by Rafaël Newman

Those of us employed in the city of Zurich got some extra time off last week. Every year, on the third Monday in April following the vernal equinox, the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs—the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds, also known by its German initialism ZZZ—stages Sechseläuten, a festival featuring a parade and a bonfire. The event, whose pronunciation in the local dialect—Sächsilüüt—makes it sound a good deal sexier and lewder than it actually is, draws in equal parts on history, historicizing revival, and mythology, and is advertised by its promoters, with a prudent hedge, as “the largest Swiss Volksfest in Zurich.”

First the history. During the 14th century, in what would one day become Switzerland’s biggest city, the tradesmen’s guilds used their growing economic might to challenge the local patriciate and were able to establish a power-sharing arrangement, with the guilds and the nobles organized into a council with variously weighted competencies. Rudolf Brun (c. 1290-1360), the leader of the guild revolution in 1336 and Zurich’s first independent mayor, is commemorated in the name of a bridge over the Limmat in the Altstadt, on the route of the Sechseläuten parade.

Brun’s newfangled corporate oligarchy lasted into the 19th century, when, as the power of the guilds was waning amid the rise of capitalism and popular democratic ambitions, the traditional medieval and Renaissance costumes of the guildsmen began to be trooped each spring as a reminder of their bygone importance: this is the historicizing element in the etiology of Sechseläuten, akin to the “revival” and marketing of allegedly traditional tribal tartans in the early modern period in Scotland, as local Scottish power had in fact been weakened.

And finally, there is the festival’s mythological source: in memory of what the ZZZ insists on calling a “heathen” custom, the advent of spring in Zurich is celebrated in mid-April with winter burned in effigy, in a recreation of a putatively prehistoric rite. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Trout (I think) in a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Marie Snyder

In the West, it feels like we have never lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism, a time without peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners. For thousands of years, the exploitation of people appeared necessary to some of the best minds, which shifted as we developed machinery and technology. But now we’re in the realm of drones, 3-D printers, and AI. Once we have the technology that can mine for lithium and coltan at the push of a button, then exploitation of human resources should all but be obliterated, leaving humans to paint and write poetry, right?? Unless, of course, the tactic of keeping people at bare subsistence levels is also a means to control the masses.  

One perspective of the past thousand years or so might look something like this: Peasants lived on the King’s land, first for free, then later in exchange for a portion of the food they grew or products they crafted. A tax on land started when the Lords realized they could profit more from keeping sheep than people, and peasants had to commodify their labour for the privilege of continuing to live where they had been born. Then we had some revolutions to usher in a whole new way of living, to be able to have individual property rights and to choose our leaders. The wealthy expanded their land into plantations and dragged over people from the colonies to work them in exchange for some food and shelter. It was different in intention than the King/peasant dynamic but not in result: lords allowing food and shelter on their land to people who already lived there in exchange for their labour carries different weight from landowners providing food and shelter to people they kidnapped in exchange for their labour. That type of enforced labour was never abolished, of course; it was merely outsourced to poorer countries and American prisons. More acknowledged today, we have the working poor who make just enough to barely pay for rent and food. Leaving a horrible job at Amazon isn’t a realistic choice without any possibility of saving money. They’re free in title but not in practice. They might very well still live on land belonging to their overlord! 

So, when did we have a democracy in which each person’s unmanipulated and unfettered vote counts as much as any other, or human rights in which we all have the right to food and shelter and certain freedoms. Did I blink and miss it?  Read more »

by David Winner

My history textbooks in junior high school in 1970s Virginia presented history pretty much as I understood it from what would have been the point of view of my parents, standard liberal white academics.  America’s racial original sins would have been muted but not ignored: slavery, indigenous genocide, Japanese internment camps.  But one day when I was poking around the school library, I discovered boxes of older textbooks that had only recently been replaced, which might now be on their way down to Florida.  Smiling black people who just happened to be enslaved kindly treated by the good white people of the South, particularly by heroic and benevolent Virginians such as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

If 1840 outside of Richmond, say, had really been like that what would it have looked like? Warm, smiley, friendly no violence or anger or retribution. Freedom, wealth, and privilege burdens that black people were lucky to avoid. The only possibility of such a universe, I would imagine, might have involved some sort of depraved mass lobotomization or heavy doses of obliterating narcotics. This vision of the old South was as impossible as it was untrue.

Flash forward to mid-fifties New York, Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley in the new Andrew Scott Netflix version is approached by a black man at a bar who says he has a job for him.  There is no reference to their races as if black people approaching white people and offering them work was a regular occurrence at that time.  In the Highsmith original, no such character exists.  Deeply racist,  Highsmith cast almost all non-white characters in her work as foolish and/or despicable. Read more »

NOTE: For the past six years, Joseph Shieber was a much-valued contributor here at 3QD. He wrote 73 essays for us which can be seen here. We are all saddened by his loss and wish to express our sympathy to his wife, Lesa, and his children, Samuel and Noa. This obituary is taken from here.

Joseph H. Shieber, April 7, 2024 of Wallingford, PA. Beloved husband of Lesa Shieber; proud father of Samuel and Noa; loving son of Benjamin and Eileen Shieber; devoted brother of William (Rebecca) Shieber and Jonathan (Kathleen) Shieber.

Joseph (“Joe”) Shieber was a loving husband and father, beloved son and brother, and respected Professor at Lafayette College. But that brief description does not encompass Joe’s remarkable impact on everyone he met.

Joe grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, within walking distance of LSU, where his dad, Professor Ben Shieber taught and his mom, Eileen Shieber, received her graduate degree. From the start, Joe was blessed with great intelligence, an even temperament, and a profound gift for friendship and love. Joe went to Yale College where he received his B.A. in Literature, while participating in the singing groups Tangled Up In Blue and the Whiffenpoofs. He then studied at the Free University in Berlin, where he received two Masters Degrees, in Mathematics and Philosophy, and Brown University, where he received a Ph.D. in Philosophy. His Brown graduation was blessed with a driving rain, and the Ph.D. recipients were forced to sit outside while an appropriate worthy person droned on with thoughts on how to lead a good life. Perhaps it was this experience which led to Joe’s research on effective (or ineffective) communications.

Joe then went off to teach Philosophy at Lafayette College. At the time of his death, Joe was the James Renwick Hogg Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, which is quite the mouthful. Joe was a beloved teacher and colleague. He was, by his fellow faculty’s account, the smartest and best-read philosopher in a department made up of smart and well-read philosophers. Philosophers are conditioned to make the first statement, the fastest statement, and the best statement. Joe was not that way. Joe always waited, giving respect to those who were speaking. He was decent, and his intellectual generosity was “really honest.” Read more »

by David Greer

I used to visit our airport on Vancouver Island not to catch a flight but to hear the skylarks. I stood in the parking lot and looked up. The stares from passengers arriving and departing seemed a small price to pay for the reward of listening to the endless birdsong spilling from the sky above the terminal.

The Eurasian skylarks were all but invisible, hovering two or three hundred feet above me, but I was familiar with their routine. Male skylarks begin their song flight with a rapid ascendance to hovering altitude, where they deliver their unbroken melodious stream, lasting up to 20 minutes. The longer and more complicated the song, the greater the likelihood of impressing a potential mate. The grassy fields around the runways provided ideal nesting sites for one of the last remaining skylark populations in North America. Fortunately, whenever I visited, the airport sky seemed always to overflow with skylark song, albeit to an intermittent accompaniment of airplane engines.

Eurasian skylarks were introduced to several American states in the nineteenth century by European immigrants nostalgic for the birds of home. A further introduction to Vancouver Island in 1903 was sufficiently successful that the local skylark population had grown to more than a thousand by the early 1960s.

Although only the male skylarks engage in the aerial opera, the long-standing belief that courtship songs are primarily the province of male birds has been well and truly shattered. That theory likely arose from the fact that early naturalists primarily made their observations in temperate zones where male birds play a larger role in birdsong. But the majority of songbird species are tropical (unsurprising, given that birds evolved in the general vicinity of Australia), and a 2014 study of almost all songbird families demonstrated that female song not only occurs in more than two-thirds of those species but also may be just as long and complex as male song. Read more »

Replacing the Gates

If I’d broken the laws of light—
if I’d been caught by a black hole
and sent to prism,
would you visit me with spectral frequency
and split waves with me?
Would you help cleave white
into colors and set them free
to carom off of everything in sight
replacing the gates of hate
with rainbows?

by Jim Culleny

by Tim Sommers

The fella says, we must never forget that we are human. And as humans we must dream. And when we dream, we dream of money. —David Mamet/The Spanish Prisoner (1998)

Long after Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it and wisely counseled giving back to Caesar what, very obviously, was Caesar’s (‘Didn’t you see the picture?’), Adam Smith tried to tell us that money was not invented by governments. Money, and economic life entire, come from “a certain propensity in human nature,” he says, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith gives a detailed account of how such barter might arise in a group of shepherds or hunters. He does not pretend that this is an actual group of which he has actual knowledge. But what genre of story is this then?

Although many economists have told the “money comes from barter” story as nonfiction, contemporary economics textbooks tell it neither as fact nor fiction, but as a hypothetical. To see the benefits of money, one textbook advises, “imagine a barter economy.” “In a complex society with many goods,” says another, money replaces barter, since “barter exchanges involve an intolerable amount of effort.” More poetically, one textbook asks us to imagine that we “have roosters, but…want roses.”

The trouble is, as anthropologist Caroline Humphrey points out, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.” Never?

Barter societies, where they exist at any scale, are what happens (initially, briefly) to societies that once used money after their central government collapses. So, while economists would have you believe that barter initially arises from “a certain propensity in human nature,” but that, given barter’s intolerable complexity, barter gives rise naturally to money, and that the use of money leads to credit and debt, David Graber argues that, basically, the opposite is true. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

A new study has revealed a troubling development in the state of Maryland: while murder rates fluctuated between 2005 and 2017—first trending downward, then increasing for a few years—the homicides recorded during that period have grown steadily more violent the entire time.

According to “Increasing Injury Intensity among 6,500 Violent Deaths in the State of Maryland,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, researchers examined the intensity of deadly incidents over a 13-year period. Intensity was measured by the number of gunshots, stab wounds, and fractures exhibited by victims. Across all three causes of death, while the rate of homicides varied during the period, the percentage of high-violence crimes consistently increased.

Conducting the study was easier in Maryland than it might have been in other states. Maryland is unusual in that its Chief Medical Examiner is required to report on all murders, suicides, and unusual deaths, which means that researchers had access to a broad-based data set. State policy meant that researchers had access to information about victims who died under medical care and those who died at the scene of the crime. The state’s data set was geographically comprehensive, too, including cases from Baltimore’s urban center, the suburban areas around Baltimore and Washington, DC, and the rural areas in the eastern and western parts of the state. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Nils Peterson

I

This is how it felt. 

Yankee Stadium Gone – Impossible. It’s like going to your old hometown and finding your house – No! the neighborhood tarmacked over. Yes, we live in the world of Heraclitus, “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”  Flux is all.

The first time I went to Yankee Stadium, I lived in New Jersey and I went with Bunny Reid, a neighborhood friend who lived in a strange house filled mostly with aunts. It had a big, big yard, and in the fall we’d play football on the long open side yard. In the spring and summer we’d play catch with mitts too big for our hands or we’d throw a pink rubber ball against the side of a garage that had been a carriage house keeping careful track of balls and strikes. We were Yankee fans. His father wasn’t around much. I think he had something to do with the railroad, but he took us to see a real game at Yankee Stadium.

I guess we drove up there through the Tunnel or over the George Washington Bridge, but memory isn’t certain here, because it was wartime and gas rationed and difficult to find, the speed limit 45 as I recall. I think I would remember train or bus. The great players were off playing for Uncle Sam, so likely this is 1944 or maybe ’45 before VE and VJ Days. However we got there, I was thrilled at being in that marvelous, seemingly eternal Coliseum, the House That Ruth Built.

Bunny’s father got the tickets, gave me mine – and, all of a sudden they were gone, Bunny and his father were nowhere in sight. There I was, 10 years old, 11 at most, 50 miles from home, maybe 50 cents in my pocket for a hot dog and a drink. Maybe there was a moment of panic. Maybe not. I took my ticket, asked an usher where my seat was, and went to it. Read more »

Alpine salamander in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Richard Farr

I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what you’d experience with your back to the railing at Niagara. As if pleased with the roar, this part of the airframe wags intermittently, like the rear end of a hopeful dog. Objects made of metal have no right to be this flexible – especially not airtight objects that are essentially several thousand small tin trays tacked together. (Welded? Bolted? Riveted? What is a rivet anyway? How is it possible to reach my age with essentially no idea what a rivet is?) 

When I read Simon Winchester’s history of engineering, The Perfectionists, I must have missed the bit about rivets, but I did learn that the turbine blades in a jet engine have to be manufactured by advanced magi of the alchemical arts, who employ exotic alloys and mind-bogglingly fine tolerances to fight metal’s very natural desire to melt or shatter when spun at ferocious speeds inside a furnace. I try not to think about the fact that a manufacturing imperfection the size of a flea’s toenail could get me into a news story.

According to my watch we’re at 6,000 feet, but that’s only an indication of the lowered cabin pressure. It’s nothing, from a climber’s point of view, but presumably it explains why my head hurts, my hands look like a pair of lizard skin gloves, and half the passengers are farting. Read more »

Stardust

—on a celestial photo

look to the spiral arc of stars
of which the nearest star and you are part

and see your milky way
and climb your finite climb

and run your finite run
and whirl and turn and wind

while they spin their finite spin
and glow their finite glow

and give you finite light
to tell you what they know

of the stuff you’re of and in,
both brief and infinite

Jim Culleny
9/4/15, 7:10 am
Photograph by Dave Lane