by Michael Liss

I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man. —Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Doctor Benjamin Rush, September 23, 1800

To quote the esteemed detective (and Classicist) Lieutenant Columbo, I think you see my problem. Who writes like this? I have spent a great deal of time over the last three months researching and writing about Thomas Jefferson and I do not think I am any closer to understanding the inner Jefferson then the day I started. I need a break. All those books (there are more in another room by other, just as authoritative writers) and every word of original source material I can find in texts and online haven’t shown me what the historian Joseph Ellis asks me to accept as defining qualities: “Jefferson was light, inspiring, optimistic.”

Maybe he was light, inspiring and optimistic. In his personal life melancholy wouldn’t be a description I’d ascribe to him. He certainly loved wine, women, music, good correspondence, and better books. He had a long list of people with whom he communicated, and the ones who were up to it got letters in multiple languages. The missives he and John Adams exchanged, when the two elderly egotists were in the mood, were stuffed with learned allusions. One of Jefferson’s, dated September 21, 1813, included verses that started in Greek and then translated to English, Latin, and French, then finally alit on Italian. You can almost hear the boys getting out their William and Mary and Harvard sweatshirts, dipping their pens in ink, and smirking. And yet, I feel the weight of his words.

During its formative years, America was blessed with several Presidents who were highly gifted. Adams certainly was, as was his son. John Quincy Adams, as was James Madison, but what set Jefferson apart was his unchallengeable status as a Renaissance man. Maybe that’s part of his enduring appeal to the academic community—being smart, talented, and classically educated is cool.

Not cool, the slaves—both the mistress and the rest—and, for many, that’s dispositive. The moral opprobria associated with the institution and the intimate relations with Sally Hemings are great and deserved. Contextualization doesn’t really work when you are talking about actions of this type. Read more »

by David Winner

Half a lifetime ago when I first got to New York, I saw a piece of performance art in Williamsburg at a place called The Bog. A young white woman dressed in some outlandish space-age smock (this was still the eighties) jumped menacingly up into the air, shouting, “oppressor,” then crumbled pathetically to the ground, shrieking, “oppressed” to try to interrogate that merciless duality.

Dario Soria, my great uncle, arguably exemplified both labels but never saw himself as either. An Italian Jew, he came to America in the late 1930s, fleeing the Mussolini/Hitler pact, but his move was always framed as American opportunity rather than European danger. The connections of his wealthy musical banking family (Mascagni, Giordano, and other verismo composers banking at the family bank near the Spanish Steps) indeed set him up in America, but Italian Jews were soon to be mortal danger back home.

Still, the whole clan appeared to have survived the Holocaust. The one family story that involved any danger was a comic anecdote about implicitly gay Uncle Arturo who, upon being arrested by the Fascist police, tried to send his manservant for his nightgown. The status of the Soria family in Italy may have felt compromised in Italy by the degree to which society had turned against them as Jews, an inconvenient truth that needed to be deleted from the narrative.

No doubt some embrace their status as victims, but sufferers of oppression can often be stigmatized. Holocaust survivors in Israel (The Seven Million by Tom Segev) were as likely scorned as celebrated. Which is really the thing about the proverbial playground. Kids spit upon those seen as pathetic, and what could be more pathetic than being sent to a concentration camp? Read more »

by Marianne Janack

The distinction between utopias and dystopias is often murky. In Ursula LeGuin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, a utopian society is built on suffering; Lois Lowry’s The Giver portrays a world in which the absence of pain depends on the absence of choice; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World portrays a world in which war, poverty and unhappiness have been eradicated because individuality and competition have disappeared.

And then there’s John Calhoun’s experiment with mice. In 1968, Calhoun put 4 breeding pairs of house mice into a mouse utopia that came to be called Universe 25: no predators, plenty of space, lots of clean nesting material, more than enough food and water, weather control, and no disease. Calhoun housed the mice in a large enclosure that would allow them all to live and reproduce in peace, with plenty of resources and no dangers from predators or diseases. It took 104 days before the first litter of mice was born, but after that the population doubled every 55 days, until the population reached 620 on day 315. Calhoun called this Phase B: the phase during which the utopic conditions seemed to encourage population growth and happy mice.. After that, the population explosion slowed down, doubling every 145 days. It peaked at about 2200.

The asymmetrical patterns of nesting and reproduction that Calhoun and his assistants saw as the experiment ran demanded explanation. Calhoun said that the patterns were evidence of a social hierarchy among the mice: the more reproductively successful the mouse, the higher it ranked in the mouse society of Universe 25. The most dominant males were the most active, and had the greatest reproductive success. A pecking order of dominance and reproductive success was the best explanation for the asymmetrical nesting and reproduction patterns that Calhoun and his assistants noticed in the box “utopia.”

At the end of Phase B there were 150 adults and 470 juveniles. In their natural habitats, fewer of the juveniles would have survived. And that, it turns out, was where the trouble started. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Certain essays hit you like a thunderbolt. As someone who has suffered from episodes of debilitating anxiety, I found Freud’s concept of the death-drive as outlined in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to be a moment of pure revelation when I first read it years ago. I don’t know if there’s anything in Darwino-capitalo-materialist social consensus that specifically encourages anxiety – I have my suspicions – but the focus on Eros as the sole driver of human activity meets a needed counterpart in Freud’s Thanatos. The human body and mind want calm, and the ultimate calm is death. “Das Ziel alles Lebens ist der Tod” –“Ziel” in English could mean something as pedestrian as “destination,” but Freud’s sense seems to have more of the sense of “goal.” All of this getting and earning and fornicating, the centers of evolutionary and capitalist life, are utterly exhausting – and not the good kind of exhaustion which comes after a day of labour, but the kind that comes the moments we are too tired to sleep. If human life is linear, we are nevertheless trapped in endless cycles big and small, and the most impactful one must be the constant interchange between agitation and torpor as we try to find some equilibrium.

And surely this is echoed in nature itself. When September comes, I struck most with the contrast between my life and the life outside the window. Nature, of course, is preparing for slumber, but my year, with the beginning of the fall semester, is just ramping up. In the moments when the agitations and activities of spring and summer are calming down, I find myself more active, more agitated, driven to a restlessness that often has no clear source or object. The great and eternal – though not, thanks to climate change, eternally unchanging – systems of flux which bring about in nature perpetual resurrection take place within a universe which itself, if we believe in the Heat Death theory, has a definite beginning and end. Inevitably, there is a kind of stasis in spring and summer – the year has settled, so to speak. Fall and winter – where the new year starts and, also, new semesters begin for me – are moments of change and agitation taking place within a setting where the death-drive is asserting its dominance.

German poet Rainier Maria Rilke published his collection The Book of Images in 1902. He was 26; he published a revised edition 4 years later, in which the poems I’m going to discuss appear. Read more »

by Lei Wang

The money of the mind is attention, I read recently in the first line of a poem, which may as well be a poetry x LinkedIn post title collaboration. Meanwhile, I’ve also heard that the definition of poetry is attention, period, so is poetry the money of the mind? (Sorry, I’m not a logician.) And if so, what do we spend our poems on?

Growing up in a tiny town in urban New Jersey, just across the river from New York, I was obsessed with Annie Dillard (RIP). But in recent years, I’ve heard she wasn’t cool anymore: too earnest, interested in the sublime unironically and without drugs. I miss the days when I did not pay attention to what was cool, when I mostly wore free oversized T-shirts from Envirothon, a team natural science competition in sniffing soils and identifying bird calls (my only sport in high school). Except my high school in a converted factory was so removed from nature that the first time I ever saw the shape of deer poop was in the form of rubberized scat our environmental studies teacher ordered as a teaching tool.

In comparison, Annie Dillard felt so wise and cultured, so knowledgeable about nature (though she also grew up in the city—Pittsburgh!). I was jealous of what she recounted in An American Childhood, when her whole family would sit around at the dining table dissecting a joke. Sometimes the punchline of a joke would come a full week later: hers was that kind of family, that knew how to spend well the money of their minds. Humor, after all, is a free gift from the universe: less about the object than about a way of seeing the object, a way of seeing anything, object +1. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

This is the second of two parts [part 1 is here] on whether implanted beliefs can count as knowledge. The question matters outside science fiction. If installed beliefs can be true, reliable, and useful and still fall short of knowledge, then knowledge needs some further condition, one that goes beyond the standard “justified true belief” formula. So, first, what is belief installation?

Belief installation is (i) the direct production of a belief in a person (ii) by an outside process (iii) that skips over her perception, the testimony available to her, and her reasoning. In the cases that interest us, (iv) the installed belief is true, (v) the installing process is reliable, (vi) the belief, once installed, is stable and fits with the person’s other beliefs, and (vii) the belief is available for use in reasoning and action. For example, you are at trivia night. You start to say that Eric Roberts has appeared in more films than anyone else (809 and counting). Then you remember, thanks to the trivia bonus pack that came with your French language implant for work, that the Indian comic actor Brahmanandam Kanneganti has appeared in more than a thousand. Do you know that Kanneganti is the most prolific film actor of all time? Or is this more like cheating by looking it up on your phone? If justification is about reliability, can an outside process’s reliability give you knowledge?

The installation case points to an agency condition on knowledge. Roughly, a person knows that p only if her believing p is an exercise of her own epistemic agency, or is properly anchored in it. In plainer terms, knowledge has to be tied to the person’s own capacities for inquiry, evaluation, and responsiveness to reasons. Installed beliefs, however true and however reliably produced, fail this test. That is why they strike us as less than knowledge, even when we find nothing wrong with them on grounds of reliability.

Reliabilism, in its simplest form, says that a true belief is justified, and so counts as knowledge, when a belief-forming process reliably yields truths. The installation device is such a process. In fact, by hypothesis, it is more reliable than perception, memory, or testimony. Think of perception in poor light, memory over long stretches of time, or testimony from ordinary, fallible informants. How, then, can the reliabilist deny that Stacey knows her implanted beliefs? Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Conclusive evidence is in from new DNA tests: Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings.

To put it more bluntly: The primary author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States raped one of more than 600 people he enslaved, starting when she was a teenager.

Does that seem disrespectful or ahistorical?

First, let’s deal with the often-heard claim that we shouldn’t judge people of another era by the standards of our time. Jefferson’s defenders argue that, yes, he owned slaves and expressed ugly racist beliefs, but those practices and ideas were prevalent in the world in which he lived, implying there was no way he could have acted or thought differently. This approach avoids a simple question: Were there people expressing alternative ideas at the time?

Of course there were—not only people of African descent but also some of Jefferson’s peers. Among them was Thomas Paine, another major figure in the establishment of the United States who is best known for his 1776 pamphlet Common Sense. What is less well known about Paine is that he was an active opponent of slavery. The year after he arrived in America in 1774, he published an anti-slavery article in the Pennsylvania Journal and the Weekly Advertiser. A few weeks later an anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia, with Paine as a founding member. His article started with a clear condemnation of slavery and the Americans who supported it:

That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.

Jefferson certainly was familiar with Paine and the arguments against slavery. Jefferson certainly was aware of the existence of the idea that all humans had an equal claim to liberty and the argument that Africans should be considered human in these matters. There were many different ideas about the institution of slavery and racism in play at the time. We‘re not judging Jefferson by the standards of our time when we point out how he used racism to justify the barbarism of slavery. We are acknowledging that others in Jefferson’s time—including the man who wrote “These are the times that try men’s souls” in The American Crisis—articulated anti-slavery and anti-racist principles, at the same time Jefferson was in 1781 writing in his “Notes on the State of Virginia” about the natural inferiority of blacks. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

I met Derrida in Memphis in 1993. We were standing by a pool and he was smoking a cigar. I’m sure I was smoking a cigarette. I was twenty-four.

The encounter was brief, the pro forma handshake one could expect as a Ph.D. student at a state university that had lured such a luminary into the interior with a conference in his honor. He was the second most famous person I spoke to during the nine years I lived in Memphis. The most famous was Michael Jackson. (A story for another time.)

Like Emily Eakin, author of The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory, I came of intellectual age in the late heyday—in America at least—of French theory, though from a slightly different vantage point. Far from the lit crit hothouses of the Ivy League—Eakin went to Harvard—I went to a state college where the philosophy department had as many LaRouchies as existentialists. Then I went to graduate school at what was then called Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis), which—the third year I was there—hosted a conference on “Derrida’s Interpretation of Husserl.” That’s where I met him, at a donor’s house near campus.

The event came two years after the publication of Strategies of Deconstruction: Derrida and the Myth of the Voice by American Husserlian J. Claude Evans, which caused a stir in my world, mirrored I’m sure in innumerable disciplines of the day as serious-minded scholars attempted to beat back the post-structuralist threat to their domains.

I understand exactly the thrill Eakin describes as French theory provided a new, often totalizing lens through which to see the world. Particularly thrilling was the insouciance with which Derrida flattened already flat-footed complainants like John Searle—himself defending his own sacred cow, J.L. Austin—in a book like Limited Inc, which I found to be every bit as hilarious as any Spy magazine takedown. Derrida was like the French knights in The Holy Grail, telling the stuffed shirts of Anglophone philosophy to run away lest he taunt them a second time. Read more »

Just something I saw while taking a walk near the train tracks in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Not sure what these tiles are for. Do you know?

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by Brooks Riley

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by Carlota Figueroa

Picture this: it’s Friday at 10:30 pm, and you have an 11:59 pm deadline that you thought was much easier than it actually is. I’m sure if you think back to your university days, you can think of at least a couple of instances when this happened. As the kids would say nowadays, you have to “lock in” and put all your attention into completing this very important assignment. Then, all of a sudden, you discover there’s a little demon playing tricks with your computer’s memory, deciding what information is stored and what information isn’t – and you have no say in it.

I know, this sounds incredibly inconvenient. Thankfully for us, there isn’t an actual demon deciding what information our computer stores and what information gets irreversibly thrown out. However, we need to be grateful for the fact that someone, a long time ago, thought that a very similar demon could exist. Does the name James Clerk Maxwell ring a bell? He birthed one of the most significant thought experiments of theoretical physics and information theory. Maxwell pondered the existence of a small finite being (which was later, in all its glory, categorized as a demon) that could separate molecules according to their speed. Such a demon sat on the barrier between two boxes, each containing gas molecules following random thermal motion. What this means is that although you can determine an average speed at which the molecules are moving, each individual molecule will move with a random speed and in a random direction. Hence, we have faster molecules, and we have slower molecules. Our Maxwellian demon acted as a traffic officer, opening a little window so that fast molecules were allowed to move from the box on the left to the box on the right, and vice versa for the slow molecules. Finally, we’d end up with a box of fast molecules and a box of slow molecules. Although a molecule should be judged by the content of its character and not its speed, this doesn’t sound too harmful, right?

Wrong. The faster the molecules, the hotter the gas, so we end up with one box much hotter than the other. With such a temperature difference, it would be possible to run a heat engine between both halves, extracting work. After letting the system reset, you’d just repeat the process, perpetually extracting useful work, and this is a direct violation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: no such machine can exist. If Maxwell’s demon truly existed, thermodynamics would find itself in a pickle. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Winter Clouds, Boston, December 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Ken MacVey

Chief Justice Roberts in his 2005 confirmation hearing famously testified that as a Supreme Court justice his job was not to “pitch or bat” but to be an “umpire” calling “balls and strikes.” History since suggests otherwise. In collaboration  with his conservative colleagues on the court, Roberts has been more like an agenda-driven baseball commissioner calling the shots by re- defining the rules of the game. He has led the court to grant Trump and other presidents  virtual immunity from criminal prosecution and to seal the deal for the idea of a  unitary presidency which subordinates independent regulatory agencies, inspector generals, and the Department of Justice to a single president’s will even if Congress has legislated otherwise.

With the upcoming  November midterm elections Roberts may face his first constitutional crisis. Trump has made the midterm elections personal. He has pronounced he should be considered the de facto candidate on all the midterm ballots and  declared that the midterm elections are all about and only about whether you are for him or against him. He has “humorously” made his MAGA devotees in a Republican convention in Dallas swear they will vote “for him”  this November whether or not they  are registered to vote. This “joke” is no joke. Trump is prepared to break legal rules to prevent Democrats from gaining control of the House or the Senate.

Trump in fact  broke the rules when he issued an executive order that  would have filtered mail-in ballots in the  midterm elections. Although the Trump administration denied it, according to expert election lawyers, the executive order was crafted  to put the US Post Office  in the gatekeeper role of reviewing  and preventing  Democratic votes in the Congressional elections from being counted. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Here is the longed-for Theory of Everything that we have sought since Einstein.

Dreams

Dreaming began 13 1/2 billion years ago with the big bang. The universe itself, as it began to unfold, began to dream. Why? Well, that is the unexplained part of the explanation of everything.

As each galaxy coalesced into being, it carried with it the original dream and gave its own shading made out of its unique balance, its proportion of light, dark matter, hydrogen atoms and original big bang stuff.

As each sun formed, it took the big bang and the galaxy dreams and gave them its own spin. A big star has a different dreaming than a small star though they both come from the same family tree and carry the dream DNA of all the dream time that’s gone before –

and when the sun gathered or spun off the stuff of planets and became a solar system, each planet took what it was given and made its own dreams. Mercury whizzing around the sun dreams differently from lumbering Jupiter. So place has something to do with each planet’s dreams as well as the matter of its making.

So our earth, third planet of our system, carries the dreams of big bang, our galaxy, and our sun into its own dream. Read more »

Celtic Knot

maybe you think I do not know
maybe you think I could not be
surely I’m always where I go
surely I am here with thee

but maybe moon is nothing old
maybe sun is never new
perhaps all stories have been one
maybe there’s no such thing as through

could be everything is here
could be everything is near
could be heaven is not far
could be now, just where we are

perhaps all maybes will be done
maybe all should-bes might be too
could be everything is one
within the shadow of we two

by Jim Culleny
3/24/12

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by TJ Price

Thursday afternoon—though it was early evening, already a septembric dusk—I found myself in a used bookstore somewhere distant from my normal routine and habit. The occasion was a doctor’s appointment, and the office was about an hour’s drive away—a specialist, who I prefer to see in person. Thankfully, the temperature had cooled from the suffocating heat of the prior week, and venturing out of doors was not as Herculean as it had been. In fact, I was actually looking forward to my little sojourn; felt it would be a welcome shake-up. My routine of late had grown stale, felt like it was collecting around me in great sheaves of cast-off dead matter. Skin cells. Dust. This, mostly due to the quasi-hermetic sealing of the apartment so that the air conditioning can keep it livable. The windows are firmly shut, locks turned, the plastic and glass probably bulging in its frames. All that is within cycles endlessly, dragged up and around, scudding across the ceiling, and then is released, hovering for a time in mid-air before then descending anew. But one morning you wake up, and the angle of the sun outside the window is slightly different—noticeably so, as if there has been a sudden, violent change overnight, and now it sags slightly in the sky where it rises. It is enough to now snag on some of the glass objects on my windowsill, and flare a little brighter through their lenses a little earlier in the morning. I worry about the intense, pure spot of light that is projected onto the wall opposite, and for a moment I convince myself I see a little curl of smoke rising from its center. There’s something different about the quality of the light, too, and then of course there’s that classic something in the air—the first crispness, the intimation of a shift. We are maybe the only ones who can articulate how that feels with language; animals certainly sense it, but to them it is as natural-feeling as blood or danger or sleep. But we wonder at it! We attempt to cloak the feeling in words, to enrobe it with our perception. What it means. A confusion of competing instincts: cold on the rise. Winter soon. The urge to gather, harvest, bring inside. It will begin, sure, as excitement, anticipation. The first crystalline curls of frosted breath, the first delicate dance of flakes in the air. But there is something else there, too. A quickening amongst all the gladdening, the minute stumble in the waltz of the heart. A bit of hurry enters the world. Alarm and alert. Of course, there’s also commodified solace in the presence of pumpkin spice and apple pie and warm and goo; there’s the holidays to consider, the shopping and the shipping and the travel and the headaches of End-of-Year hassle, all to throttle down toward New Year’s Day and another resolution, maybe, if we’re lucky, a revelation. There’s alarm there too: what have I done with this year? What has it done with me? And that’s really the question: how has this year manhandled us, tossed us around like rag-dolls, all (of course) against our protestations. Won’t be sad to see the back of this one, we’ll say ruefully. Something I think I hear a lot more frequently these days. Maybe something to do with getting older. Maybe something to do with the way the world is trending. We survived, goes another cynical New Year’s refrain, and the hands on the Doomsday Clock tick another hemi-demi-semi-second—or whatever quixotic increment they’ve decided to use now—to stave off the inevitable titular catastrophe. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

This is the first time I’ve ever re-posted a 3 Quarks Daily article. I was led to re-examine the idea of visits by Aliens—particularly in the UFO phenomen—by two incidents. One was the announcement on May 8 of this year to release new, never-before seen files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). This footage is being released on a rolling basis and is available to view on War.Gov/UFO.  The other is the upcoming release of a new Steven Spielberg film about UFOs called “Disclosure Day.” The film is fiction, but contains references to a lot of what we believe to be true about UFOs, aliens, abduction and crop circles, most of which has come from Mr. Spielberg’s imagination:  E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Between these two forces, PURSUE and Spielberg, I wonder how much truth will actually be revealed.

I have updated this article, which was originally posted in September 2017. It described our experience touring Wiltshire, England in 1994 searching for Crop Circles.  These beautiful and symmetric circles in ripe fields were originally thought to be communications from aliens, or landing sites of UFO’s, and they began to appear  during the 1990’s obsession with aliens. My husband Rick and I wanted to see these other-worldly apparitions for ourselves; the thrill of touching something that was touched by alien beings was unbelievable. And perhaps we’d see a UFO nearby, too.

1994 was the height of the alien frenzy. There were bestseller books, magazines, and TV shows about crop circles, flying saucers and alien abductions. A 1990 Gallup believed we had alien visitors. The highly popular “X-Files” weekly show had a large viewership who tuned in every Sunday evening to watch Special Agents Scully and Mulder investigate paranormal phenomenon, focusing on alien abductions; their slogan was “the truth is out there.” Sensational alien stories swept the nation in these pre-social media days, as people relied on news media and best-seller books for their information. And there were plenty of books and TV specials to stoke your imagination. Read more »