Learn That First

I've wondered if dawn is like birth
and dusk like death
and if we're given these metaphors
to pique our curiosity
as if to say nothing in this world
is real. You are so naive,
you think this is a dream?

Yes, these are shadows.
Socrates said as much in the agora
trying to spread some light
but this is always difficult among men.
Men prefer to grasp at shades.

Child, this is not a dream,
that is misapprehension—
what Socrates suggests is that
life shelters in shadows
in this desert
…………… learn that first
.

Jim Culleny
8/11/17.

by Jalees Rehman

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is best known for his studies on classical conditioning showing that dogs repeatedly presented with a combination of food and a sound would subsequently salivate upon hearing the sound alone, in anticipation of the meal. The combination of the two stimuli – food and sound – over time "conditioned" the dogs' brains to link these two stimuli. A variation of this experiment was performed on human subjects by Ellson and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1941. In Ellson's study, 40 subjects were "conditioned" over time by hearing a sound and seeing a light. Ellson later on exposed the subjects to only the light, yet 32 of 40 subjects claimed to have also heard the sound. Ellson concluded that such conditioning could lead to hallucinations – the hearing of sounds which, objectively speaking, are not present.

Recently, the Yale University psychiatrist Philip Corlett and his colleagues conducted a very interesting variation on this earlier study by asking whether some people are especially vulnerable to having auditory hallucinations induced by conditioning. The researchers recruited four groups of study subjects: 1) Fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who also regularly heard voices (an auditory hallucination), 2) fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who did not hear voices, 3) fifteen individuals without any evidence of mental illnesses who also claimed to hear voices and 4) fourteen healthy individuals who did not hear voices. Group 3 consisted of voice-hearing psychics ("clairaudient psychics") who identified themselves as such via their own websites, at psychic meetings, or referrals from other psychics. Another important innovation in Corlett's study was the inclusion of brain imaging studies on all subjects, thus allowing the researchers to study functional brain responses when exposing them to auditory and visual stimuli. The researchers then repeatedly exposed the study subjects to a checkerboard image and 1 kHz tone while they were lying in the brain scanner. The subjects were asked to press one button to indicate that they heard the tone, and a second button if they did not. They were also instructed to press down the button longer, the more confident they were in having heard the tone.

After conditioning the subjects, the researchers then intermittently began to show them images of the checkerboard without playing the tone. As expected, many subjects indicated having heard the tone even when it had not been played. However, patients with severe mental illness and a history of hearing voices (group 1) as well as healthy psychics with a history of hearing voices (group 3) were significantly more likely to wrongly indicate that they had heard the non-existing tone. Members of these two groups were also more confident that their hallucination was actually real, since they pressed down the button for longer. Healthy subjects and patients with mental illness who did not have a history of hearing voices were comparatively more correct in identifying whether or not the tone was present. Importantly, when the researchers repeatedly showed the image without the tone, voice-hearing, mentally ill patients were unable to "update" their beliefs when compared to the other groups, whereas the psychics gradually recognized that the tone was non-existent.

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by Brooks Riley

According to a biologist who studies the properties of dirt, a single teaspoon of the stuff contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Not a particularly salient fact, but enough to launch the imagination toward other epic notions and distortions of scale: What if our whole world is just a tiny microcosm in someone else’s teaspoon out there in the ether, no more than a microbiome in the belly of a beast so vast it swallows whole universes from a teaspoon into its black hole of a maw, itself a spoonful in a nest of universes, like Russian nesting dolls, their own spoons poised over a bottomless bowl of Beta borscht along a belt of milky ways that go on forever?

Infinity doesn’t bear thinking. ‘Do I matter’ always leads to ‘do we matter’, and along this precarious train of thought the ‘we’ keeps getting bigger, from our person to our species to our planet to our solar system to our universe and beyond. Where does it all end? That we’ll never know doesn’t diminish the question. If there’s only one universe, what is outside of it? If it has boundaries, can it be a universe? These are secular thoughts leading to the contemplation of unimaginable insignificance, and are best left to astronomers or philosophers to figure out, if we survive that long.

The notion of scale has insinuated itself of late into my sleeping life as unpopulated dreams go in search of miniscule changes in a grid pattern, or the perfect word to correct an imperfect song, or a secret combination of colors out of a staggering number of variants. Sometimes I am scaled down to the size of Thumbelina, ready to crawl up the back of a peregrine falcon before takeoff.

Awake, I feared I was slouching toward early autism, which is how I imagined the early autumn stage of my life, or as Gustav Mahler so sublimely echoed Friedrich Rückert’s words: ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.’ Or ‘I am lost to the world’.

But that’s not entirely true. I’m more interested in the world than I’ve ever been, but from a safe distance. I may be ‘lost to the world’ but it isn’t lost to me.

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by Tamuira Reid

There is something about the light in Tuscany. That is what I will remember the most. Not the pasta and the prosciutto that made my pants split open, the drop-jaw architecture, the art dripping from the walls of the Uffizi. No. It's all about the light. It's golden and strong and covers everything in an otherworldly glow. Makes sense why the Renaissance painters were so inspired. And why my father saved pennies (literally) just to stand in front of the Ponte Vecchio as a young man. These photos don't really do it any justice, he'd tell me, spreading the proof between us.

My son and I just left Italy, where I was teaching for NYU Florence. Our campus was a collection of villas dotting acre after acre of olive trees. Ollie went to Italian Catholic school and learned words like "ciao" and "grazie" and some bad ones that he laugh-whispered to me at night before bed. I spent hours wondering what it was, exactly, that made gelato taste so unbelievably good. Life was rich and simple, even if we were dirty and complicated at heart.

We've now traded the cobbled, crooked streets and statues of naked men for the A train and car alarms. The Duomo for Times Square. Peace for chaos. And the thinking of writing to the doing of writing. Summer.

Professors make fast work of the summer months. It's the time we set aside to build our masterpiece, commit ourselves to making that work, the one piece we've dreamt about our entire lives. The one that potentially defines who and what we are.

Back in my college days, I always imagined professors having these fabulously indulgent summers, shuttling off to some exotic tropical island, barefoot and sipping on margaritas, wearing ugly shorts on a golf course. Old, smart people getting laid. I never thought that they might actually, like, work.

I am a creative nonfiction writer turned screenwriter who is currently writing a novel. (I wrote a screenplay, based on a personal essay, and now I am rewriting it as fiction.)

Writing takes time. Lots of it. Insane amounts of it. Hours upon hours until you have no idea what day it is or what the weather is like or when the last time you ate something other than coffee was. When I became a mother, my world shifted entirely. Days became longer, better, harder. Time wasn't something I took for granted anymore.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

As we know from the Law of Small Numbers, coincidences happen. Indeed, Ramsey's Theorem tells us they are downright unavoidable. Unfortunately, not all can be happy coincidences. In the first two weeks of July we lost three remarkable women of mathematics: Maryam Mirzakhani, Marina Ratner, and Marjorie Rice.

The most famous was Maryam Mirzakhani. She passed away on July 14th. This was reported in the New York Times, the Economist, and across the internet (including, of course, here at 3QD). Her widespread fame was in large part due to the fact that she was both the first woman and the first Iranianian to earn the Fields Medal. As we discussed at the time, Mirzakhani worked in geometry. More specifically, she worked with moduli spaces: these are geometric spaces where each individual point is itself a rich geometric object.

That is, imagine you are interested in studying geometric objects of a certain type (say, circles). Rather than study them one by one, you could study them as a collection. If you say two circles are "close" to each other when their radii are close in size, then you have a way of measuring distances in the space of circles and this lets you unleash 2000 years of geometric tools on the problem of circles. Of course, Mirzakhani studied moduli spaces of much more complicated gadgets than circles, but the principle remains the same.

Loyal 3QD readers saw this approach in action a few months ago. Thanks to the work of Canterella, Needham, Shonkweiler, and Stewart, we know it is possible to match the points on the sphere with triangles in a way where nearby points on the sphere match up to nearby triangles in Triangle Space. If we wanted to be fancy (say, at a geometers' cocktail party), we could have said that they showed that the moduli space of triangles can be identified with the sphere.

Their primary motivation was to give an answer to one of Lewis Carroll's bedtime problems [1]. But thinking geometrically also gives us entirely new insights. A big one is that with geometry we have the ability to talk about the shortest path between two points. But the shortest path depends on the ambient geometry. As we all know, the shortest distance between two points in the plane is given by a straight line. However, on a sphere, the shortest path is given by a "great circle".

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by Claire Chambers

Today is the anniversary of 70 years of Pakistan, and tomorrow it will be Indians' turn to celebrate their nation's Independence Day. I recently wrote about South Asian cultural production that portrays Nehru, the Mountbattens, and the Edwina-Jawaharlal relationship or affair. Today I turn my attention to depictions of the Quaid-i-Azam or founder of the nation of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Many influential historical accounts of the Partition have assigned sole responsibility for the country's division to Jinnah and the Muslim League. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre's journalistic history of Partition, Freedom at Midnight, and even Sumit Sarkar's more scholarly account of the lead-up to Independence, Modern India 1885-1947, are examples of portrayals that to varying extents adhere to the view of Jinnah as a megalomaniac evil genius who masterminded the Partition to gain power. However, this politician was much more complex, as my blog post strives to show.

Like these history books, Richard Attenborough's biopic Gandhi portrays Jinnah as a coldly inhuman monster. Indeed, Akbar S. Ahmed writes of the cinematic portrayal, 'Jinnah conveys one impression: menace'. The Muslim League leader has unshakeable agency and is figured forth as a supercilious and worldly politician, who can often be found standing near to Gandhi making ironic comments. Gandhi, by contrast, is saintly and otherworldly, declaring with admirable pluralism: 'I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew'. In the film, it is Machiavellian Jinnah who says that as a response to the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre Indian violence is only an eye for an eye. To this statement Gandhi replies with the famous and possibly apocryphal line: 'An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind'.

The actor playing Jinnah, Alyque Padamsee, has aquiline features and rather sinister parti-coloured hair. In the screenplay, he is described as 'tall, slender, ascetic looking, but dressed impeccably' and, in a more barbed comment, as '[a] man made for the spotlight, a man loving the spotlight'. When Gandhi first returns to India from South Africa, Jinnah is sceptical about the dimuinutive man's abilities, enquiring whether he is a fool and suggesting that Congress should allow him briefly to vent his frustrations about South African racism before he slips into oblivion. Jinnah appeals to the Prophet Mohammed for patience when Gandhi keeps him waiting because he has travelled to meet him by way of a third class train compartment followed by a long walk. The contrast between the elegant lawyer in Western dress who drives a luxury car and this humble pedestrian clad in homespun cloth could not be clearer.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

The ancient bricks of the mosque’s roof slowly loosen and slide apart, letting in a sudden, high torrent of water that nearly drowns me before becoming a mist of green, garden-filtered light: a recurring dream after my first visit to Cordoba, Spain, years ago. I would remain haunted afterwards by the narrow alleys of the Juderia, where, in the upper-story of an old mansion-turned hotel in Cordoba, I sense ghosts striding the rooftops, leaping across the alleys around the mosque-turned-cathedral next to a synagogue. When I write the history of al-Andalus in poems, the book ends up carving a narrative of fire, not water; it begins with the “convivencia” (peaceful coexistence) of the Abrahamic peoples gathering around the Arabic “furn,” the communal oven, baking and breaking bread, or at the kilns together making exquisite tiles out of Iberian dust— it ends with the genocidal fires of the Inquisition. The final destruction notwithstanding, the garden-filtered light of al-Andalus remains and grows in the rich tradition of Andalus-inspired poetry across the Muslim world, and the garden-filtered music of al-Andalus is the music of water reminiscent of the banks of the river Guadalquivir (from the Arabic “al-wadi al-kabir”) where waterwheels turned acres into crop-filled fields, orchards and iconic gardens with fountains and pools, transforming the land and its people for over seven-hundred years.

I praise the scholars, scribes, rulers, poets and builders of al-Andalus in my poems, but also its arabesque-rimmed public wells, irrigations canals, gardens, baths and ablution fountains in citrus-scented patios: an appreciation of water as creative material and a spectacularly-utilized gift to civilization. I recall Mahmoud Darwish’s longing in his line “water, be a string to my guitar” (Eleven Planets at the End of the Andalusi Scene”) and Iqbal’s metaphor for the Muslim spirit itself as an ocean “Watch, from that ocean-depth— what comes surging at last” in “The Mosque of Cordoba.”

If the Qasida is a journey-poem of the people of the parched Arabian desert who took the poetic form across three different continents, water may well be a metaphor for the immortal beloved in whose pursuit the endless journeys are made and in whose memory water is channeled, all manner of life supported and beautified— a response in the language of gardens to the Divine promise of elaborate gardens in the life hereafter, an homage to (“al-Hayy/al-Khaliq”), the ever-living-creator who teaches how to create. Al-Andalus quenches the mystic thirst, standing for the ultimate creative output, a robust, self-energizing spirit constantly filling its reservoir of knowledge, a paradise of human cultivation and a treasure of the Muslim legacy; its fragmentation and collapse equally unforgettable as a tragedy.

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by Paul Braterman

Ten minutes difference, and Earth would still be Planet of the Dinosaurs

We have suspected for some decades that the dinosaurs¹ became extinct as the result of a massive meteorite, an asteroid, hitting the Earth. We have known where the impact site was since 1990, if not before. But it is only last year that we successfully drilled into the impact site, and only now, for the first time, do we really understand why the impact was so fatal. And if the meteorite had arrived ten minutes earlier, or ten minutes later, it would still no doubt have inflicted devastation, but the dinosaurs would still be here and you wouldn't.

Too many suspects

L: Ammonites (Haeckel, 1904, via Wikipedia). Click on this and other images to enlarge

66.1 million years ago, dinosaurs covered the Earth. 66 million years ago, there were none. And not only the dinosaurs, but the pterosaurs in the skies, the long necked plesiosaurs and even the ammonites in the oceans, and 75% of all complex animal life. No terrestrial vertebrate heavier than around 25 kg seem s to have survived. What happened?

There was no shortage of theories. Quite a lot was going on, geologically, at the time. There was massive volcanic activity in India, giving rise to what are known as the Deccan Traps, containing over a million cubic kilometres of basalt. Such major volcanic episodes have been connected with other mass extinctions. They are accompanied by the ejection into the stratosphere of sulphur dioxide, which in turn slowly reacts with atmospheric oxygen and water vapour, forming a haze of sulphuric acid far above the Earth's surface. This partly blocks out the Sun, affecting the plant growth on which almost² all life on Earth depends. We saw such an effect on a much smaller scale with the 1991 eruption of Mt Pinatubo in the Philippines, which caused a two-year slowdown in global warming and reduced crop yields worldwide, far beyond the reach of the actual dust cloud. Continents were on the move, with the reopening of the North Atlantic, polar icecaps reappeared after prolonged absence and led to lowering of sea levels, affecting ocean productivity, and all these things may have added to ecological stress. But all this hardly seems enough for such a wide-reaching die-back, nor does it account for the suddenness of the process.

Above, Mt Pinatubo, caldera formation phase, USGS

And so, we saw the emergence of the asteroid impact hypothesis. The Solar System still contains fragments of rocky material left over from its formation. This material is mainly concentrated in the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter, but small fragments continually come our way. Most of these are tiny particles, which burn up in our atmosphere (meteors or shooting stars). Some are large enough to survive, falling to earth as meteorites, and their chemical composition tells us a great deal about the stuff from which Earth was originally formed. Very occasionally, the meteorite is large enough to dig out a crater, such as Meteor Crater in Arizona. During the early years of the Solar System, major impacts were frequent and dramatic, as we can see by looking at the Moon and at the other inner planets, but on a geologically active planet such as Earth the evidence will long since have eroded away. However, there are still plenty of small asteroids whose orbits intersect the Earth's. What if one of these happened to crash into the Earth, and trigger catastrophe?

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Sicily

By Mohammad Iqbal

Ah! Cradle of a civilization

tomb of Muslim culture —

mole on the cheek of the sea

guide in a desert of water,

tell me your story, your sorrow —

show me the glory of ancient days.

I weep tears of blood at the distant din

of Bedouins for whom the sea was a playground,

in whose fervent swords lightning flashed—

they freed mankind from fantasy

shook the earth

beneath the throne of pashas,

chanting, “God is Great.”

Is that chanting forever silent

though its echo still delights?

Just as Saadi,

the nightingale of Shiraz,

wailed when Baghdad was sacked

and just as Ibn-e-Badrun’s heart was broken

when the heavens scattered the wealth

of Granada to the winds

and just as Daag sobbed tears of blood

when Delhi, his beloved

Shahjahanabad, was razed —‑

now destiny has directed Iqbal,

a speck of dust in the wake of lost caravans,

to repaint your canvas with sighs,

carry your gift to India and make her sigh too

at waves sobbing forever on your rocky shores

relating the story of ruins.

Translated, from the original Urdu, by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

by Holly A. Case

Centrál Kávéház, Budapest, c. 1910

Robi and I were speaking Hungarian. "Should we ask our new neighbor the Enlightenment question?" I asked. Robi nodded noncommittally as the neighbor picked up his smartphone. I laid out what could happen: one, the conversation could be short and awkward, two, it could be long and superficial, three, it could be long and not superficial. The likelihood of one or two was very high, I submitted. Robi nodded, unimpressed, and deepened the awkward silence.

"Excuse me. Do you mind if I ask whether you have any views on the Enlightenment?"

"What do you mean?"

"The Enlightenment…18^th century, Voltaire, Kant…"

"Yes. What about it?"

"We were discussing the Enlightenment's separation of moral systems from God," I explained. "Pluses and minuses," I added, trying not to poison the well.

"Good or bad, it had to happen," said our neighbor, with an accent now identifiable as Spanish. "It's evolution."

From there we moved to ideas about history, evolution and perpetual struggle versus socialism and the promise of an ultimate end to history, and about the replacement of God with ideology. After getting unfruitfully hung up on Nietzsche for a moment, we agreed that we were living in a post-ideological era.

"Capitalism is the new god," said the man, who by then had a bowl of pasta in front of him. Capitalism wants everything to flow; it abhors barriers, he continued.

We took issue. If capitalism is a god, how come no one is ever willing to sacrifice themselves for capitalism? Lots of people died for gods and ideologies, and both placed heavy demands for self-sacrifice.

"But people sacrifice themselves for capitalism all the time," he rebutted.

"But not explicitly," I protested. "Who ever said ‘Long live capitalism!' on a scaffold or before a firing squad?"

"Perhaps that's because we are implicated it in it. In capitalism, we are both the dictator and the oppressed."

"Like anorexia," I added, the disease of the 1980s that might have told us where we are if we could have read the signs. What is anorexia but an internalization of the two roles: dictator and oppressed? Or at the cellular level cancer…

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Then

If it were then
I’d be seated on the step of the well house
gazing at peach tree buds and the tales they told
of waiting, swelling, being
listening with the lake at my back
down and through the steep slope of woods
across the street. I’d see its gleaming surface
spark through voids of oaks and the strangling bittersweet
that climbed and throttled them ….. if I turned

if I turned I’d hear the shouts and splash of swimmers
with muscles like mine, unconsciously prime, no effort just ease,
sounds, raw amplitudes caught in the topology of pink folds
sprung from the sides of my head like wings —

and there’d be birds, of course, that sing,
species unknown to me then, just birds, robins at least
—the first I knew specifically by their russet breasts
pointed out to me by dad, or mom perhaps,
though by this time that certainty’s as gone as the mist
that rose at sunrise from that lake

gone

all except the echoing sense of it:
the ache that clings like the scent of lilac from the bush
that, not far from the well house at the corner of the drive,
stood its ground against the plow which passed again and again
heaving its cold load upon it at the curb
never say die, its blooms later sang in spring unison,
lavender blossoms bundled like choirs
whose songs rose from their bush of pied shadows
performing sweet chemical chansons for my nose

that day then would have been as young as this but less weighted,
less fraught, less freighted, less shadow-cast:
I’d be seated on the well house step inconsiderate of the future
and unperturbed by the past
.

Jim Culleny
7/28/17

by Hari Balasubramanian

There are techniques of processing food that ancient cultures everywhere seem to have arrived at through an unstructured process of trial and error, and without a formal understanding of chemistry. This is how wheat grains turned into bread loaves, milk to cheese, soybeans to tofu, fruits to alcohol. As the techniques traveled in space and time, there were adaptations to the template, the creation of new variants. Much of what we call ‘cuisine' is precisely this ongoing process of collective experimentation.

This piece is about a millennia-old method of preparing corn which I discovered this year and which led me to other, unexpected links in history. In May I'd purchased a few pounds of corn grains. Not fresh corn on the cob that can be eaten grilled or steamed, but grains of corn that, like grains of wheat or barley or rice, have been kept dry for months after harvest. Naively I thought that cooking them should be easy: either soak them, like one soaks beans, and then, after they've softened a little, boil or pressure cook them. But the outer skin of each corn grain – the hull – was very tough. Even many hours of soaking and then cooking did not produce satisfactory results. While the cooked grains were softer, they still were somewhat difficult to chew. Something was clearly off.

I was missing an important step, a chemical process called nixtamalization. The word nixtamal comes from an indigenous Mexican language, Nahuatl. It refers to the process of cooking dried corn in an alkaline solution. This can be done easily at home. All you need is to boil corn, water and lime (not the citrus lime but the powder calcium hydroxide) together for fifteen minutes, then let it rest. After a few hours, the tough outer skin loosens, peels off easily on rinsing, leaving the kernels. The kernels can then be ground and made into a dough or masa. And it is masa that gives the remarkable aroma and taste to the freshly made tortillas, tacos, and tamales that Mexico and other Central American countries are famous for. If you mill whole corn grains without nixtamalizing them, then not only is the milling process harder because of the tough hull, but the resulting flour may not form into a dough. So much for the new fad of eating whole and unrefined grains!

But there's more to it than convenience and taste. Nixtamalization may have evolved for a specific reason. Niacin, a source of Vitamin B3, which remains trapped and inaccessible if the corn is not nixtamalized, becomes more available if it is. This vital fact, however, remained unknown for a long time. As we'll see, cultures around the world that took up a diet high in corn but without nixtamalization paid a heavy price.

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by Richard King

I'll say one thing for the Cheeto Jesus: he's done wonders for the journalistic trade in specious literary comparisons. In the year or so since Donald Trump became the GOP's presidential nominee, I must have read hundreds of articles comparing his rise and behaviour in office to dystopias and alternative histories such as Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here, Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. It's almost as if this presidency comes with its own reading list. "Okay guys, that's it for today. Next week we're going to look at Orwell, so please bring your copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four …"

I mean, it's all a bit predictable, this stuff about novels predicting Trump. It's the kind of thing a weekend editor, under orders to go "behind" the headlines, is almost duty-bound to publish. But now we are offered another novel with which to dissect the current regime, and this one seems to have set the minds and hearts of the commentariat racing. I refer of course to Margaret Atwood's dystopia The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which imagines a United States under ruthless puritanical rule, subject to a religious caste system, and officially misogynistic, homophobic and cruel. Yes, apparently Donald Trump – Trump the bumptious billionaire; Trump the carrot-coloured conman; Trump the very essence of late capitalist trash – is now to be seriously and solemnly compared to a council of puritanical commanders who enforce gender conformity through the barrel of a gun and punish deviations from it through the bowline of a rope. Seriously? Apparently.

As I probably don't need to tell 3QD readers, the occasion for this outbreak of It Can Happen Here-ism is the recent adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale for the subscription video-on-demand service Hulu. Starring the excellent Elisabeth Moss, whose stints as a Democratic president's daughter and a young, determined secretary in the world of 1960s advertising have forever endeared her to progressive viewers, this adaptation has proven hugely popular with critics and TV audiences alike, gaining scores of 100% and 93% (from critics and audience, respectively) on the review-aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It has thirteen Emmy nominations, and has sent sales of Atwood's novel through the roof. It's even popped up in a speech by Hillary Clinton, who now has lots of time to watch TV.

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by Emrys Westacott

The industrial revolution transformed the world entirely. Its most profound legacy, though, is not anything specific like electricity, motorized transport, or the computer, but the state of permanent technological revolution in which we now live, move, and have our being. There are some, it is true, like economist Robert Gordon, author of The Rise and Fall of American Growth, who argue that we should not expect future innovations to match what we have experienced in the past. But like the fabled salt machine at the bottom of sea, the tech industries continue to churn out innovations–smart phones, driverless cars, Wikipedia, delivery drones, solar panels, camera-based surgery–that quickly and significantly affect the lives and expectations of us all.

For more than two centuries, this ongoing technological revolution has consistently done two things.

• It has eliminated jobs by replacing humans with machines
• It has created new jobs

Agriculture offers a paradigmatic example of the first trend. In 1830, 83% of the workforce in the US was employed in agriculture. By 2014, the percentage working in agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting was down to 1.4%. Most of this reduction is due to the introduction of machines that in a few hours could plough, sow, gather, winnow, stack or store what used to take teams of workers days to accomplish.

From the start, the displacement of people by machines has caused problems. The original Luddites were English textile workers in the early nineteenth century who sought to protect their jobs by smashing the new weaving machines introduced by factory owners looking to save labour costs. Since then the same pattern of technology replacing or displacing workers has been repeated countless times. When the sort of work involved is boring, repetitive, and requires little skill or training, the loss is less likely to be lamented. But very often workers who identify with a specific trade, and pride themselves on skills acquired over many years, find themselves the victims of innovation. And this can happen very quickly.

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by Paul North

An informal talk before first-time college goers, the summer before their first year at an Ivy League university.

How does it feel when your group's social practices bring the world to the brink of destruction? How does it feel when no one can legitimately deny this fact any longer? We haven't been closer to midnight on the nuclear doomsday clock since the H-Bomb was invented in 1953. We haven't seen this level of financial inequality between the vast majority and a small minority of wealth-holders since before the New Deal. The economy is deeply segregated by race and by gender. As a culture, almost to a person, we failed to admit to ourselves that the heat-trapping tendencies of carbon dioxide could lead to a cascade of negative effects. You are going to college on the eve of nuclear war, mass impoverishment, and climate disaster. What is college for? I give you three simple imperatives: be stupid, get lazy, and dream.

When I went to college at the end of the 1980s we weren't conscious of any of this. Sure, in pre-school we dove under desks during nuclear drills, but the end of the cold war seemed to promise us that we could pay attention to other things. For my group, that was the hangover from hippydom. We were revolutionaries. We practiced free thinking, listened to political music, protested. Art lead to emancipation, we thought.

Now the feeling is different. And yet, …

Why someone would even go to college on the eve of the apocalypse is a legitimate question, but since you decided to go, for complicated reasons I know, not all of which have to do with intellectual work—for some it is for economic reasons, for some social reasons, all of the reasons pretty compelling—since you decided to go to college for all of your many reasons, we will concentrate on another question. What are the virtues you can and should cultivate in college? Your first answer might be: excellence, leadership, and success. This is after all the Ivy League. And yet, even after all your hard work, you hear the hollow gong of these big empty words. They are of course codes for the social and economic advancement promised by an elite college. What does excellence mean? Saying "excellent" is something like recognizing an intrinsic value, demonstrated by schoolwork but residing somehow, mystically within you. It is a virtue that becomes a kind of substitute for social class. If you are excellent, legend has it, you don't have to be rich, or else you become rich, eventually, because of your excellence. Excellence is the highest position in a merit system (poor, mediocre, normal, good, and so on; D, C, B, A, and so on). Leadership refers to your position in relation to your peers, in social organizations, extra-curriculars, university committees, and the arts. There is a sense, unspoken, that the best among you or the ones with the most "excellence" should naturally acquire roles of power over others. And finally, "success"—academically success is just an abstract term for a high grade point average, which acts as a kind of currency, or so students think, with which to pay their way into the next level of the game.

No doubt you would agree: life is not a video game. Rewards aren't automatic, even if you are excellent, a leader, and have success. But I want to say more than this. On the eve of an apocalypse it isn't clear there will be a next level, or if you're not willing to be that pessimistic—who can say right now what that next level will or should be? College now, I want to propose, especially an elite place like this, is where you should put the future aside.

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