by David Winner

If anything useful comes out of the Jeffrey Epstein saga, it is that it gives us an example of pure evil with which to compare our lesser ill deeds. I’ve done some shitty things in my life, some secret, some observed, but only once was I subject to something like trial and punishment. Nearly half a century later, the incident serves as a kind of personal bellwether. This was me. This actually happened. I’m using some initials rather than names because I don’t want the players involved in the incident to google themselves and remember this eerie incident

Early in the 1990s, M, a kid I’d gone to high school with, smashed his car into a tree and died. Only a decade earlier, his life had also been in danger on a fateful tenth grade school trip up from Charlottesville, Virginia to New York City, and I and one other boy had been held responsible.

In the 1970s, my parents adopted the French/Italian tradition of allowing the child a small glass of wine at dinner, and actually several one evening when Ismail Merchant came over to dinner at my grandmother’s apartment and (ignoring my father’s side-eyed cautions) kept refilling my glass until I got drunk for the first time.

Drugs were a different matter. I only knew them through cautionary references on TV shows, and, after I started attending a progressive high school just outside of Charlottesville, by their whispered reputation. When Rory invited me to my first actual high school party in ninth grade, my mother (or maybe a cab) dropped me off in front. When Rory opened the door, I jokingly asked him where the “din of iniquity” was located. “The basement,” had been his matter of fact reply, and down a flight of suburban carpeted stairs, kids were drinking from a keg and puffing on peculiar cigarettes that smelled nothing like my father’s Marlboros.

That was the beginning of a beginning and the beginning of an end. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

This is not a piece about Carl Schmitt, but it does start with him. Unfortunately. In 2025, Schmitt was hard to miss, as James Traub chronicled in this excellent essay. For a while now, the democratic order has felt like the Weimar republic – flawed, fragile and possibly doomed. It seems only sensible to get acquainted with the political thinker who wrote most honestly, most mercilessly, most profoundly, about its weaknesses, in a time where the stakes were highest.

Schmitt, however, is not just the prophet of liberal failure; he wants to see it happen. Often, when he sums up the ills of modern parliamentary democracy – its party-politics, its banality, its political crises – he seems less a political philosopher than an angry pundit. He picks his abstractions and identities so that they associate the institutions and values of the Weimar republic with an enlightened rationalism that he loathes, and that he believes he can easily discredit.

The secret ballot, for instance, where each vote is counted and an “arithmetic majority” calculated? Pah! That, Schmitt knows, has nothing to do with the will of the people, which is of necessity public. The popular will can be known just as well or better by acclamation than by “the statistical apparatus that has been formed with such diligence over the last half-century”. Democracy simply demands that the law and the will of the people are one and the same. This has nothing to do with such unglamorous procedures as counting. The popular will can be expressed by a minority, or even by one individual.

Better people than Schmitt have been wrong about the secret ballot; John Stuart Mill had his reasons, which didn’t depend on disdain for numbers or on general-will-voodoo. But the contrast could not be larger. Mill’s impulses were liberal, democratic, and utilitarian, and he sought out tensions and contradictions between his ideals in order to face them and perhaps solve them. Schmitt, on the other hand, did exactly what illiberal propagandists are doing in our time: driving wedges between the popular will and democratic institutions, slandering the latter because they stand in the way between the people and some glorious national future. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

On June 27, 2026, the hottest day recorded to date in Berlin, I emerged from the meagre shade of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral to make a run for it across Bebelplatz, on Unter den Linden in the city’s Baroque center. I had resolved to brave the punishing late-afternoon sun for a souvenir photograph of the skylight set into the middle of the square, which offers a view down into “The Empty Library” (1995), Micha Ullman’s subterranean memorial to the Nazi book burnings on that site on May 10, 1933.

I was in Berlin that weekend to attend a new production of Mozart’s Abduction from the Seraglio at the Staatsoper, also on Bebelplatz (about which more at a later date); to meet with a colleague from a partner institution with whom I will be co-leading an Academic Travel course this coming fall; and to visit Ulf, an old friend who has made Berlin his home for decades.

Since I met Ulf in 1990, when we were students at the Freie Universität Berlin, it has been our custom to exchange books on our birthdays, both of which fall in May; and accordingly, if belatedly this year, I had come from Zurich on that blazing weekend bearing a couple of volumes I was certain would interest him, given his professional and personal immersion in Jewish history. One was Melting Point: Family, Memory, and the Search for a Promised Land, Rachel Cockerell’s innovative 2024 account of her great-grandfather’s role in a plan to resettle Russian Jews in Galveston, Texas, in the years before the Great War. The other, older, weightier book was Effingers, by Gabriele Tergit (1894–1982).

Born in Berlin as Elise Hirschmann in 1894, Tergit took as her nom-de-plume an anagram of the word Gitter, German for “grill” or “bars” and, metonymically, for “prison.” Tergit, meanwhile, is a German word in its own right, an entomological term meaning the armor plating on an arthropod. Read more »

by W. Alex Foxworthy

A few years ago, my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. For some time before that, one could see that his capabilities were declining, although the changes could still be attributed to age, retirement, or the narrowing of his circumstances. He had been a successful entrepreneur and consultant who worked with large companies across the United States and internationally. Then, over several months, and finally over a matter of weeks, the decline accelerated. I became directly involved in arranging his care and managing parts of his life that he had always managed himself.

I knew Parkinson’s in outline. It involved dopamine, the substantia nigra, tremor, slowness, and a drug called levodopa. When I was in graduate school studying to become a neuroscientist, I was presented with a number of facts about neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s. But for me, those facts did not amount to an intuitively satisfying explanation. They did not tell me why the disease begins, why it destroys some neurons and largely spares their neighbors, why replacing dopamine can seem miraculous, or why its consequences reach far beyond movement.

Though I have a background in neuroscience, I am by no means a Parkinson’s specialist. What follows is my attempt, as both a scientist and a son, to construct a simple and hopefully true picture of what is going on. The picture has three parts. First, a normally useful protein can enter a self-templating aggregation pathway. Next, the resulting seeds can propagate through connected parts of the nervous system. Finally, they do not affect every cell equally: they take hold most destructively where the cell was already operating with the least reserve.

This framework probably describes much of typical, alpha-synuclein-associated Parkinson’s disease, but it may not describe every biological subtype capable of producing the clinical syndrome we call Parkinson’s. Recent seed-amplification studies detect misfolded alpha-synuclein in most people with typical sporadic disease, but not in everyone diagnosed with Parkinson’s and not with equal frequency across genetic forms. The account that follows is therefore a model of a large and important part of the disease, not a claim that every patient arrives by one molecular road. Read more »

Train track in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

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by Eli Rarey

A poetry reading I recently attended at Clio’s Books in Oakland began with the poets and the audience all sitting in silence together for three minutes. Three minutes is a long time. None of the poems we heard took as long as three minutes to read. It was, you could say, the epic poem of the evening. Sitting in silence, known to many as “meditation,” is one of the foundational spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism. This literary event, called The Poetry of Zen, The Zen of Poetry, included poet Norman Fischer, who is also a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, as well as three other poets whom he had recently also ordained as Zen priests: Stefany Anne Golberg, Denise Newman, and Pearl Kan. A poetry reading with Zen priests who also happen to be poets.

At a poetry reading, we intend to listen to poets read poems. Silence is negative space. But at a Zen poetry reading, this relationship becomes unstable. Even the relationship between “poet” and “audience” becomes uncertain. Sitting in silence, there is no audience. If that silence is part of the reading, then the poetry of the silence is one of which we are all the author. As Pearl Kan said in response to a question about Zen and poetry, “I don’t think poetry is particularly Zen.” Poetry is about wanting to express yourself, wanting to make something. Zen is about releasing attachment to self-expression or definitions. Embracing doubt. That suggests that these poets’ work emerges from an expansive space of not-poetry, a field of silence from which they speak. Yet at this reading poetry and not-poetry were highly indistinct. Even this supposed opposition between Zen and poetry is itself in doubt. And doesn’t all poetry emerge from not-poetry? And isn’t that supposed opposition always in doubt? We imagine a poet as someone for whom the experience of their lives is somehow inherently poetic, in the same way we imagine a Zen priest as someone for whom the experience of their lives is inherently Zen. The poetry reading at Clio’s, appropriately, was not just a reading but also a kind of panel discussion about Zen, even a kind of absurdist performance art happening.

After we sit in meditation for three minutes, Stefany Anne Golberg calls out to the audience, “Question number one!” Someone responds immediately, calling back: “What is Zen?” This response comes from Susan Moon, co-author with Fischer of a book called What Is Zen. So Fischer’s answer to the question is to reference the book. Thus, the answer to “What is Zen?” is What Is Zen. Zen is difficult to define because Zen itself encourages us to doubt definitions and disrupt distinctions. As Fischer says, “The only thing that is not in doubt is that we doubt.” A poem follows, and then “Question number two!” Someone from the audience asks, “What is poetry?” In the same way that Fischer’s answer to “What is Zen?” is very Zen, the poets’ answers to “What is poetry?” are very poetic.

The poet/priests also offer canonical Zen koans for the others to respond to. This Zen practice I had not been exposed to before. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Charles Siegel

As I am writing this, the World Cup is into the quarterfinals. All in all, it’s been a great tournament so far. There have been many exciting, close matches. There was the brain-melting final 15 minutes of Argentina’s victory over Egypt. There have been several elimination matches decided in stoppage time, or extra time, or on penalties. There have been standout performances from the players you’d expect — Messi, Mbappé, Haaland and Kane — and also from lesser-known figures who have made themselves into new international stars, such as Denis Undav of Germany and Azzedine Ounahi of Morocco.

Most endearingly, there have been terrific performances from underdogs. The most surprising of all such stories, of course, is that of Cape Verde. As everyone now knows, this small island nation, population 530,000 or so, qualified for the World Cup for the first time — the third smallest country ever to do so. And they didn’t come just to make up the numbers. They progressed, incredibly, to the knockout stage, holding mighty Spain to a 0-0 draw, and drawing with two-time champions Uruguay and Saudi Arabia as well. In the round of 32, they lost to Argentina in extra time, on an own goal, but essentially they won. As one wag paraphrased the famous old headline in the Harvard Crimson, “Cape Verde beats Argentina 2-3.” Cape Verde’s goalkeeper, Vozinha, became an instant folk hero.

Spirits have been high all around. Away from the matches themselves, there have been endless stories about foreign fans and their wide-eyed, exuberant embrace of all things American. Lots of emphasis on food, especially. There have been stories about foreigners’ amazement at Mexican restaurants serving chips and salsa whether you ask for them or not, and not charging you for them, and bringing endless refills. (Although some of these stories are fake, as seems inevitable these days.) Here in Dallas, visitors have marveled at the barbecue, and the prehistoric size of beef ribs.

Beyond the food, foreigners are apparently surprised to find Americans so friendly and welcoming. There have been many reports about how visitors come here with preconceived images of our country, its truculence and xenophobia. But then they’re surprised to find that actual Americans aren’t like that at all. These stories are very pleasing to us, of course. They reassure us, make us feel we’re really not that bad. That we welcome strangers here! That our country is the big, capacious, friendly, magnanimous country we have all grown up thinking it is.

All true! But here is another truth: we are also cruelly, heartlessly unwelcoming. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

I first learnt of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its draft report on June 26, from a post in Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist, where he describes it as a clown show and as “a blueprint to end church-state separation.” Mehta is far too optimistic. The commission’s report is much more than that. The final report, we are promised, “will equip all Americans with the knowledge and support needed to defend their Constitutional rights.” The draft shows us what these words really mean. It contains recommendations that would greatly aid the Administration in its campaigns against independence of thought, suppress discussion of Palestinian rights, encourage proselytizing in the workplace, and grant protected status to conspiracy theories put forward in the name of religion.

There’s worse.

The very first recommendation reads

Instruct the Department of Justice to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.

There is so much wrong with this, that one hardly knows where to start. The Department of Justice is part of the Administration, and has no business issuing guidance on the “proper understanding” of any part of the Constitution, let alone the complex subject of church-state relations. The fact that the Commissioners, who include in their number influential scholars, prelates, and opinion shapers, were willing to put their name to this recommendation shows, more clearly than any other single recent event, that the United States as a Constitutional Republic is all but dead.

The strategy involved is obviously far beyond the mental capacity of the man who sits in the Oval Office, but fully in accord with the thinking of his entourage, and in particular of Russell Vought, whose 2022 article, Renewing American’s Purpose referred to the United States as “post-constitutional,” complained as an example about the role of career officials (remember that this includes all the scientists) in the Centers for Disease Control, and demanded that governmental activities be brought under strict centralized supervision.

The specific recommendations are very much as would be expected, given the choice of Commissioners, and lay out the plan to hold the MAGA coalition together in the approaching post-Trump era. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Chilly Morning, Boston, 2020.

Digital photograph.

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by Michael Liss

[M]en by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. —Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824

In the end, they were, like so many other citizens of this exasperating if often great and good land, men of impulse, of passion, of ambition and of regrets. Washington himself, a demigod in his lifetime, still left office soured by the partisan sniping, some of which was directed at him. Franklin, the twinkle-eyed inventor, patriot, diplomat, and elder statesman, one of the great figures of the 18th century, felt aggrieved over some attitude of Congress that he felt did not appreciate his point of view. John Adams, unceremoniously shown the door by the electorate in 1800, remained an outsider for the rest of his long life, periodically railing at the uncouth, the undemocratic, the unmeritocratic, and the uneducated. James Madison watched the beautiful Swiss-watch-like mechanism of his Constitution challenged by the reality of it being used by men who very often had little more than personal and tribal advancement in mind. And, of course, there’s Jefferson.

In Gordon S. Wood’s telling in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 book, The Radicalism Of the American Revolution, this result was entirely rational. “A new generation of democratic Americans was no longer interested in the revolutionaries’ dream of building a classical republic of elitist virtue out of the inherited materials of the old world.”

Professor Wood died last month at 92, but left a legacy of scholarship (and honors) that few can match. Like probably every other history/political-science junkie in America, I had read Radicalism. I still had a copy, tucked carefully into the third space from the right on the bottom of the second shelf of the first big bookcase on your left as you walked into my study (in case you needed directions). Unearthed, it showed it had become a tad yellowed and a bit frail. It also looked like it needed to be re-read. Read more »

“In every myth something human speaks,

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by Christopher Hall

How far does Trump’s bad taste go towards explaining his presidency? A long way, thinks Paul Krugman:

…is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?

This is all deeply alien to American tradition. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings. Yet the style of these monuments and public buildings is generally one of restrained neoclassicism meant to evoke the Roman Republic – an ideal of a republic of equals reflected in law and norms as well as architecture. Anything approximating the Louis XIV style of Trump would have been considered monarchical and autocratic by the Founding Fathers.

So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.

Are we still convinced that “restrained neoclassicism” and “American tradition” are closely aligned? The neoclassicism of the 18^th century which informed the design of Washington DC most certainly advocated for refinement and restraint – or, more commonly, noted their absence. The “Timon’s Villa” episode of Pope’s Epistle of Burlington is a dissection of taste gone wrong, even as it is deployed by an aristocrat:

At Timon’s villa let us pass a day,
Where all cry out, “What sums are thrown away!”
So proud, so grand of that stupendous air,
Soft and agreeable come never there.
Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught
As brings all Brobdingnag before your thought.
To compass this, his building is a town,
His pond an ocean, his parterre a down:
Who but must laugh, the master when he sees,
A puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze!
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!
The whole, a labour’d quarry above ground.

Bigness, of course, is at the centre of the Trump aesthetic, but such measurements are a matter of perspective. Big and small, high and low; whatever categories are manipulated or inverted were never firm in the first place. Fintan O’Toole has recently written about this matter of perspective in Trump’s America, using Gulliver’s Travels by Pope’s friend Swift as a jumping-off point:

…we return to a neurotic form of politics in which, like Gulliver, citizens are made to hover between the poles of massive aggrandizement and utter mortification. These opposites come as a package; they must be experienced together. The great leader costs the people imaginatively down into the pit of abjection so that he (and only he) can lift them up into hyperinflated greatness. He does so because he has nothing to offer in between: no betterment, no dignity, no equality.

Trump elevates the degraded and degrades elevation; the point is not to bring the values of “the people” into the regions of decorous authority, but to dismantle the very idea of authority itself. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Ever heard of Heraclitus? I bet you’ve heard of his river. It’s on a million posters.

I’m not one to judge, but I would go so far as to say this quote is bandied about pretty thoughtlessly.

For example, this is the ocean and not a river. Not to mention not a great spot for stepping in.

But at least the ocean has water in it. This is just a random field.

And this guy seems to be trying to avoid stepping in – he’s in a boat after all, but from the looks of that yaw, he’s going in eventually.

Alice Walker wrote a book called:

In fact, there are at least eight books with that title. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

1. This is what they told me in Montana.

“If you encounter a bear, walk, don’t run, away. Move slowly – don’t make eye contact – If the bear charges – stand your ground. If the grizzly continues to come at you, lie face flat on the ground, hands clapped around the back of your neck, and play dead. The bear will likely leave you alone or paw you inflicting only minor injuries.”

Well, that puts a lot of hope in likely.

So. let’s think of grief as a bear.

If you encounter a grief, you might well want to walk or run away and not make eye contact. But it’s better to stand your ground. If it keeps coming, lie face flat on the ground. Let it paw you. Its injuries won’t be minor, will hurt. But when they scar over, I won’t say heal, you’ll be different. Grief also will be different, likely even companionable.

Well, that too puts a lot of hope in likely.

After I wrote the above, I realized that grief isn’t always bearish. It has other, more subtle ways of being – the quality of being there always though you don’t notice until some small thing calls its presence forth, a word, a phrase, a look, a sudden awareness of absence, a shadow.

I thought “like a shadow” and remembered the old Robert Louis Stevenson poem, “My Shadow.” Here’s the second stanza,

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

Well, much like grief. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Do universities need to foster more intellectual diversity among professors? Should there be affirmative action for conservative thinkers in disciplines such as sociology and social work? Asked less often, but just as relevant: Should business schools and economics departments hire a few socialists?

This long-running debate intensified in Trump’s second term, as MAGA forces ramped up attacks on any challenge to right-wing populist politics. Unfortunately, a principled question about the appropriate mix of ideologies in a faculty has been twisted to advance political goals.

Rather than offer policy recommendations for institutions coping with this mess (because I don’t have any), I want to speak in favor of intellectual diversity for individuals (because we all need to remember to keep an open mind). In my three decades in academia, I saw too many professors hang on too tightly to the conventional wisdom of their intellectual gang rather than entertain new ways of thinking.

My teaching career provides several examples of the dangers of dogma, on all sides.

For seven years I was a Faculty Fellow in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, which was the DEI unit (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) of the University of Texas at Austin until a state law eliminated it in 2024. “Faculty Fellow” just meant that on top of my day job (teaching in the School of Journalism), I received a bit of funding for local projects, primarily to help launch a community center.

I enjoyed the community work but found that lots of people assumed, incorrectly, that they could predict my political positions from my association with the division. But I never fit comfortably on either side in the culture wars in higher education, a status not unique to me. I’m not suggesting I was a model professor but rather that reactions to my work show the dangers of dogma. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

John Conway invented the Game of Life in 1970, and it remains an active area of research and play fifty-six years later.

John Conway was a deeply original mathematician who made important contributions to multiple areas of mathematics. Indeed, when Dr. Conway passed away in 2020, I wrote an entire 3QD essay about his work and, as interesting as it is, the Game of Life (or GoL) didn’t make the cut.

The rules of GoL are deceptively simple. It is a zero-player game. This means that once the game starts, it runs on its own with no further player intervention. It is played on a very, very large grid of one-by-one squares that we will call “cells”[1]. Each cell can be “alive” or “dead”. In each turn of the game, an alive cell can remain alive, or die, and a dead cell can remain dead, or spring to life. In each turn of the game, whether a cell lives or dies depends solely on the state of its eight neighbors:

• a living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbors remains alive, and otherwise it dies [2];
• a dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbors springs to life, and otherwise it remains dead [3].

That’s it.

To play the game, in the zeroth turn you, as the creator deity, decide which cells are alive and which are dead. Thereafter, the game plays itself, turn-by-turn, and you watch your universe unfold:

Conway discussed the origins of GoL in an interview with the Numberphile folks. He described how he was originally motivated by John von Neumann’s work on self-replicating machines. However, von Neumann’s machines had 19 different possible states. No doubt with the aphorism “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” in mind, Conway spent months tinkering with the GoL rules until he was down to two states and two rules.  Despite the simplicity, the game remained interesting.

By “interesting”, Conway meant unpredictable. This was Conway’s deep philosophical insight: saying GoL is unpredictable is to say that it is capable of anything, and if GoL is capable of anything, then it should be capable of everything [5]. That is, despite its simple algorithmic rules, GoL should be capable of arbitrary complexity. And indeed, in 1982, Conway proved that GoL is Turing-complete. Something is Turing-complete if it can simulate any Turing machine and, hence, can simulate any computer and perform any computation. Read more »