3 Quarks Daily Is Looking For New Columnists, DEADLINE Soon

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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Friday, June 20, 2025

Tea Montage

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

 1. Teacup from Russia

The first teacup I use as a child is not for tea but milk which is boiled and mixed with sugar. I blow on it to watch the steam disperse and the cream float. The teacup is Russian. This is just before the Soviet war begins in Afghanistan and America lionizes the Mujahideen, the future fathers of the would-be war orphans otherwise known as the Taliban.

By the time I begin college in America, the Soviet Union fades and the Mujahideen are already darlings of the past, but I hear the story of Stalin that will forever stay with me:

Stalin at the dinner table pets a live chicken whose feathers he plucks feather by feather, demonstrating how, as the chicken becomes colder and weaker, it hovers more desperately around his hand, the only source of warmth. Bloodied and in pain, it follows the trail of the few grains of feed tossed its way.

An image to relive in a time when I see nothing but a pile of feathers and humanity desperate for survival. It is June of 2025. The trail of blood will be obvious to the reader; it follows the trail of fuel, weapons, data, and global capitalism. Read more »

The System, the Rebels, and the People

by Jeroen Bouterse

I have been re-reading Paradise Lost, prompted by the battle between Immortals and demons in the movie Ne Zha 2. The film, if you have not seen it, depicts a ruling party turned into a vehicle for the personal ambitions of its leader. If you ask me, that is; consider yourself warned that I am rather strongly disposed these days to connect everything to contemporary politics.

Paradise Lost provides a temptation in that regard, however you read it. Whether the poem explores forms of resistance after the battle to depose a ruthless dictator has been lost, or whether Satan is an opportunistic agitator, campaigning on draining the swamp but in fact only out to be worshipped himself – or both – modern analogies easily suggest themselves. William Empson compared Milton’s God to Joseph Stalin.[1] If I don’t name names, it is out of respect both for you the reader and for the heroes in Milton’s poem, which are more eloquent, less petty, and show more depth than their present-day authoritarian counterparts.

Still, Milton’s account of the Fall allows us to psychologize. We can indulge in the belief that if people had chosen better, we wouldn’t have been in such a mess right now. I think that should be fun for both of us, or cathartic for me at least. In any case, I am telling you in advance, so that if you continue reading, you don’t “pretend / Surprisal, unadmonished, unforewarned”.[2] Read more »

The Necessity of Feeling Seen

by Marie Snyder

Attachment theory is part of the vernacular now. Even the Norwegian show Porni mentions it, and the dramatic eldest daughter blames her mom for her “relational damage”! We’ve largely accepted the questionable idea that mom’s attentiveness in childhood creates our attachment patterns for life — the gist of the theory as it’s largely understood, but what’s usefully generalizable from the actual studies? There are many criticisms of the theory, yet some university psych courses applaud it without reservation. I’m dubious about it, but I also don’t want to entirely throw this baby out with the bathwater.

This is a huge topic, and I’ll hardly do it justice here. There are a few excellent books on it, but part of the problem with how we understand the studies might be that the most nuanced books seem to be the most academically written, and likely the least read. As it morphed into popular consumption it may have strayed further from the original intention. On top of the reading, I went to a couple workshops on attachment to find the magic solution to all our relationship ills, and my big takeaway is this (for free!): if you’re a bit distant, consider being open to getting closer, and if you’re a bit clingy, try to step back a bit. It’s good advice to notice and change patterns that are a problem, absolutely, but I’m not sure it merits the number of workshops, courses, and self-help books that it’s provoked. At worst, some books actually counsel people to avoid any “avoidant or disordered people” as if there’s no saving them from their dastardly origins. Therapeutic discussions of childhood misconnections definitely have helped people better understand themselves, but I think this theory produces such volumes of celebration and condemnation because, in difficult relationships, it feels like the answer, but to parents, it feels like blame.   Read more »

Thursday, June 19, 2025

The Mark of Decay

by Akim Reinhardt

Donald Trump is a con man. He was that for a very long time before he entered politics. Because he is a con man, it is tempting for critics to describe his presidential victories as successful cons. However, I think that interpretation does not hold up. Because while Trump at his essence may be little more than a sociopathic con man lacking a sophisticated and flexible inferiority, voters and citizens are not simply “marks.” The electorate, especially one as large as the United States’ (over 73 million registered voters), is maddeningly complex. It reflects a stunning amount of views, ideals, fears, and nuance. And the catch is that while the elected government can never hope to fully reflect this complexity, it can unduly influence it.

We become what we set out to destroy. It’s an old chestnut. Oh, the irony of becoming the thing we hate as we dedicate ourselves to its destruction. But for now I am more concerned with a different irony: we become what sets out to destroy us. That we sometimes are buffaloed into thinking our enemy is our friend, mistaking their sneer for a smile, emulating them, falling into their arms, and ultimately doing their bidding. Something like Stockholm Syndrome, perhaps, but even darker, manifested though through thorny seduction instead of hostage taking, and offering little chance for redemption. At best there will be regret, and at worst a permanent transformation.

Why do you end up loving someone who hates you? Because you already hated someone. Read more »

Many Houses

by Angela Starita

A page from a Pee-Wee’s Playhouse coloring book by Gary Panter

Teddy lives in two houses. They’re equally bereft of taste–good or bad. Teddy’s a dog and his nominal doghouse is inside the house of his owner, Jonathan. It’s built inside the closet under a stairway, with its entrance, the side facing Jonathan’s living room, covered in pale rusticated stone.

Jonathan calls it “the world’s most famous doghouse.” In interviews on feel-good segments of news shows, he refers to Teddy as “the world’s most famous dog” and explains that he himself is “blessed with a creative mind.” This last is in reference to the scenarios he dreams up for TikTok videos that feature Teddy as a Rabelaisian prankster interested only in buying toys and treats with Jonathan’s credit card, watching movies, and playing video games. He spends an inordinate amount of time on a couch. 

It’s Teddy’s house that launched him to fame. Jonathan had been making DIY construction videos, and the one that garnered the most views was the closet-to-doghouse conversion. It had hit some collective nerve, the one that delights in miniatures and accounts for the popularity of dollhouses and children’s beauty pageants. Its fitted with a couch, shelves for photos a copy of PlayDog, and a television over a faux fireplace. My favorite of the videos has Jonathan crawling inside for Teddy-hosted sleepovers.

In the two years I’ve been watching Teddy videos, the mise en scene has moved from the doghouse to what I presume is Jonathan’s actual house, a place as scared of distinction as the model home developers “stage” for potential buyers—sparsely furnished in off-whites with names like Chantilly Lace and White Dove. Predictably, the first floor is an open-plan centered around a beige sectional sofa facing a high-definition television. Occasionally there are shots of a dining “area” and, in a behind-the-scenes video, Jonathan shows off his home gym, a room with a treadmill and other equipment. He and Teddy sometimes watch movies in the “home theater” a room with swollen, black recliners presumably facing an even larger screen. Read more »

Wednesday, June 18, 2025

“This Is A Test Of The Emergency Handwriting System”

by Mark R. DeLong

Four vertical stripes of portions of letters, each showing a different person's handwriting. The sentences that are pictured are all incomplete, but the "hands" are distinct. Some messy, others clear.In February, after a month-long consideration, I set my New Year’s resolutions into a five-by-five grid. I made a BINGO card—twenty-four resolutions plus the FREE space. It was my attempt to gamify the whole tired resolution process that I’ve failed at so well. Surprisingly the trick seems to have worked, at least partially.

One of my BINGO New Year’s resolutions was to write more letters. In fact, that was the first thing I thought of when I compiled my list and so it occupies under the “B”, one (to use BINGO-caller’s lingo). Activities have implications, I told myself, and “doing stuff teaches habits that transcend the things you do. Sure, some of my items look to-do-ish, but they can also lead to virtues.” That message headed up a post entitled “The Fate of Letters,” and I now wonder whether there was some subtle prognostication in the works.

Letter writing has begun to teach me some things.

“One thing about your letter,” someone told me “it’s so hard to read your handwriting.” He was referring to my handwritten note to North Carolina’s US Senator Thom Tillis, written as the new administration was winding up the wrecking ball and Congress sat in the bleachers, silently watching. “In the Senator’s office,” he continued, “they’d not bother to read it, I’m afraid.” (I was glad to have provided my readers a transcript.) And it is true, my handwriting is bad but not illegible. Scores of students have trudged through my comments squeezed into margins and in closing notes on their papers. Only occasionally have I had to “translate.”

Three of my recent letter recipients have commented (not exactly complained) about my writing, too. One, a physician, admitted his handwriting was about as scrawly and awful as mine. Another commented, “It was a pleasure to decipher your handwriting—not as bad as mine but a challenge nonetheless.” Even in a bewilderment of inky swirls and stabs, some readers were able to find a certain pleasure.

Another recipient sent me a postcard response, which he labelled a “test of the Emergency Handwriting System.” Read more »

A Test Which Failed Us All: How New York’s Specialized High School Exam Became a Blueprint for Inequality

by Daniel Gauss

In the context of growing concern about educational equity, the persistent racial disparities associated with the Specialized High School Admissions Test in New York City continue to spark debate. As cities and school systems nationwide reconsider the role of standardized testing, the story of the origins of this test shed light on how deeply embedded policies can appear neutral while, in reality, reinforcing inequality.

Both New York City’s civil service exam of the 1930s and the admissions test to New York City’s elite public high schools (the SHSAT) originated from a need to eliminate favoritism and political influence in acceptance policy. Both exams led to significant racial disparities. The civil service exam was reformed and government employment became more inclusive by the early 1970s, but no meaningful attempt has been made to make such adjustments in regard to the specialized high schools.

There can be no doubt that there have been lingering and chronic racial disparities at New York City’s elite and publicly-funded specialized schools following the adoption of the SHSAT. Numbers from 2024 show that Black students comprised just 4.5% of offer recipients, rising slightly from 3% in Fall 2023, but remaining far below their population percentage in the public school system (20.2%). Latinx students saw an increase to 7.6% of offers (up from 6.7%) but this still shows a major underrepresentation compared to their 28.3% share.

On the other hand, Asian students received around 52% of offers (while making up about 15% of the public school system), and White students received about 26% (while comprising about 16% of the system); together, White and Asian students accounted for roughly 78% of acceptances (Chalkbeat, June 18, 2024). These figures reflect a persistent demographic imbalance over decades.

So how did we get here? Read more »

Tuesday, June 17, 2025

Speak Our Truth

by Jerry Cayford

The coastline of the United Kingdom as measured with measuring rods of 200 km, 100 km and 50 km in length. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

I was always attracted to that old dichotomy: people must be either stupid or lying when they claim to believe some obvious falsehood. This dichotomy is a staple of Democratic theorizing about our political culture. (Sometimes the choice is between stupid and evil, which amounts to the same.) For example, Adam-Troy Castro’s social media classic “Why Do Liberals Think Trump Supporters Are Stupid?” has been circulating since halfway through Trump’s first term. But this simple dichotomy is losing its appeal. It is just not plausible that tens of millions of ordinary Republicans—our neighbors, friends, and families—are stupid or evil. There have been many proposed explanations of this puzzle: information siloes hide the obvious from otherwise intelligent people; tribalism exerts a powerful evolutionary draw. I believe, though, that there is a different and hidden complexity here.

I use the word “complexity” deliberately, because my argument draws on one of the icons of chaos theory (aka complexity theory) known as the “Coastline Paradox.” That name refers to a 1967 paper, “How Long Is the Coast of Britain?” by one of the pioneers of chaos theory, Benoit Mandelbrot. James Gleick provides a quick introduction to the topic in “The Man Who Reshaped Geometry” (1985), and a thorough treatment in his book Chaos: Making a New Science (1987). But the Coastline Paradox itself is easy to understand.

Imagine you measure the coast of Britain by putting markers every ten miles and summing the distances between them. You get a certain result. If you put markers every mile, you get a larger result. Measure the coast with a yardstick: longer still. With an inch ruler: longer. The coast will continue to get longer as you trace it around ever-smaller irregularities, around every grain of sand. So, how long is the coast? As Gleick says in his article, “In fact, it depends on the length of your ruler. As the scale becomes finer and finer, bays and peninsulas reveal new subbays and subpeninsulas, and the length—truly—increases without limit, at least down to atomic scales.” In a sense, physical length does not exist. Or, physical lengths are all infinite. Or, better, length depends on your method of measuring.

Examining length gives us a glimpse into a new picture of how the things we say and believe relate to reality. Read more »

Dead & Company Paint Their Masterpiece At The Sphere

by Charles Siegel

Oh the streets of Rome
are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think
that you’re seeing double
On a cold, dark night
on the Spanish Stairs

Those are the first lines of “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a song written by Bob Dylan in 1971. I remember that the first time I heard the tune, I thought it was by The Band, because they actually released it first in September of 1971. Two months later, Dylan’s version came out, oddly enough on the album “Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II.”

Many artists have covered the song, most notably the Grateful Dead. They played it 144 times, according to gratefulsets.net. This sounds like a lot, but it means the song doesn’t even make the top 85 in terms of number of live performances by the band. This is because they only began performing it in 1987, and the band stopped playing entirely in 1995 upon the death of their lead guitarist and talisman, Jerry Garcia.

Dead & Company

The Grateful Dead ended in 1995, but the band has lived on since then in a series of groups. These groups have contained various original members, gradually decreasing in number. The first was The Other Ones, followed by The Dead. But the longest-lived and most successful has been Dead & Company, which today includes two members of the Grateful Dead: Bob Weir, the rhythm guitarist and vocalist, and Mickey Hart, the drummer. It also includes another drummer, Jay Lane, and the bassist Oteil Burbridge and keyboard player Jeff Chimenti. Finally, there’s John Mayer on lead guitar and vocals.

On a fortunately-timed business trip to Las Vegas last month, I saw Dead & Company on a Thursday night and Friday night. This was the last weekend of their second two-month “residency” at the Sphere, the futuristic new music venue that looks as if it simply fell from outer space and landed a block from the Strip, and now blinks out strange messages all day and night.

If they were tired and happy to be nearing the end of this run, they sure didn’t sound like it.  Read more »

Monday, June 16, 2025

Ulyssees on the Limmat

by Rafaël Newman

Poster by Dieter Kubli

Zurich was James Joyce’s home on several occasions. The writer’s first sojourn there, in 1904, was brief: when the prospect of a job teaching English in Switzerland didn’t pan out, he and his partner, Nora Barnacle, freshly arrived from Dublin, soon moved on to Trieste, then still the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s only seaport. Joyce and Nora returned to Zurich in 1915 and spent most of the Great War there, renting apartments in various districts as Joyce worked on Ulysses and took part in the intellectual life of a city teeming with refugees. Finally, having spent the interwar period for the most part in Paris, by 1940 the couple were back in Zurich, where Joyce died the following year. He remains in the city to this day, in Fluntern Cemetery, where his seated memorial gazes out wryly, if myopically, at Lake Zurich and the Alps beyond.

The Zürich James Joyce Foundation, Augustinergasse 9

That the Swiss metropolis boasts the Zürich James Joyce Foundation, however, an internationally renowned center for Joyce research and scholarship, is due less to the Irish writer’s tenancy in the city, in life as in death, than it is to the achievements of another man, a Swiss native and Zurich local named Fritz Senn, who has devoted much of his long life to the study and promotion of Joyce’s work. Among Senn’s many publications are Joyce’s dislocutions: Essays on reading as translation (1984); Nicht nur Nichts gegen Joyce. Aufsätze über Joyce und die Welt (1999); Joycean Murmoirs (2007); and, most recently, Ulysses Polytropos (2022). Senn has founded and edited international journals, initiated Joyce symposia, and, together with Klaus Reichert, compiled the Frankfurt James Joyce Edition, in seven volumes.

Fritz Senn leads a reading group at the ZJJF (photo: ZJJF)

The Zürich James Joyce Foundation (ZJJF), which celebrates its 40th birthday this year, was established in 1985 with financial assistance from the Schweizerischer Bankverein (today’s UBS) to house Fritz Senn’s collection of first editions, secondary literature, and Joycean memorabilia, and to allow visiting scholars to profit from Senn’s personal expertise along with the library and archive. The ZJJF holds open reading groups, typically led by Senn himself, in which participants read Ulysses and Finnegans Wake together over the course of many months, and organizes a series of talks, known as the Strauhof Lectures, by noted Joyce specialists. It hosts a translators’ roundtable and regularly stages convivial celebrations of Joyce’s work, with readings and music at Christmas and, of course, a yearly Bloomsday event every June 16, commemorating Joyce and Nora’s first assignation and the date on which Ulysses is set. Read more »

Thomas Jefferson Would Like A Word With You

by Michael Liss

Words, so many words. Words that inspire “Ask Not,” and those that call upon our resolve “[A] date that will live in infamy.” Words that warn about the future “[W]e must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and those that express optimism about it “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” Words that deny their own importance “[T]he world will little note nor long remember what we say here,” while elevating themselves and the dead they honor to immortality.

These words, these good words. They are the building blocks of our civic culture. In a democracy like ours, where we do not demand conformity, but rather abide by rules that are essentially an exchange of promises, words are paramount. What do they mean, how binding are they, do they express an unbreakable eternal truth, or do they grow sclerotic, even obsolete? If so, how do we change them? Is there an essence, a central truth that is and must be immutable?

To get any of those answers, we should begin with Jefferson, the central designer and primary wordsmith in the architecture of independence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Wonderful, isn’t it? Thrilling. It is our intellectual origin story. It should fill us with pride—that, for these principles, we took on the most powerful nation on Earth and, after years of reversals, won. Soon we will celebrate the 249th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. We can trot out some nerdy historian to point out that maybe it’s not really the 4th of July—maybe it’s the 2nd or 3rd. We can indulge ourselves in cautionary reminders how perhaps we haven’t lived up to the promises that are in the Declaration. We can certainly bewail the state of contemporary politics. Or we can just enjoy it, maybe go to a small town if we don’t live in one, see the old cars and the pride of the older soldiers, the flags and bunting, the picnics, the fireworks, the tradition of a 4th of July speech by some local worthy.

Blather—of course it is. Like everything else, we commoditize it, commercialize it, invariably bury the lead: At its best, Independence Day should be a reaffirmation of the Declaration’s central promise. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

……………. All the world’s a stage,
                   And all the men and women merely players;
                  They have their exits and their entrances,
                  And one man in his time plays many parts,
                  His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
                  Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arm
                                   — Shakespeare, As You Like it, Act II

Always a Beginning

I think of the cartoons
that blare, THE END IS NIGH!
from a sign of a guy
on a street, torn coat, forlorn,
whose years went south, didn’t pan out as
he thought they should when he was a boy,
never made it over life’s hump
when the light at the end of the tunnel
everybody talks about as things collapse
went dim —from fat sun
to lit pinprick in the scrim behind a stage
where all are merely players,
women  men  strong  lame  clowns  crooks
politicians running from, showing up,
puking, mewling, but then I thought
of a moment just before,
when in the dark there is nothing,
nothing except a beginning,,. . .always
a beginning
Jim Culleny
11/1/16

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Sunday, June 15, 2025

Book Plate: Ed Simon Imagines Time

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.

The role of the mechanical clock in medieval science - Medievalists.net

A novel, like a symphony, must be conveyed through a particular artistry of time. Unlike a painting, or even a short lyric poem which gestures towards narrative, a novel must dwell in it. Even a novel where “nothing happens” must by the nature of the form make its art happen through the progression of a past into the future, but it in the complexities of that transition – the roundabouts, the flashbacks, the shifting, the slip-streaming, the ruminations, and the foreshadowing – which makes extended prose so adept at conveying the ambiguous feeling of time itself. Within a novel, time can be treated as anything but simple, so that the past can find itself perennial; the future can be a matter of precognition; the present an eternity (or, conversely, nothing at all). “Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word,” writes the Russian Formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. “If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.” The abstraction of the present is what some mediums exult at – whether lyric or painting – but a novel can’t help but exist amidst the texture of time, its warp and warble, its nicks and snares.

The Spoiled Heart by British novelist Sunjeev Sahota masterfully interrogates time, in particular time’s daughter of memory and its cruel son trauma. Published in April, Sohata’s novel is set in industrial Chesterfield, a small hamlet in Derbyshire. Focalized around the local union leader Nayan Olak, though narrated by his occasional childhood friend Sajjan Dhanoa who is equal parts roman a clef and Nick Carraway, The Spoiled Heart is set in a realistic England distant from many Americans’ country house fantasies. Working-class and multicultural, tough and often despairing, this is the England not necessarily of Blenheim and Wentworth Woodhouse, or even of red phone-booths, double-decker buses, and fish and chips, but rather of kebab houses and labor politics, strikes and stark class divisions. Nayan, the son of Indian Sikh immigrants, suffered hideous trauma twenty years before, when as a young man barely into his 20s a seemingly accidental fire in his parent’s High Street shop killed his mother and young son. The tragedy destroys Nayan’s marriage so that in between caring for his bitter and demented father, he ultimately dedicates his life to Unify, a union representing laborers across a variety of industries. Having decided to run for the presidency of Unify, Nayan is challenged by his colleague and former friend Megha Sharma. Where Nayan is a class-essentialist leftist of the Corbynite variety, Sharma – also the daughter of Indian immigrants, albeit from a well-heeled class – is an adherent to an identity-focused liberalism. Much of the drama from The Spoiled Heart derives from the ideological and personal friction between these two.

But were Sahota’s novel only a means of allegorizing post-Brexit and post-covid fissures in the British left it wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating, and moving, as it is. Read more »

Being Good After Hegel and Nietzsche

by Chris Horner

What does it mean to live a Good Life in the secular west? Good can mean more than one thing, of course: apart from moral good – doing the right or ‘good’ thing, there is the idea of ‘good’ as flourishing, being happy, fulfilled. The latter matters to us a lot, judging by all the self-help books, YouTube influencers, Rules for Life and so on. For very many lucky enough not to have to worry about poverty or war there still seems a grinding anxiety about how to achieve a happy life. That life seems to be Elsewhere. But why? Some would argue that the angst is due a loss of a shared way of life, one grounded in a conception of human purpose. So, we get nihilism and sense of anomie. Yet lost wallets are returned, and courtesy is still exhibited in everyday situations. If this is moral anarchy, it is not as chaotic as one might expect. Nevertheless. I think something has changed for moderns.

With the decline of an Authority often associated with the Christian church in the West, many people experience the question of what one should do as a burden. As an unlamented Paternal Authority wanes, anxiety about happiness and fulfilment takes its place. The new Superego command is to enjoy oneself, be the best one can be, stay fit, be loved, and be attractive. Consequently, we turn to an army of experts and coaches eager to provide us with ‘rules for living’. And the appetite for moral judgment hasn’t left us either: yet more rules about what one ought to say or not say (rather than action that might change anything).

Modernity—however we define it—follows the Enlightenment. Kant described Enlightenment as the end of tutelage and the accession to maturity, with the responsibilities that come with freedom. Freedom is understood as the end of the tyranny of princes and prelates, the chance to fulfil one’s desires. However, greater knowledge of the self leads to greater doubts about those desires, and the causes of Desire itself. The  autonomy promised by Enlightenment seems compromised from the start. While Nietzsche, along with Freud, is regularly cited as the key figure in this creeping sense that the subject isn’t master in their own house, Hegel foreshadows both. For Hegel, too, there are no simple, undivided identities: we are divided subjects. Read more »

Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar: Literary Gupshup with Kanupriya Dhingra

by Claire Chambers

Entering Delhi’s famous Sunday Book Market – known locally as the Patri Kitab Bazaar – in Daryaganj is to step into another world. Previously a tangle of tarpaulin stalls behind Jama Masjid, it has been moved to a gated compound called Mahila Haat. In her new Cambridge University Press Element titled Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra treats this market as an improvisatory ‘location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities’.

Dhingra, a South Asia print historian who earned her PhD at SOAS (University of London) and now works as a professor at BML Munjal University, passed much of her life as a young adult among these booksellers. In our interview she explained that her middle-class family had not given her a particularly bookish childhood. Yet, as a student searching for texts to ‘help with passing exams’ and then as a researcher, she was unexpectedly introduced to the neglected but fascinating subject of parallel book bazaars. Over years of fieldwork, she came to realize that these markets encapsulate Delhi’s historical, economic, and socio-political currents. The result is a 92-page minigraph that fuses memoir, reportage, and analysis to tell the bazaar’s story. It reads at once as a colourful ethnographic diary and an invitation to imagine an alternative literary landscape.

Dhingra’s book is built on many months of Sundays spent walking the market, talking to traders and readers, and mapping the bazaar’s assemblages and syncopations. I was lucky enough to tag along on one of these expeditions in July 2023. Arriving empty-handed, we traced a circuitous route between tables piled high with dog-eared paperbacks under billowing canopies. I departed clutching lucky finds: a 1950s Urdu story collection and a strange out-of-print children’s novel called The Vicious Case of the Viral Vaccine. This scintilla of serendipity – arising from what she calls ‘double chance encounters’ – defines the market. Read more »

Friday, June 13, 2025

Speech Acts and Mental Samizdat

by Christopher Hall

Image by ChatGPT

When J. L. Austin published his book How to do Things With Words, his intent was to demonstrate that language must be understood to go beyond any mere reference function. We do not use language merely to point to things in the world, but also to enact things within the world. “I christen thee the Titanic” is a linguistic act. The non-referential quality of language ought to be of some concern to us at the moment. Trump, bullshitter supreme, has never cared about the referential aspect of his language, and whether that bears any correspondence with reality. What strikes me most about Trump’s 2nd term is that he seems to be deploying this empty language with intent; MAGA has become self-aware, perhaps even sentient. The key to the Trump presidency is not misinformation, but the ultimate distrust of information itself. He wants, and is getting, a people who can be convinced to distrust all signals, and thus hear only noise. Everything Trump says is designed to enact something on the listener; what Trump is actually talking about is often irrelevant.

There is a clumsy will-to-power here, but Trump’s fundamental authoritarian impulse doesn’t, for the moment, seem to be pulling in the typical direction. Of course, it’s entirely possible that he wants people to believe that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, or that there’s a white genocide occurring in South Africa. But there’s also a very real sense that he simply doesn’t care. Orwell envisioned political language as being rendered “dead,” particularly (but not exclusively by any means) in authoritarian states. And yes, Trump’s limited vocabulary, his absurd repetitions and locutions, and his general bumptious cadence, might all be symptoms of general necrosis. But, at least in this sphere, Trump doesn’t have to coerce anybody. It’s enough to present nonsense and proclaim that people can think what they want.

The politician as bullshitter is nothing new. But as I think about Trump and the new authoritarianism’s affect on the public sphere, I am beginning to believe the key to 21st century is not what Orwell saw as a deadening of language. Yes, meaning is on the decline, but it is coming about not as result of repressive restriction, but rather through perverse exuberance. Language isn’t dying; it is experiencing cancerous growth. If it true that authoritarian states like China and Russia continue to enforce silence, they increasingly do not to rely on this alone as a means of control; overwhelming noise will do the trick just as well. Do we understand enough about control by noise to understand this trajectory in our political future? Read more »

Imagining, for Grown-ups: On Illness & Superstition

by Lei Wang

My mother, who was a doctor, always wished she could have been a teacher instead. She was assigned to be a doctor in 1970s China in the weird way the government assigned people to careers then, based solely on test scores. (My dad, assigned as a programmer, had really wanted to pursue a purer, less applied kind of science.) Mom did like being a doctor, though always warned me against going into medicine: the dangers of knowing too much, also all those turtle shells (what she called organic chemistry compounds) to memorize. Perhaps because she really wanted to be a teacher, perhaps because when she immigrated to America, she could no longer practice medicine, she loved to talk to me enthusiastically about biology, especially about T cells and germs as the cops and robbers of the immune system, as if she were my personal Mrs. Frisbee of the Magic School Bus.

I have not gone into medicine, but I have taken weird, pseudoscientific healing classes that may very well be related to growing up with too many biology metaphors. Recently, I have been thinking: we call it healing, but for whom? When healing a cold, aren’t we actually just mass-murdering viruses? I have a friend who everyone in our friend group agrees is the most loving person we know; during the pandemic, when she got sick yet again, the dark joke was that she was too hospitable to viruses, too accommodating of their comfort. She could have stronger boundaries.

“There are two kinds of people, cancer people and allergy people,” a metaphysical healer once told me. “Cancer people take too much in and allergy people keep too much out.” This made sense, metaphorically. We want to know why, and sometimes the symptoms really do fit the situation (I also like to think, since I have allergies, that this means I will not get cancer). Read more »