Great Awakenings of the American Man

by Akim Reinhardt There’s a lot going on right now. Lowlights include racism, misogyny, and transphobia; xenophobia amid undulating waves of global migrations; democratic state capture by right wing authoritarians; and secular state capture by fundamentalist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu nationalists. Among the many factors causing and influencing these complex phenomena are: the rebound…

1800, 1828, 1860, 1876, 1896, 1928, 1932, 1948, 1980, 2000, and Today

by Akim Reinhardt Historians have spilled much ink analyzing and interpreting all of the U.S. presidential elections, dating back to George Washington’s first go in 1788. But a handful of contests get more attention than others. Some elections, besides being important for all the usual reasons, also provide insights into their eras’ zeitgeist, and proved…

Rethinking Atheism

by Akim Reinhardt The turn of the 21st century saw a burst of atheistic declarations and critiques in the United States and Great Britain, led by a small group of celebrity atheists including Philosopher Daniel Dennett, Biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist Christopher Hitchens. I have always found this New Atheism, as the movement is often…

The Reinhardt Style Guide, or All the Stuff You’re Wrong About

by Akim “Scare Quotes Can Indicate Facetiousness” Reinhardt Two spaces after a period, not one.  If a topic sentence leading to a paragraph can get a whole new line and an indentation, then other new sentences can get an extra space.  Don’t smush sentences together like puppies in a cardboard box at a WalMart parking…

Teaching with Artificial Intelligence

by Akim Reinhardt A little over a year ago I published an essay here at 3QD that implored my fellow educators not to panic amid the dawning of Artificial Intelligence. Since then I’ve had two and a half semesters to consider what it all means. That first semester, many of my students had not even…

Why Donald Trump Might be a Vampire

by Akim Reinhardt What do we know about vampires? They are selfish to a degree that is sociopathic They are consumed by vanity They roar against anyone who contradicts them Their skin is oddly discolored They demand sycophantic followers All they care about is fucking, feeding, and being complimented They are capable of hypnotizing people…

Once More Around the Sun, then Home

by Akim Reinhardt We’re circling the Sun at a rate of between 18.20–18.83 miles per second. It is not a fixed speed because Earth travels on an ellipsis, and moves a hair faster when it’s closer to the Sun than it does when further away. It averages out to about 67,000 miles per hour over…

Headline

by Akim Reinhardt The Lede: Wombats ate five children at a drive thru restaurant in Omegosh, Texas last week. The Body: A wisdom of wombats, on the run from massive fires in their Australian homelands, surrounded five children at a Checkers drive thru and lectured them on the disproportionate impact of the U.S. carbon footprint,…

Satire in the Age of Outrage

by Akim Reinhardt Satire seems all but dead for now. Maybe it’s because the world became increasingly ludicrous, culminating with a real-life president as ridiculous as any satire Jonathan Swift or Dorothy Parker could dream up. Donald Trump’s bizarre presidency may have been the peak of absurdity (fingers crossed), but it had been building for…

30 Times

by Akim Reinhardt I can’t sing. Or so I always thought. A notorious karaoke warbler, I would sometimes pick a country tune, preferably Hank Williams, so that when my voice cracked, I could pretend I was yodeling. Then one night, I stepped up to the bar’s microphone and sang a Gordon Lightfoot song. I wasn’t…