by Usha Alexander

[This is the tenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

On February 18, 2021, NASA landed Perseverance rover on the surface of Mars. Perseverance is the latest of some twenty probes that NASA has sent to bring back detailed information about our neighboring planet, beginning with the Mariner spacecraft fly-by in 1965, which took the first closeup photograph. Though blurry by today’s standards, those grainy images helped ignite widespread wonder and fantasy about space exploration, not long before Star Trek also debuted on television. By the 1970s, science-fiction storytelling was moving from the margins of pop-culture into the mainstream in film and television—and so followed generations of kids, like myself, who grew up expecting off-world adventurism and alien encounters almost as much as we anticipated the invention of video-phones and pocket computers and household robots, as our conceptual bounds for the human story were pushed ever farther outward.

And so much of our expectation has come true. Smartphones and Zoom calls and Roombas are just the most mundane examples of how our techno-fantasized future has manifested in daily life. There’s promise of even more to come, as cultural forces continuously work to realize not only our imagined technotopia of flying cars and jetpacks, but even to seek out those elusive alien encounters. Perseverance rover is, in fact, a robotic astrobiologist: its purpose on Mars is to seek out direct signs of alien life—microbial fossils, if not living microbes themselves. But even should the Martians disappoint us by their absence, information gathered by Perseverance is still intended to help us make that next “giant leap for mankind”: human colonization of Mars. What was until quite recently still generally regarded an outlandish notion seems now widely accepted as the obvious next chapter in our human Manifest Destiny. Indeed, the more we know about the unsuitability of that cold, airless, radiation-beleaguered rock, the more we seem inspired to conquer it. Read more »

Delita Martin. Rain Falls From The Lemon Tree. 2020

Acrylic, Charcoal, Decorative Papers, Hand Stitching

More here and here.

by Rafaël Newman

It’s been 40 years this past month since the election of François Mitterrand as President of France. Today, June 21, is the day chosen by his first Minister of Culture for the Fête de la Musique: what has come to be known as “World Music Day” in the English-speaking countries that have since, along with scores of others, enthusiastically adopted the annual festival.

Mitterrand was the first Socialist in the history of the Fifth Republic to attain the office of president, and his term, historic as well for its unprecedented (and still unrivalled) duration, was characterized among other things by grand gestures of support for culture, both classical and popular, focused not only on Paris but increasingly on the cities and towns of the traditionally underserved French provinces. Following a nation-wide study of amateur musicianship commissioned by Culture Minister Jack Lang, which found that one out of two young people in France play a musical instrument, Mitterrand’s government in 1982 initiated the annual Fête de la Musique, to be held on the day of the summer solstice, and to feature multiple, simultaneous public performances by musicians, both amateur and professional, playing for crowds of varying dimensions, from busker’s circle to stadium-sized audience.

Although Mitterrand’s cultural policy was in some respects a continuation of his predecessor’s efforts at modernization and opening, Giscard’s patrician air had lent his presidency the cast of a bygone era, and it was left to Mitterrand, the former Vichy functionary and perennial also-ran, to reap the benefits of a sea change in French public affairs, symbolized in part by the Fête, an annual celebration of a vital, and vitally homespun, national creativity. The Fête was thus effectively part of an image campaign: a rebranding, or, less cynically and more in keeping with the cultural theory of the era, a re-imagining of the French community, and a libidinous recommitment to its revolutionary pillars of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

White people go around, it seems to me, with a very carefully suppressed terror of Black people—a tremendous uneasiness. They don’t know what the Black face hides. They’re sure it’s hiding something. What it’s hiding is American history. What it’s hiding is what white people know they have done, and what they like doing. White people know very well one thing; it’s the only thing they have to know. They know this; everything else, they’ll say, is a lie. They know they would not like to be Black here. They know that, and they’re telling me lies. They’re telling me and my children nothing but lies. —James Baldwin, 1979

What and how the Nation teaches its children says a lot about the political principles for which it stands. Through a complex mechanics of curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, discourse, and discipline, public school systems have always operated as cultural and ideological state apparatuses. This means that they help to reproduce the dominant ideological and cultural logic of the nation-state of which they are an integral part. The mechanics of public education change as the ideological and cultural morphology of the state changes. Yet, schools are also sites of struggle over the Nation’s dominant ideological and cultural interests. As Henry Giroux has shown, there is always resistance at the curricular, pedagogical, and discursive levels to the reproductive energies of the state. Teachers, students, parents, and other stake-holders are always, from one side of the ideological spectrum to the other, pushing back against the reproductive mechanics of the school. One articulation of resistance that has become a source of outrage and concern in our current times for many liberals and conservatives is the move by some states, districts and schools to use Critical Race Theory (CRT) to reframe what and how American history is taught.

CRT, explains Stephen Sawchuk, Associate Editor of Education Week, “is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.” Within the context of schooling, CRT researchers and scholars “look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them.” Researchers working within the framework of CRT over the past 40 years have shown, qualitatively and quantitatively, how systemic racism in the areas of housing, finance, law, healthcare, and education has disenfranchised, marginalized, oppressed, and dehumanized people of color from the Nation’s inception and continue today. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

When we were young, most of us indulged in the speculation, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” Many of us said things like a firefighter, a doctor, a nurse, or a teacher. As children, we instinctively looked at the world around us and recognized the careers that seemed to have purpose and meaning, and that seemed to make the world a better place. I can’t imagine that many 5-years olds dreamed of being paper pushers or spending their days doing data entry. But we grow up. People around us have expectations for us; we have expectations for ourselves. We might have academic challenges, financial needs, family obligations. We see the world and the careers open to us as more diverse and as more challenging than the Fisher-Price Little People figures that characterize the world for a child.  And so, many of us lose that childhood idealism and just get a job, get on the career ladder, put our noses to the grindstone.

At the beginning of lockdown, my friend and former colleague Catherine and I started talking about the future of work. This conversation turned into a book that we’re currently writing, and a companion podcast called The Impromptu Game Plan. Our overall premise was, “for the last decade, the digitization of jobs, primarily through automation, has been an exponentially disruptive force.  And then COVID-19 hit.  COVID-19 has devastated entire industries that may never come back, or at least come back in their previous form. It further disrupted the world, the economy, the workforce in ways that we will be living with long beyond the end of the spread of the virus. The economic disruption caused by lockdown has accelerated the workforce displacement already underway due to automation and other technology disruptions.  We’re now living through a perfect storm of human-made and natural disruption that will cause as much reordering in society as the industrial revolution did, perhaps more so.” We thought there was an interesting germ of an idea there, but we had no idea how prescient we would turn out to be. Read more »

by Callum Watts

The desire to turn failure into a learning opportunity is often generous, and an important way of dealing with the trials and tribulations of life. I first became aware of it as a frequent trope in start-up culture, where, influenced by practices in software development where trying things out and failing is the quickest way to get to something of value, we are constantly subject to exhortations to “fail fast and fail forward”. Many workplaces now lionise (whether sincerely or not is another matter) the importance of learning through failure, and of creating environments that encourage this.

I’ve noticed the idea that failure should be re-conceptualised primarily as a source of learning appearing in many other contexts. Self-help encourages us to think of misfortunes as opportunities for personal development. The peculiar fact that people like Jordan Belfort have become popular figures in the self-help/motivational speaker circuit is striking, but even outside the realm of obvious moral failings, we are encouraged to think of our own tragedies as opportunities for redemption and growth. In the face of covid-19, people talk about what they have learnt from a year in lockdown, how it might have improved them as, and I expect there will be plenty more of this sort of thinking to come in the next couple of years. This though, can become a manic compulsion, which has a distorting effect on our ability to understand the reality of our existential condition. The desire to find in every grief an opportunity, forgets the inescapably tragic dimension of life, and in doing so misses something profound. Read more »

Self-portrait in a reflection in a passing train window at Ostbahnhof in Munich last evening.

by Bill Murray

If you’d like to start at the beginning, read Part One here.

On a piercing-bright, dripping-humid Irrawaddy delta morning in the 1990s, wild, screeching fowl wheeled over trucks full of boys in Chinese dragonheads banging on the side panels, driving in circles, celebrating the new year. The year of the pig had just begun.

The Yangon – Thalyin bridge was three two-and-a-half kilometer, Chinese-built lanes, one in each direction with a rail track separating them in the middle. Having just one lane on a bridge doesn’t keep anybody from passing, of course.

From China all the way around southeast Asia to here, the technique for driving is the same: If you get out around the car in front of you fast enough, you present the oncoming drivers with a fait accompli: I am tying up the entire highway in front of you, so you have no choice but to brake and let me merge in front of the guy beside me.

Naturally the oncoming traffic plots to do the same, and tranquility seldom reigns. Yet in the middle of it all, whole Burmese families plodded by on ox carts or old blue Ford or Dodge “buscars” with men and boys stuffed everywhere inside, standing hanging on the back and a dozen more piled on top. Invariably they all broke into wide smiles and waved madly as they wheezed past. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon, Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age, The University of Chicago Press, 2021.

Permanent Crisis hits close to home. In the first place, I have been trained as a humanist, my degree is in English Literature. But I have long suspected that the sense humanists have of being under attack (by agencies in the culture at large) is at least as much a feature of humanities culture as it is a perception of the world in which they live. Thus I am biased in favor of the thesis Reitter and Wellmon are arguing.

Second, most of the book is an examination of debates that took place within the German academy in the nineteenth century. Why is that important to me? Because my alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, was explicitly founded on the German model in 1876, the first American university to be so founded. The words Bildung and Wissenschaft that march through this text like Sherman’s troops through Georgia also surrounded me at Hopkins.

But first I urge you to settle into a comfortable chair, pour yourself a drink, coffee, tea, scotch, a white wine spritzer, whatever. This is going to take awhile. As you know, it is customary in some quarters for a reviewer to use the occasion to expatiate on their own views while treating the book under review as but a pendant on that disquisition. I hope, Paul and Chad, that my abuse of this privilege is not so flagrant as is so often the case in, for example, The New York Review of Books but I found your argument so compelling that I had to toss in my 2 cents.

In the first section I lay out their argument as I understand it. Then, after a generous quotation from the book, I illustrate the argument with some observations by the late J. Hillis Miller, a contemporary humanist of the first rank. Miller’s observations set up the third section, where I stray from the text entirely, and discuss the ways in which schools could use the internet to revamp humanities instruction and public outreach in ways suitable to the contemporary world. I loose it entirely in the fourth section, where I explain how one ancient text, Plato’s The Crito, has been central to my own life, and then move closer to the Reiter’s and Wellmon’s text with a discussion of Goethe’s Faust, which also has personal significance. I conclude on a note of measured open-ended pessimism. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In my last essay for 3QD we talked about how we are at the beginning of a new era in mathematics. As a discipline mathematics has the mythos that it is True and Eternal, but it is also a human endeavor and has its share of errors. Fortunately, it is a robust and self-correcting system that usually catches and corrects these errors.

For several decades we have had proof verification software. Versions of such software are useful in the so-called “real world”. NASA, for example, is keen to avoid software crashes. After all, if you brick the Curiosity rover on the surface of Mars it’s not like you can just reboot it. NASA sponsors an ongoing series of meetings devoted to formal verification methods.

In mathematics, however, proof verification software has yet to play an important role. For both human and technical reasons, research mathematicians and proof verification folks live on different planets. My last essay was about the software package Lean and the fact it is quickly getting up to speed with undergraduate level mathematics and even knows about manifolds and perfectoid spaces (geometric objects used by researchers every day). Heck, perfectoid spaces were introduced by Peter Scholze less than a decade ago — a blink of an eye in the long arc of mathematics.

In fortuitous timing for 3QD readers, Lean made news just last week. In December Peter Scholze laid down a challenge to the Lean community. It was called the Liquid Tensor Experiment. Last week the challenge was answered.

The revolution has begun! Read more »

by Tim Sommers

In an interesting recent article on Aeon, “You are a Network” (based on her 2019 book, “The Network Self”), Kathleen Wallace argues that anthropological, narrative, feminist, and communitarian views of the self have all converged on the idea that you are a network.

But you’re not.

At least part of what she has in mind is that the self is a process not a substance, that it’s essentially relational, and that it can be extended in various ways – for example, what we count as our cognition can be extended beyond the boundaries of our own mind and body. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s true.

The argument that “you are a process” is orthogonal to the question of what sort of thing or process you are. For example, physicalists (philosophers committed to what used to be called “the slogan”: “everything that is real is physical”) prototypically also describe the self as a process. It’s a brain process. So, I don’t think the substance/process bit is the real issue.

So, I want to talk about whether you and I are essentially relational and whether our cognition can be extended or networked. With all due respect to the view, my aim is deflationary. There are relational properties, but you cannot essentially be your relational properties. And that idea that we can extend our cognition is basically just a metaphor. Let’s start there. Read more »

Jean Shin. Fallen. Installation at Olana State Historic Site, New York.

“… In the 19th century, hundreds of thousands of hemlocks were cut down for the tanning industry, which used the tannin in the tree’s bark for the commercial demands of leather-making. The devastating loss of these evergreen forests would have been visible from Olana’s hilltop. With an artist’s eye toward the cycles of nature, Church would also include fallen trees in his paintings.”

“In memory of the millions of hemlocks that fell in the 19th century to the local leather-tanning industry, Jean Shin used antique bark-peeling tools to remove the tree’s outer layer before giving it a protective new coat …”

More here, here, and here.

by Peter Wells

Seventy years ago, according to William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies (Carey, 2009), the future Nobel prizewinner was a middle-aged English teacher in a private boys’ school in Salisbury, UK, and not enjoying it. He had written three novels, none of them published, though some of his poems had gone into print. His novel about schoolboys killing each other on a tropical island, originally entitled Strangers From Within, was begun in 1951 and first sent to a publisher in 1952. It was rejected by seven publishers before Golding sent it to Faber & Faber in 1953, where the reader, Polly Perkins, pronounced it:

An absurd and uninteresting fantasy about the explosion of an atomic bomb on the colonies and a group of children who land in the jungle near New Guinea. Rubbish and dull. Pointless.

Golding might have continued for a further twenty years in the job he hated, had not a new member of the Faber & Faber team, Charles Monteith, picked up the well-thumbed manuscript from the reject pile and taken it home. Should we be grateful to him? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Varun Gauri

The narrator and main character of Ishiguro’s new novel is Klara, an Artificial Friend (AF, for short). In other words, she’s an artificial intelligence, a robot, a machine. Klara’s job is to befriend and care for a sick young teenager, Josie.

Why would Josie, or any human being, want to befriend an artificial intelligence?

To being with, Klara is “really cute.” Her hair is “neat and short.” Not only does she resemble a human, Josie observes, but Klara looks French! Klara is also “really smart.”  She has “many unique qualities,” perhaps foremost “an appetite for observing and learning,” unlike many of the other AFs, especially the ones that have all the latest technical advances but which people don’t seem to take to. For these reasons, Josie instinctively picks out Klara at the AF store.

Klara’s descriptions of human life are direct and novel. The reader notices her language, which, as James Wood observes, powerfully makes the real truly strange, defamiliarizing, and thereby renewing, our perceptions of the world. For instance, she repeatedly acknowledges the sun not for its warmth or the lovely shadows it casts, as a human narrator might, but for the sun’s “patterns” and its “nourishment,” as a a solar-powered machine would, one imagines. Her accounts of human emotions are alternately astute and bizarrely precise: “My impression was that the Mother was at that moment the most lacking in tension I’d witnessed since my arrival.” Klara is especially attuned to the ways in which loneliness creeps into human life, and says this about the importance of Josie joining her mother for morning coffee before the mother leaves for work: “I understood then that if she failed to join the Mother for the quick coffee, there was the danger of loneliness creeping into her day, no matter what other events filled it.” Read more »