Its roads move with a discipline that, to a Delhite, can seem almost miraculous. Its public spaces are polished, its surfaces cared for, its rhythms as predictable as a machine. Singapore presents itself as a city that has thought things through.

Delhi, by contrast, often seems like a city that has thought nothing through and yet somehow keeps going. It is loud, polluted, unruly, crowded, exasperating. It can feel like an affront to reason. Traffic behaves as if governed by anarchy rather than law. The air, for months at a stretch, is hardly fit to breathe. Read more »

Deborah E. Roberts. When You See Me, 2019.

More here, here, and here.

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by Tim Sommers

When is it acceptable to break the law to protest an injustice? That’s an easy one. Anytime the injustice is sufficiently unjust. But that’s not the whole story. Among the rights everyone should be afforded in a reasonably just liberal democracy, I believe, is the right to break the law sometimes in certain ways. Many have defended, in particular, one kind of civil resistance that involves lawbreaking, namely, civil disobedience.*

John Rawls, in A Theory of Justice, defines civil disobedience as a politically (or socially) motivated, public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law (or order) undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or policies against a general background of fidelity to law by actors willing to accept the consequences of their actions. He argued that civil disobedience is justifiable even in a reasonably just society.

Some have objected to Rawls’ focus on an idealized account of what civil disobedience would be like in a society presumably more just than ours. They worry that this distorts, rather than clarifies, the role of civil disobedience in actual, existing societies.

Others have argued that Rawls’ account has too little to do with the paradigm cases of civil disobedience. For example, Gandhi and King did not operate against the backdrop of legitimate, reasonably just societies – unless you consider Colonial India or the Jim Crow South reasonably just.

Philosophers have also objected to various features of the view wondering whether justifiable political actions must be public or whether the actors must always accept the consequences or even whether political action must be non-violent.

I believe that Rawls had good reasons for offering an account idealized in these ways. Read more »

Burning Bush

At twenty I danced the tops of walls—
Nijinsky of the double top plate

bent in-two like an onion shoot
unbending up through an earthen gate,

lifting sticks to be put in place,
nailing their tails held against my boot,

walking the wires of gravity’s net
as a spider commands its filament web

hung in the crotch of the jamb of a door
between one post and its lintel head.

From the crow’s nest of my wall-top perch
poised to get the next piece set

in air as clear as a baby’s thoughts
surveying homes unlived-in yet,

fresh-footed, balanced, without a clue,
assessing my recent work and worth:

the shadows of studs plumb and true
lying like bars over up-turned earth.

Sweatskin slickkening in the light
breath as sure as the bellows of god

biceps built by the truth of weight,
muscles doing their natural jobs:

arms of sinew, bone and grit
reaching to haul the next board up

to be lifted and laid wall to ridge
and fixed by hammer blows on steel

fueled by blasts of the burning bush
in the orchard of god that has ever spun

like the fire that made big Moses reel
the burning bush we call the sun.

by Jim Culleny
2/22/13

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by Eric Schenck

Over  the last 10 years, I’ve learned three languages. Egyptian Arabic, German, and Spanish. And the best thing I’ve done for each one? Meet with quality conversation partners so I can practice speaking. 

It’s a simple but effective habit:

• Find someone that speaks your target language
• Make sure they want to learn a language you speak
• Meet with them and “exchange” languages so you can get some quality speaking practice

This can be a mixed bag. I’ve had dozens of conversation partners over the years. Most are just OK. But some are actually great. 

Here are five of my most memorable partners from the last decade: 

Egyptian Arabic

Mohamed:

I met Mohamed when I first moved to Cairo in 2015. I was working as an English teacher, and he was one of the students at my school. 

We became friends fast. Mohamed and I would meet up every other weekend, smoking shisha while learning new vocab. It was a lot of fun.

But it wasn’t all great. He was raised in a conservative society, and some of the things he said left me shaking my head. I got better at Egyptian Arabic, sure. But even more valuable? The experience I had spending time immersed in a different culture. (And at least trying to see things from somebody else’s perspective.) Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

“Wilcox married a police officer who worked crime scenes. He gave her advice on how to protect herself from an attacker: She should always carry keys in her hand when she walked to her car alone, and she shouldn’t keep a block of knives exposed in the kitchen. Too often, her husband told her, he’d seen women murdered with their own knives.”

Wilcox is Dawn Wilcox, a school nurse in Plano, Texas. The quote comes from 14,445 and Counting, a story about her and several other people—women—who document victims of murder. Specifically, victims of femicide, the murder of females because they are female. The article by Christa Hillstrom appears in The Atavist Magazine. It is a grim snapshot of the world women live and die in circa 2026.

After a friend of Wilcox’s daughter was murdered by an acquaintance, Wilcox “thought about how often women were harmed by men they knew…Did women have no choice,” she wondered, “but to wander the world hoping never to step on a landmine of a man?” Looking for further details about the number of murdered women, and who they were, she found no comprehensive database. What data existed was “grossly incomplete”. Wilcox began to build one herself in 2016. Her focus was the victims.

Wilcox maintains Women Count USA right up to today. It contains the names of 14,445 women—thus the title of the article. The real world has created a backlog of entries, ballooned by Wilcox’s refusal to automate the process, by her insistence of manually entering each name. Because, she says, “tracking femicides became another way of providing care”. Not the same as, but similar to, her work as a nurse. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

The film The Matrix famously froze its simulation in the year 1999. It was chosen as the alleged peak of human civilization. What unknowns might the new millennium bring? Many were understandably anxious. It was a psychologically-heavy turning point.

But celebrations abounded. ABC News ran a special program that covered the new millennium festivities around the world. A global consortium was formed to commemorate the occasion. 2000 Today was made up of a diverse set of national channels from Venezuela to Egypt to Poland. It even had its own soundtrack titled “A World Symphony for the New Millennium.” There had never been before such a successful effort to create a globalized world through media, with the exception of maybe the song “We Are the World” in 1985.

Three world powers—the United States, Russia, and China—each took a very different tone in addressing the momentous occasion.

For the United States, the new year was spoken of as if sitting atop the highest peak and gratitude from Americans was expected. At his 2000 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton tried to keep this optimism going with little room for acknowledging past tragedy. His opening statement was blunt in stating: “We are fortunate to be alive at this moment in history.” Never before had America enjoyed “so much prosperity and social progress with so little internal crisis and so few external threats.”

Russia, however, had an altogether different experience of  the new millennium, one of shocking dysfunction. Read more »

by TJ Price

I

For years after an abrupt departure from college, I floated around, aimless and pathless. It was only a matter of time before I lost any buoyancy and began to drown, most likely in one or any of the bars I had begun to frequent. Seasons slid by without any notice, as if each month were just a mask slipping off by the coy legerdemain of a stage magician. Winter led to another winter; summer led to another summer. How we got from one to the another was the topic of much surly amazement from the drunks with whom I kept company; often I would bear witness to their surprise—and their gall—upon realizing how much time had passed.

There was always a reason to drink, but there was never a reason to stop, other than a vague intimation of estimated excess. Maybe a pang in the liver, or a tightening below the sternum. A nose turned slightly bulbous, blushing with broken capillaries. Maybe a heart so full of booze that it sloshed around each chamber, flooding it like rooms in a house. 

I spent most of my time with this girl I knew, this girl who spent more time in the bar than she did in her expensive condominium. We’d hit it off almost immediately, bonding over our shared love of reading. Not that we had a lot of books in common—our tastes were wildly divergent—but it was more that we both just liked to read that drew us together. The first night we met, during a late-night excursion from our barstools, she took me to her place and I discovered that her fridge was stuffed full of pizza boxes and takeout containers. The stove didn’t work, she explained, but I knew she was bluffing—it would have been simple to get it fixed, even if it were actually broken.

That night, after a few lines of cocaine, we talked excitedly about poetry: she recited a line or two of Plath—you do not do, you do not do, black shoe, in which I have lived for years like a foot, barely daring to breathe or ha-choo—I returned my own salvo, with Eliot—and through the spaces of the dark, midnight shakes the memory, as a madman shakes a dead geranium. She pressed a finger alongside one nostril, sniffed loudly, and then stared at me with her big round moon eyes, impatience growing on her like a fungus. I was meant to do something, I think, but in that moment of booze and drug-fueled confusion, I couldn’t parse what was expected of me. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

When did you first notice that you cell phone was finishing your sentences? Sure, spellcheck had been around for a while, however annoying it might be, but coming up with whole sentences that seemed to read your mind—“can I call you later?” “Can we meet tomorrow?” “Do you need groceries?  These suggestions seem to come out of nowhere but can surprisingly express exactly what you want to say.

But so-called artificial intelligence struck like lightening in November 2022 when a start-up company called Open AI was founded with a billion dollars from an assortment of Silicon Valley techies who released a chatbot called Chat GPT.  Within 5 days a million people had chatted with the bot, generating essays, poems, and answers to questions, if not always perfectly accurate.  Two months later, Chat GPT had 100 million users.

Chat GPT is available to everyone online for free, like Wikipedia.  However, for an extra monthly cost of about $20, you can obtain the Premium version, which gives you faster results, more access, and rapid application of new updates.  AI is expensive to run, however.  It requires large data centers, occupying acres of land, to process the data and analyze the problems it is given; large amounts of water are needed to cool these massive computers; and finally, large amounts of data, printed matter, poetry, computer programs, and so on must be constantly fed into the data banks in order to keep up with current events and new discoveries. Microsoft has been a major supporter of Open AI, providing critical cloud computing infrastructure via Microsoft Azure, enabling the training of large models, and investing millions in the company. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

Maybe in the many nearby ghost towns,
ghosts do roam
and send old-fashioned good wishes
to abstract relatives in distant homes.

—from the poem “Maybe”, If I Do Not Reply (2024)

*

In Zhou Dedong’s short story “Have You Heard of ‘Ancient Glory’?” (Hereafter “Ancient Glory”),[1] a young couple scrapes together a down payment on a new apartment in the western outskirts of a Chinese city, the only place they can afford. The complex, Ancient Glory, looks impeccable: freshly rendered concrete, manicured paths, functioning lifts. It is also dead quiet. No lights in the windows. No footsteps echo in the corridors. The couple sense something strange hanging over the place. Then Qingming Festival arrives, and people start showing up. Qingming, falling in spring, is a day when families visit graves or memorial sites to clean them, burn paper offerings, and honour the dead—an act of filial piety, the deep reverence for one’s elders and forebears that sits at the heart of Chinese moral life. The apartments in Ancient Glory hold funeral urns. The buildings are occupied. Just not by the living.

Zhou Dedong, often called the godfather of suspense fiction in China, published this story in Sinophagia: A Celebration of Chinese Horror (2024), the first English-language anthology of contemporary Chinese horror fiction. He meant “Ancient Glory” as a ghost story. But in a strange way, it is also a documentary.

A cemetery plot in Beijing’s unhinged property market can now cost 60,000 RMB per square metre (about US$8,000), sometimes more, which is several times what one would pay for a home in nearby Hebei Province. A burial plot comes up for renewal every twenty years, while an apartment deed runs for seventy. The calculation is clear and brutal: a flat is simply better value for the dead. Families have begun purchasing apartments in struggling developments to house cremated remains, giving rise to what scholars have termed guhui fang, bone ash apartments.[2] The ghost city and the columbarium have become, in contemporary China, the same building. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

Last time, we explored how insects navigate and hunt using motion-based vision, and how these perceptual interfaces can themselves be exploited by dragonflies using motion camouflage to trick conspecifics.

In this essay, we shift from insects to spiders, and from motion cues to the many sensory strategies spiders use to sense their environment and guide their behavior. These developments culminate in the Portia spider, which has evolved one of the most remarkable visual systems known, along with cognitive abilities to match it. Harland and Jackson assembled three representative hunting scenarios involving Portia, drawn from repeated observations, which I will use as illustrative examples during the essay, while we try to understand their perceptual space.

Spiders are an unlikely place to look for visual sophistication. The first spiders evolved more than 300 million years ago, long before flying insects. Web-building spiders, which dominated early spider evolution, rely only minimally on vision. Instead, they externalize perception into silk. The web is not just a trap; it is an extended sensory organ. Web-dwelling spiders using aerial structures developed about 150 million years ago targeting flying insects.

In web-dwelling spiders, vibration replaces vision as the primary channel of information. Abiotic sources such as wind tend to displace large portions of the web at once in low frequency. Biotic sources like struggling prey, potential mates, invading conspecifics or even predators, originate from specific locations usually at higher frequencies.

The web transmits and amplifies all signals generated, while the spider “listens” with its legs, reconstructing a three-dimensional map of tension and displacement. It senses these displacements using slit sensilla, specialized strain sensors located at the joints of its eight legs, capable of detecting movements as small as 0.1 μm. Read more »

Remnants of a celebration on the streets of Brixen, South Tyrol.

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