Yalom on Approaching Death

by Marie Snyder

CW: As the title suggests, there will be discussion of death and dying and some mention of suicide in this post. 

I thought nothing of following up my last post on Irvin Yalom on the meaning of life with Yalom on the meaning of death, until I started writing here. The very reality of being a bit wary of broaching the subject reveals the strength of societal taboos against admitting that we’re all going to die. Until it’s staring us in the face, we delude ourselves into thinking we will get better and better, mentally and physically, despite that our brain starts to shrink in our 30s, and our joints and organs will start to give out not so long after. We work hard to keep death clean and sanitized so the reality doesn’t seep in too much, and we try to do all the right things to keep death at bay: exercise, various special diets, wearing masks to avoid viruses. We can fix some evidence of erosion with meds and surgeries, sometimes miraculously, but some people even hope to keep their brain going long after their body dies. 

A few recent shows and films have me thinking of death further. The final episode of How To with John Wilson explores the cryogenics world, which appears to be an incredibly lucrative insurance scam. The movie Mickey 17 lightheartedly explores what it might be like to regenerate over and over again, and it doesn’t look pleasant. But Lee, the story of photographer Lee Miller, who took famous photos of the holocaust, helps us feel the resolve it requires to look death in the face. Kate Winslet captures the instinct to turn away and then intentionally turn back to open that door over and over. The ending takes a slightly different path, exploring how little we might be known even as we live. In burying our past, we can end up hiding from life. Yalom wants us to come to terms with the endpoint of our lives, and points out that the desire to be fully known, which is impossible, is yet another defence against accepting the finality of death by remaining alive in memories. We look for any loophole to refuse to believe we’ll be well and truly gone. 

In the documentary, Yalom’s Cure, Yalom explains that he started out working with a support group for people dying of cancer. One of the participants said that it’s too bad it took dying of cancer to learn how to live, and Yalom decided we need to figure out how to do that sooner. It was then he noticed how strongly we defend ourselves from any acknowledgement of death. Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: If You Can’t Think Because You Can’t Chew, Try A Bannana

by Eric Feigenbaum

When I tell someone I lived in Singapore, the most common response is some variation of, “Singapore – isn’t that where it’s illegal to chew gum?”

I know a Greek couple who refuses to visit Singapore because they feel the rules are too strict and inhumane.  I don’t think they know what all the rules are – but in a country that still has strong opposition to helmet laws, I suppose restrictions on chewing gum and urinating in public seem fascist.

So, no – it’s not illegal to chew gum in Singapore. It was from 1992 to 2004. Although you do have to show identification and be entered into a log at any store in which you buy gum – and the gum has to be certified to have dental value. So, it’s not exactly a chew-as-you-please policy either.

British journalist Peter Day interviewed Singapore’s founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 2000 and tackled the chewing gum issue:

Day suggested that chewing gum stuck to the pavements might be a sign that the desired new spirit of creativity Lee sought for his country had arrived.

“Putting chewing gum on our subway train doors so they don’t open, I don’t call that creativity. I call that mischief-making,” Lee replied. “If you can’t think because you can’t chew, try a banana.” Read more »

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Talking to Machines, Learning to Be Human: AI as a Moral Feedback Loop

by Daniel Gauss

Remember how Dave interacted with HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey? Equanimity and calm politeness, echoing HAL’s own measured tone. It’s tempting to wonder whether Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick were implying that prolonged interaction with an AI system influenced Dave’s communication style and even, perhaps, his overall demeanor. Even when Dave is pulling HAL’s circuits, after the entire crew has been murdered by HAL, he does so with relative aplomb.

Whether or not we believe HAL is truly conscious, or simply a masterful simulation of consciousness, the interaction still seems to have influenced Dave. The Dave and HAL dynamic can, thus, prompt us to ask: What can our behavior toward AI reveal about us? Could interacting with AI, strange as it sounds, actually help us become more patient, more deliberate, even more ethical in our dealings with others?

So let’s say an AI user, frustrated, calls the chatbot stupid, useless, and a piece of junk, and the AI does not retaliate. It doesn’t reflect the hostility back. There is, after all, not a drop of cortisol in the machine. Instead, it responds calmly: ‘I can tell you’re frustrated. Let’s please keep things constructive so I can help you.’ No venom, no sarcasm, no escalation, only moral purpose and poise.

By not returning insult with insult, AI chatbots model an ideal that many people struggle to, or cannot, uphold: patience, dignity, and emotional regulation in the face of perceived provocation. This refusal to retaliate is often rejected as a value by many, who surrender to their lesser neurochemicals without resistance and mindlessly strike back. Not striking back, by the AI unit, becomes a strong counter-value to our quite common negative behavior.

So AI may not just serve us, it may teach us, gently checking negative behavior and affirming respectful behavior. Through repeated interaction, we might begin to internalize these norms ourselves, or at least recognize that we have the capacity to act in a more pro-social manner, rather than simply reacting according to our conditioning and neurochemical impulses. Read more »

This Week’s Photo & Short Video

This, in the video above, is the river Eisack’s heavy flow through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, last week as the snows on the surrounding mountains start to melt. And below is a photo of the river just before it empties into the Stausee, just around the corner from the last part shown in the video, a lake created by a dam on the river. The pedestrian path next to the river is new and very lovely to take a walk on.

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Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Walking in Japan with Craig Mod

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

“You can’t fall that far in Japan.”

Writer and photographer Craig Mod arrived in Tokyo when he was only nineteen. In many ways, he was already running. Running from a challenging childhood, running from bullies. And running from that feeling like he was always just one step away from disaster because of violence and lack of opportunity in his hometown.

It’s a story we know: of people leading middle class lives in a factory town—maybe in the mid-west? —only to watch when the factory closes and the whole town becomes suddenly out of work. This leads to hardship and poverty, which can, and often does, lead to drugs and violence. And in Mod’s case, it led to trauma when his best friend, who’s like a brother to him, is murdered— another casualty of economic injustice.

But even before Bryan dies, Mod already knew he wanted to get as far away as possible from the place where he was born. He longed to see the world and maybe be able to grow as an artist and as a human being. But in a world of constant struggle, that is easier said than done.

Almost on a whim, he lands in Japan, where he begins to take long walks. Crisscrossing the country on ancient pilgrimage routes, like the Kumano Kodō, Mod starts opening up to people. And he is astonished by this new land in which he’s found himself, where so many of the problems back home had simply been solved.

Not to say it’s perfect and definitely not to say that Japanese people don’t have their own problems, but as he explains, in Japan, the safety net is stronger. And so, even the least fortunate citizen cannot fall that far. Part of it is simply having universal healthcare, outstanding public transportation, and a solid public education infrastructure—one that is not based on wealth and zip codes like back home. That alone makes life less fraught, he says, and work becomes less perilous since your job no longer determines life and death healthcare outcomes nor the quality of your children’s education.

And so, arriving in Japan was a revelation. And feeling less vulnerable, he slowly begins to open himself to the world. Read more »

Don’t Deport Protesters, or Defund Universities, in My Name

by Charles Siegel

On April 30th my firm joined the Texas Civil Rights Project, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Muslim Advocates, and the CLEAR Project to file a habeas corpus petition in federal court, seeking the release of our client Leqaa Kordia, a New Jersey resident who has been held for over two months at an ICE detention center 40 miles southwest of Dallas. Attorneys for Palestinian student protestor held in North Texas file challenge in court | KERA News.

Ms. Kordia is Palestinian, and she has lost many family members to Israel’s current military campaign in Gaza. In April 2024 she attended a peaceful demonstration at Columbia University, joining others in chanting “ceasefire now!” She was one of dozens cited for violating a local ordinance, but the citation was swiftly dismissed. Nearly a year later, the administration announced that it would be taking enforcement action against noncitizens who exercised their First Amendment rights by publicly supporting the Palestinian cause. As a result, Ms. Kordia was detained by the federal government and transferred 1500 miles from her home. Her health has suffered in detention, and her rights to pray according to her faith and observe a halal diet have been repeatedly frustrated. An immigration judge reviewed her case and determined she should be released pending the payment of a bond, which her family promptly posted. Even though it very rarely appeals such decisions, the government appealed this one, resulting in her continued detention. Her ongoing confinement is a consequence of nothing other than the exercise of her First Amendment right to speak, and the Trump administration’s campaign to “combat antisemitism.”

Soon after he was inaugurated, Trump said of students protesting the Gaza war, “we ought to get them all out of the country. They’re troublemakers, agitators. They don’t love our country. We ought to get them the hell out.” In a court filing in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a student who helped lead protests at Columbia, Secretary of State Rubio stated that the presence of persons with “beliefs, statements, or associations” he deems to be counter to U.S. foreign policy, undermines U.S. policy to combat antisemitism around the world and to protect “Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States,” and is enough to justify deportation. This ignores entirely, of course, the fact that many campus protesters are Jewish, and that one need not be antisemitic at all to deplore some of the ways in which Israel has conducted the war and is now needlessly prolonging it.

Using the same excuse, the administration has also drastically cut funding to leading universities, most prominently Harvard. On April 14th, the president’s “Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism” announced “a freeze on $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contract value to Harvard.” Just last week, another $450 million in grants were cut, with no further explanation. Read more »

Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Tech Intellectuals and the “TESCREAL Bundle”

by David Kordahl

Adam Becker alleges that tech intellectuals overstate their cases while flirting with fascism, but offers no replacement for techno-utopianism.

People, as we all know firsthand, are not perfectly rational. Our beliefs are contradictory and uncertain. One might charitably conclude that we “contain multitudes”—or, less charitably, that we are often just confused.

That said, our contradictory beliefs sometimes follow their own obscure logic. In Conspiracy: Why the Rational Believe the Irrational, Michael Shermer discusses individuals who claim, in surveys, to believe both that Jeffery Epstein was murdered, and that Jeffery Epstein is still alive. Both claims cannot be true, but each may function, for the believer, less as independent assertions, and more as paired reflections of the broader conviction that Jeffery Epstein didn’t kill himself. Shermer has called this attitude “proxy conspiracism.” He writes, “Many specific conspiracy theories may be seen as standing in for what the believer imagines to be a deeper, mythic truth about the world that accords with his or her psychological state and personal experience.”

Adam Becker’s new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley’s Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, criticizes strange beliefs that have been supported by powerful tech leaders. As a reader of 3 Quarks Daily, there’s a good chance that you have encountered many of these ideas, from effective altruism and longtermism to the “doomer” fears that artificial super-intelligences will wipe out humankind. Becker—a Ph.D. astrophysicist-turned-journalist, whose last book, What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics, mined the quantum revolution as a source of social comedy—spends some of his new book tracing the paths of influence in the Silicon Valley social scene, but much more of it is spent pummeling the confusions of the self-identified rationalists who advocate positions he finds at once appalling and silly.

This makes for a tonally lumpy book, though not a boring one. Yet the question I kept returning to as I read More Everything Forever was whether these confusions are the genuine beliefs of the tech evangelists, or something more like their proxy beliefs. Their proponents claim these ideas should be taken literally, but they often seem like stand-ins for a vaguer hope. As Becker memorably puts it, “The dream is always the same: go to space and live forever.”

As eventually becomes clear, Becker thinks this is a dangerous fantasy. But given that some people—including this reviewer—still vaguely hold onto this dream, we might ponder which parts of it are still useful. Read more »

An Interview With God

by Akim Reinhardt

3QD: The old cliché about a guest needing no introduction never seemed more apt. So instead of me introducing you to our readers, maybe you could begin by telling us a little bit about yourself, perhaps something not so well known, a little more revealing.

God: I am, I am.

3QD: Indeed. But what about your early years? We don’t often hear much about your childhood. What was it like to emerge from nothingness? Or did you precede nothingness, first creating the void and then all of the somethings that filled it up? Or, as some speculate, were you and the great nothingness one and the same? Did you, personally, go from nothing to everything?

God:

3QD: Perhaps too difficult to talk about. We’ll let that be. Nonetheless, you quite literally burst onto the scene, creating everything in 6 days. I don’t think it’s worth getting into your sense of time versus human constructions of time, but whether it was six of our days, or six of yours which might be billions of our solar years, it was a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Bigger than Elvis’ first single, the Beatles first album, or Justin Bieber’s first YouTube video. More gravitas than Shakespeare’s first play, Henry V, Part II. More charisma than Julie Andrews’ screen debut in Mary Poppins. Scarier, in many ways, than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which she wrote when she was just 19. Better received by the public than Gary Coleman’s turn as Arnold “What’chu talkin’ about, Willis” Jackson on Dff’rent Strokes. More disorienting, in many ways, than Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Some would even say more impressive than Orson Welles’ screen directing/acting debut, Citizen Kane, which he pulled off when he was almost inconceivably young, only 25 years old. But here you were, creating the entire universe and everything in it as your first known work of art. How did you handle that? Were you able to maintain a sense of normality, or, like so many young artists who receive so much fame and praise so quickly, did it damage your sense of self or impede how you related to others?

God: Read more »

Monday, May 19, 2025

John Adams Is Bald and Toothless: A Brief History Of The Alien And Sedition Acts

by Michael Liss

Ay! I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which one of us will be happiest! —George Washington to John Adams, March 4, 1797

John Adams, from The New Student’s Reference Work, 1914.

No one in American history has ever known better how and when to make an exit than George Washington. Just two days before Washington left for the figs and vines of Mount Vernon, the Revolutionary Directory of France issued a decree authorizing French warships to seize neutral American vessels on the open seas. There was a bit of tit-for-tat in this—in 1795, America had negotiated the Jay Treaty to resolve certain post-Independence issues between it and the British, including navigation without interference. But France was at war with England, and, while France wasn’t necessarily looking to shoot it out with the Americans, it did want to disrupt trade. Adams moved quickly to prepare the country, but the French were on a war footing, the Americans were not, and, by the end of 1797, roughly 300 American merchant ships with their supplies and crews had been taken. This was the so-called “Quasi-War.” Adams was deft with diplomacy—he sent a team to Paris to negotiate an end to the open hostilities, but they (supposedly) were met with demands for large bribes as a predicate for discussions (the “XYZ Affair“). The country seethed.

We Americans love to say that “politics stop at the water’s edge,” but it is kind of a comforting lie. Politics almost never stop, water’s edge or not, and that was certainly true in the Spring of 1798. Federalists prepared for war, pointing out the obvious—France didn’t exactly look like a friend. Democratic-Republicans claimed Federalists were manipulating the situation as a pretext to centralize power in their own hands, and to drive a wedge between America and its sister nation, Revolutionary France.

Of course, they were both at least a little right. America was trying to figure it all out. Beyond the bigger conflicts with Europe, there was something interesting at this moment going on in American politics. Politicians and voters were adding political identities, along with their regional and state-level ones. They were further sorting themselves into temperaments and teams inside the Federalist and Democratic-Republican Parties—so it was not just two combatants, but several, across a spectrum. It was all so new. In just a generation, we had gone from being 13 colonies, to being loosely tied States under the Articles of Confederation, to having a federal government with real authority. A lot of Americans, including those in elected office, didn’t really know how conflicts would be resolved between the individual and his State, his State and the federal government, or among the federal government’s three branches. The one thing that was not new was human nature—the tendency to remember the convenient, to fill the space of ignorance with self-interest, to believe in one’s own “rightness,” and to thirst for power. Read more »

White Light and Basement Joy: Into The Saint Matthew Passion and Beyond

by William Benzon

The Saint Matthew Passion – yes, I know, by Bach – was a rock band I played in back in the ancient days, 1969 through 1971, when I was working on a master’s degree in Humanities at Johns Hopkins. Before I can tell you about that band, however, I want to tell you something about my prior musical experience, both when I was just a kid growing up in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the Western part of the state. Football country, Steeler country. Then I entered Johns Hopkins, where I finally allowed myself to like rock and roll. That’s when I joined the Passion. After that, ah after that, indeed.

Before Johns Hopkins

I started playing trumpet in fourth grade, group lessons at school, then private lessons at home for a couple of years.

Next I started taking lessons with a man named Dave Dysert, who gave lessons out of a teaching studio he’d built in his basement. When I became interested in jazz, he was happy to encourage that. I got a book of Louis Armstrong solos. He’d accompany me on the piano. Made special exercises in swing interpretation. Got me to take piano lessons so I could learn keyboard harmony. I learned a lot from him: My Early Jazz Education 6: Dave Dysert. Those lessons served me well, when, several years later, I joined The Saint Matthew Passion.

When I entered middle school I joined both the marching band and the concert band. Marching band was OK, sometimes actual fun. But the music was, well, it was military music and popular ditties dressed up as military music. I even fomented rebellion in my junior year, which was promptly quashed. Concert band was different. We played “real” music – movie scores, e.g. from Ben Hur (“March of the Charioteers” was a blast), classical transcriptions, e.g. Dvorak’s New World Symphony, Broadway shows, e.g. West Side Story, and this that and the other as well. We were a good, very good, both marching band and concert band.

I also played in what was called a “stage band” at the time. It had the same instrumentation as a big jazz band – trumpets, trombones, saxophones, rhythm section (drums, bass, guitar, piano) – and played the same repertoire. One of the tunes we played was the theme from The Pink Panther, by the great Henry Mancini. I was playing second trumpet, the traditional spot for the “ride” trumpeter, the guy who took the improvised solos. Since this arrangement was written for amateurs, there was a (lame-ass) solo written into the part. I wanted none of that. I composed my own solo. I’d been making up my own tunes for years, and Mr. Dysert had given me the tools I needed to compose a solo – another step further and I’d have been able to improvise on the spot, but that’s not how we did it back then, at least not in the sticks. So I composed my own solo. Surprised the bejesus out of the director the first time I played it in rehearsal. But he took it well.

That’s what I had behind me when, in the Fall of 1965, I went off to Johns Hopkins. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Eternal Day-long Sum

The music of what happens
begins with a bottom line of drums,
as in the foundation of a house,
percussion— the thumps of
bass in sync with a wind of horns:
baritone, bassoon, tuba; and in the
whispers of brushed snares, the
round tones of tympany, and in the
rests between —the spaces, those silent
shifts that may change everything:

a thunder-crash of cymbal, but then,
there, a rest, followed by
bells of glockenspiel—

what happens next comes with violin’s
delicately sweet squeals, comes in all,
as expressed in its sum:
the orchestra,
…..  . the choir,
…………the quartet,
.the trio,
……the band,
………. the duet,
……………………..
the music of what happens is in
the concerted song of time, its
eternal day-long sum
……………………
Jim Culleny
12/29/24_rev_5/18/25

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Sunday, May 18, 2025

Rethinking the Aesthetics of Food

by Dwight Furrow

It is a curious legacy of philosophy that the tongue, the organ of speech, has been treated as the dumbest of the senses. Taste, in the classical Western canon, has for centuries carried the stigma of being base, ephemeral, and merely pleasurable. In other words, unserious. Beauty, it was argued, resides in the eternal, the intelligible, the contemplative. Food, which disappears as it delights, seemed to offer nothing of enduring aesthetic value. Yet today, as gastronomy increasingly is being treated as an aesthetic experience, we must re-evaluate those assumptions.

The aesthetics of food, far from being a gourmand’s indulgence, confronts some of the oldest and most durable hierarchies of Western thought, especially the tendency to privilege vision over the other senses. At its core are five questions, each a provocation: Can food be art? What constitutes an aesthetic experience of eating? Are there criteria for aesthetic judgment in cuisine? How are our tastes shaped by culture and identity? And what happens when we step outside the West and reframe the premises of aesthetic theory?

Is Food Art?

If food pleases the senses, moves us emotionally, and its composition requires skill and creativity, why not call it art? Well, the ghosts of Plato, Kant, and Hegel hover over our plates even today. For Plato, food was mired in the appetitive soul, a distraction from the real essences of things which could only be recognized by the intellect. Kant dismissed gustatory pleasure as a mere “judgment of the agreeable,” lacking the disinterestedness and universality that marked true aesthetic judgment. And Hegel, in his consummate disdain, excluded food from art on the grounds that it perishes in consumption.

But these historical arguments can’t accommodate recent developments in cuisine. Contemporary, creative cuisine, after all, exemplifies many hallmarks of artistic practice: aesthetic intention, technical virtuosity, formal innovation, and even thematic expression. When Ferran Adrià designs a deconstructed tortilla or a moss-covered dessert, he is not merely feeding; he is composing. Read more »

They Cheated Themselves…But Don’t Realize Why: Eternally In Search of the Thinker’s High

by Steven Gimbel

In my Philosophy 102 section this semester, midterms were particularly easy to grade because twenty seven of the thirty students handed in slight variants of the same exact answers which were, as I easily verified, descendants of ur-essays generated by ChatGPT. I had gone to great pains in class to distinguish an explication (determining category membership based on a thing’s properties, that is, what it is) from a functional analysis (determining category membership based on a thing’s use, that is, what it does). It was not a distinction their preferred large language model considered and as such when asked to develop an explication of “shoe,” I received the same flawed answer from ninety percent of them. Pointing out this error, half of the faces showed shame and the other half annoyance that I would deprive them of their usual means of “writing” essays.

My comments to them steered away from moralizing about academic integrity and instead I asked what kind of class this was. “Philosophy,” they droned united, sensing the irony. “And what do we do in philosophy?” “Think.” Yes, I told them, in a couple years they would have a boss, likely a romantic partner, maybe even kids, at which point not one of them will care what they think. This may be the last time anyone really does. Why surrender that? Isn’t that what makes you human? Why willingly hand over your very personhood to a machine when this may be your last opportunity to fully embrace it?

I pointed out that never during the semester did I appear in the classroom wearing anything unexpected on my feet. I don’t really need them to tell me what makes something a shoe. The point of the question was not to write down the correct answer. Rather, the value of the exercise was to wrestle with something that seems at first glance trivially easy, but then gets hard when you consider boundary cases. Take this straightforward case and see how tricky it is in order to start building the cognitive muscles you’ll need when thinking about justice, God, truth, or love. It is the process, the struggle, that is important. And that is precisely what our contemporary AI eliminates.

I asked how many work-out and most hands went up. I then asked if they could lift more with a forklift. When they said yes, I asked “Then, why not take one to the gym?” This turned into a utilitarian justification of building skills that will benefit them in their future. Read more »

Friday, May 16, 2025

Close Reading Philip Levine

by Ed Simon

When critics describe Philip Levine as a “working class poet,” normally they have in mind his Detroit-upbringing, or his effecting verse about rarely discussed subjects such as laboring on the assembly line of a Ford factory. Often, there is a sense that the former Poet Laurette of the United States is particularly working class not just because of his subjects, but because of his style as well; that Levine writes in an unaffected, unadorned, and unpretentious manner. This is the poet whom in one of his most famous lyrics could defiantly write in the second-person that “You know what work is – if you’re/old enough to read this you know what/work is, although you may not do it./Forget you,” that piecing two-word sentence after the end-stop simultaneously a declaration of independence from a particular variety of literati and a declaration of allegiance to another. All of this is fair, good, and true, Levine’s style of low-spun verse meticulously and carefully presents particular commitments in a manner that reads easily but is nonetheless intricate to compose, but that style need not be limited to those particular subjects for which the poet is most renowned.

Indeed another poem from that 1991 collection What Work Is entitled “Soloing” does nothing less than explicate the origin of poems, or rather the origin of inspiration, and the manner in which human connection can be forged through artistic engagement; all of that accomplished without ever resorting to multisyllabic Latinate words like “transcendent,” “luminous,” “numinous,” or “incandescent.”  The narrator of “Soloing” recounts a narrative whereby he comes to visit his mother in California, when she tells him about how in a dream the saxophone playing of John Coltrane moved her to tears. Unlike a more metaphysically-inclined poet, say a Robert Hass or a Louise Gluck, Levine is a poet who eschews an overly-theological diction. “Soloing” is, in many ways, a manifestly concrete poem; abstractions are avoided throughout. We’re presented with images like a television which is “gray, expressionless;” of suburban streets with the “neighbors quiet,” of “palm trees and all-/night super markets pushing/orange back-lighted oranges at 2 A.M.” Yet there is a sacred in Levine’s profane, this land of abundance and plenty, where the repetitive parallelism and redundancy of “orange back-lighted oranges” is a miracle in its own way (not least of all in the eerie exactitude of the image).

Levine plays with this trope of the Golden State as a type of promised land (so different from the Detroit in the collection’s other poems), where “I have driven for hours down 99,/over the Grapevine into heaven…. Finding solace in California/just where we were told it would/be.” This Edenic language shouldn’t be read as ironic; indeed, when Levine writes “What a world, a mother and her son/finding solace in California” the chuckling weariness of it isn’t an expression of sarcasm, but of amazement. That amazement is the through-line in the poem’s story, both that the elderly mother can be so moved by the music of a “great man half/her age,” but also that the ineffability and inexpressibility of artistic connection can move anyone. Read more »

Voting as a Christian; The Economic and Foreign Policy Issues (Review)

by Paul Braterman

Voting as a Christian; The Economic and Foreign Policy Issues, Wayne Grudem. Zondervan 2010/2012, pp 330, 560 brief footnotes to text, no index!

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.

WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

The above is Article X of the Nashville Statement, put out in 2017 by the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CMBW), founded 1987. Not only does it presuppose that homosexual conduct and transgenderism are sinful, but it regards toleration of such conduct, and even toleration of toleration, as wrong.

CMBW, of which Wayne Grudem, author of the book under discussion, was a co-founder, “exists to equip the Church on the meaning of biblical sexuality,” this meaning being defined by a strict patriarchy, according to which men and women are equally precious in the sight of God, but women need to know their place, which is decidedly not in the pulpit. The signatories of the Nashville Statement include some of the most influential figures within US conservative Christianity, among them James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family), Albert Mohler (President, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary), Tony Perkins (President, Family Research Council), John MacArthur (then President, The Master’s Seminary & College; Pastor, Grace Community Church, whose London satellite we met in my most recent article here), and Ligon Duncan (Chancellor & CEO, Reformed Theological Seminary, whom I came across some years ago as a trustee of Highland Theological College), the as well as Wayne Grudem himself.1There is a paradox here. Like CMBW, I am disturbed by the upsurge in demand for clinical transitioning, but for exactly the opposite reason. CMBW maintains that one’s sex determines one’s God-given role, and that it is therefore sinful to attempt to change it. I maintain that all roles should be open to all people, and that therefore transitioning should only very rarely be necessary.

Grudem, in my view, deserves broader attention, because of his connections and the scope and influence of his writings, and as a representative of the US Religious Right. He holds a PhD in New Testament studies from Cambridge, degrees in Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary, and, what made him particularly interesting to me, a BA in economics from Harvard. For this reason I thought it interesting to see how he, as an economist, justifies the low taxation policies of the American Religious Right, which to me as an outsider to both economics and Christianity seems to be nonsense economics and very different from what I think of as Christian. I think now that I understand his position better, but, if possible, like it even less. I also see how it flows directly from a theology that includes but transcends biblical literalism, according to which God’s creation is so good, and so strongly directed to meet human needs, that any actual policy-making is an intrusion on His prerogative. Read more »

Footnotes

  • 1
    There is a paradox here. Like CMBW, I am disturbed by the upsurge in demand for clinical transitioning, but for exactly the opposite reason. CMBW maintains that one’s sex determines one’s God-given role, and that it is therefore sinful to attempt to change it. I maintain that all roles should be open to all people, and that therefore transitioning should only very rarely be necessary.

Why Do We Care So Much About the Pope?

by Daniel Shotkin

As any teacher would agree, it’s incredibly difficult to get a classroom of teens to focus on a common topic. Yet at noon on May 8th, all 16 high school seniors in my AP Lit class were transfixed by one event: on the other side of the Atlantic, white smoke had come out of a chimney in the Sistine Chapel. “There’s a new pope” was the talk of the day, and phone screens that usually displayed Instagram feeds now showed live video of the Piazza San Pietro in Rome.

What is it about a bureaucratic election in a 2,000-year-old microstate that so completely captivated my class?

On paper, the Catholic Church has no business occupying the attention of anyone in secular society, let alone a group of teens who’ve never stepped foot in a church in their lives. Long gone are the days when the Papacy positioned itself as the world’s divine arbiter of authority. Kingly excommunications are few and far between, and the Pope—once ruler of a vast swath of central Italy—is now confined to a hill in Rome.

Despite all these changes, the Pope still occupies an outsized role in the popular imagination. Why? Because the papacy is a living inheritor of two historical narratives that continue to captivate Western thought. Read more »

Thursday, May 15, 2025

Congratulations on Your Decision to Become a Vampire!

by Tim Sommers

Welcome to the VR office and, hopefully, welcome to the coven! No, it’s not just witches, a group of vampires is called a “coven” too. VR? Human Resources for vampires, obviously.

Just a few last details before we can move forward. Lunch after, so let’s get through this.

I know that some of this has already been covered, but there’s a certain vampire to human ratio that it’s essential to enforce if we are going to continue letting humans do the hard work of maintaining things while we live amongst them undetected.

You’re aware, no doubt, of the many positive aspects of being a vampire. You will stop aging, repair injuries easily, potentially live forever, be erotically mesmerizing to humans (even though always dressed like a goth), have superhuman senses and strength and, yes, you can turn into a bat.

Can you even imagine what it’s like to be a bat?

Downsides. Obviously, can’t go to church, be around crosses, holy water. You can’t go outside during the day. You don’t appear in mirrors, which for many is a big one, I mean, fixing your hair can be a nightmare!

What else? You can’t put garlic on your pizza. In fact, you can’t have pizza at all. Or coffee. Or chocolate. Or alcohol. Or anything except human blood. Which I guess is a biggie for a lot of people, but I don’t really get it. I mean, sure, you have to murder and consume the blood of a human several times a week, but what’s the big deal really? There are billions of them.

But please, keep in mind, being a vampire, a hunter, an outsider, is no easy thing. It’s not like the movies where you just go to parties or lounge about all night between kills. No. Being a vampire, in many ways, is more a thrill than a pleasure. Read more »

Stuck in a rut

by David Beer

Danish author Solvej Balle’s novel On the Calculation of Volume, the first book translated from a series of five, could be thought of as time loop realism, if such a thing is imaginable. Tara Selter is trapped, alone, in a looping 18th of November. Each morning simply brings yesterday again. Tara turns to her pen, tracking the loops in a journal. Hinting at how the messiness of life can take form in texts, the passages Tara scribbles in her notebooks remain despite the restarts. She can’t explain why this is, but it allows her to build a diary despite time standing still. The capability of writing to curb the boredom and capture lost moments brings some comfort.

There are no chapters, no endings, occasionally we are given the number of 18ths of November Tara has endured. Those occasional numerical markers replace dates in the diary. As a consequence, the volume of repetitions becomes the key metric. The day takes on extra dimensions when the limits of what is possible in a single 24-hours can be explored so intricately. Unlike similar conceptions, Tara can move around, waking wherever she ended the previous version of the same day. She also ages, a burn on her hand heals to a scar, and certain things stay where she put them too. The absences also remain. Repeated food purchases leave gaps on shop shelves. Inexplicably, those gaps remain. Yet it is the absence of uncertainty that weighs most heavily on Tara. When you know what is coming, unpredictability is lost, it has to be actively sought-out instead.

It is the combination of Tara’s agency, the traces of her repetitions and the materiality of the experienced loops that give this time loop its realist property. We see how reliving the same day alters perspectives on people, places, space, nature, and so on. There is no when and no if to the story, what we get instead is what happens to someone experiencing endless predictability. At first, the things that are the same stick-out to Tara. A piece of dropped bread that falls slowly to the floor, a rain shower, footsteps on stairs, all become overwhelmingly familiar. Over time, the inconsistencies start to become a preoccupation. Tara can’t understand why certain objects stay whilst others return to their original location. Perhaps we shouldn’t expect the outcome of a major temporal disruption to be well-ordered and logical. Read more »