LaToya Ruby Frazier. Mom and Mr.Yerby’s hands, 2005.
Silver gelatin print.
Though we are an aggregator blog (providing links to content elsewhere) on all other days, on Mondays we have only original writing by our editors and guest columnists. Each of us writes on any subject we wish, and the length of articles generally varies between 1000 and 2500 words. Our writers are free to express their own opinions and we do not censor them in any way. Sometimes we agree with them and sometimes we don’t.Below you will find links to all our past Monday columns, in alphabetical order by last name of the author. Within each columnist’s listing, the entries are mostly in reverse-chronological order (most recent first).
by Leanne Ogasawara
1.
All I wanted, I told him, was “the perfect teapot.” Just one would be enough, I said, but it had to be perfect (1) — as if a teapot could make everything else in the world okay. A seemingly simple task, and yet finding it was elusive as any great chase.
My first demand was it had to be a Yixing zisha teapot. Valued since at least the tenth century in China, zisha pots are purple or reddish-brownish, unglazed stoneware that are so beautiful they will make you drool (2). The first thing I did was spend hours at the Flagstaff Tea Museum in Hong Kong. Studying the pots in their collection, I tried to narrow down exactly what I wanted in my own “perfect pot.” I learned all about the way zisha pots are hand-modeled out of what is extremely hard clay. Like any great Literati art, one artist alone is traditionally in charge of the entire process from start to finish, and therefore the artist’s seal will be affixed to the bottom of the pot as it is in every way that artist’s creation: one of a kind.
It was in Hong Kong where I’d first fallen in love with tea and stoneware pots. Even now, I never cease to marvel at how soft and warm stoneware feels in comparison to porcelain. Handling unglazed pottery is always a very sensual experience; porous and velvety, it’s like human skin. One of the reasons zisha pots are favored by Chinese tea masters is because the clay absorbs the fragrance and taste of the tea and over time the pot brings something of itself to every brewing, like antique oak barrels used for wine or the ground used in certain kinds of pickling. Read more »
by Akim Reinhardt
Below I identify what I see as two basic recurring problems in modern atheism. I then offer two approaches that I believe atheists should consider for understanding and relating to the religious.
Problem 1: Arrogance. Don’t be so sure of yourself. Even if you’re not laboring under a “God delusion,” you should still have the humility to recognize that you know next to nothing, and what few answers you might proffer aren’t anything anyone wants to hear. If humanism is to offer any benefits, it must begin with an acknowledgment of humanity’s vast ignorance and inability to learn much.
This sentiment will likely send some admirers of science into paroxysms. Surely, they protest, we’ve learned so much over the last century or two. Read more »
by Brooks Riley
by Marie Snyder
A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
~ Alexander Pope
Is it, though?
We’re in a mental health crisis and people need more access to help. How much learning is necessary to help one another, and is it dangerous to listen and offer another perspective or even some suggestions without an advanced psych degree? In old movies, people told their stories to bartenders, hairstylists, or cab drivers for the price of a beer or trim or trip to the airport. They just needed a captive audience willing to listen to their worries Now we want people with credentials as if that will provide more certain results.
But not all credentials are created equal.
Last year BetterHelp got in the news for allegedly sharing confidential health data to social media sites, and was fined $7.8 million. TV writer Mike Drucker wrote:
“EVERY BETTERHELP AD: ‘We’re like therapy but cheaper and easier! We have people for every problem so you get care just for you!’
ACTUAL BETTERHELP: ‘We’re going to set you up with a confused therapist that will ghost after two sessions. Also we told Facebook about your assault.'”
More recently, the New York Times had an article on scams in the wellness coaching industry, describing scenarios in which the new recruits were bilked out of massive amounts for “tuition” made up of a few hours of videos, and then were never helped to find clients. Read more »
by David Winner
Throughout most of my life, I periodically napped in the back sitting room of my parent’s house in Charlottesville, gazing at an enormous shelf of my father’s books.
Why I am a Jew was an unlikely title to find. Though my father was most certainly a Jew, he was fiercely disconnected from all things Jewish. He claimed that he only learned that he was Jewish after he left his Jewish mother and Irish American stepfather behind in Pasadena to go to a very antisemitic Harvard in the late forties. He hated Woody Allen, Larry David, Bernie Sanders, and all other public Jews, never set foot in a synagogue or at a seder dinner, and was skeptical about the state of Israel.
Perhaps being brought up by such a non-Jewish Jew has influenced my perspective. When the news broke about the Hamas attacks in the fall, Angela, my wife, was cross with me before I even opened my mouth because she was stunned by what had happened and feared what I would say. I’ve had a long history of disparaging Israel.
A few days after the attacks, I came back to my house in Brooklyn to find Angela in conversation with our ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbors. They were in shock. Their seventeen-year-old son told us that Muslims had slated the following day for killing Jews around the world. Only Israel could protect us from the “animals.” The world, as he framed it, was overrun by an evil force out to get him and his community. Rather than confront his racism, I retreated inside. I didn’t think he would ever construct things any differently. Read more »
by Paul Braterman
According to the anthropologist James Bielo, such places as the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter provide sacred infotainment, in which visitors imagine that their own lived experience is Bible-based. This requires an illusion of authenticity, with no concern for biblical accuracy. Thus, when Bielo sat in on the planning stages of the Ark Encounter video trailer, he found much concern over the appearance of the pegs being used to hold the Ark’s planks together, which looked like something you could buy at a modern DIY store. That mattered because it didn’t fit the illusion. But no one really cared that Noah was incorrectly described as “righteous,” rather than the highly ambiguous “righteous in his generation,” which is what the Bible actually tells us. Ken Ham had okayed the script, so it must be fine theologically. Ken Ham, founder and at the time CEO of Answers in Genesis, owner of the Ark Encounter, is zealous in his support of one particular version of biblical literalism, but such zeal does not leave room for even the possibility of ambiguity.
As infotainment, consider how the Ark Encounter describes the lives and lifestyles of Noah and his family on board. We are warned that the designers have used artistic license, but assured that nonetheless what we are offered is completely compatible with the biblical account. Technically, that may be true, but in spirit it is totally false. We are not being given an account of the Biblical ordeal, but scenes from a wholesome contemporary sitcom. There is a library, containing scrolls and tablets, where Noah relaxes and Shem studies. It contains a couch, which Noah built during the flood. There is also a commodious kitchen with a wood-burning oven, used for baking bread, rolls, and other things. An equally commodious dining room, where they can all relax in the evenings after having fed the animals. Read more »
This is the first in a series of three articles on literature consider as affective technology, affective because it can transform how we feel, technology because it is an art (tekhnē) and, as such, has a logos. In this first article I present the problem, followed by some informal examples, a poem by Coleridge, a passage from Tom Sawyer that echoes passages from my childhood, and some informal comments about underlying mechanism. In the second article I’ll take a close look at a famous Shakespeare sonnet (129) in terms of a model of the reticular activity system first advanced by Warren McCulloch. I’ll take up the problem of coherence of oneself in the third article.
Augustine’s shameful members
There is a passage in The City of God where Augustine complains about “bodily members” that are not subject to our will (Book 14, Chapter 17):
Justly is shame very specially connected with this lust; justly, too, these members themselves, being moved and restrained not at our will, but by a certain independent autocracy, so to speak, are called “shameful.” Their condition was different before sin…. because not yet did lust move those members without the will’s consent; not yet did the flesh by its disobedience testify against the disobedience of man.
Augustine is obviously complaining about sexuality, and offering the interesting speculation that, before humankind’s fall from grace, sexuality was under the control of the will but only afterward, alas, was such control lost.
The problem is hardly confined to sexuality. One cannot become hungry at will, nor curious, affectionate, playful, angry, and so forth. One can fake many of these things, and more, and sometimes one can fake it until it becomes real, after a fashion. However, we can go beyond faking it. Though the use of literary or artistic means, we can exert indirect influence on our affective states. We deliberately, willfully, set out to read a poem, listen to piece of music, watch a movie, whatever, and our feelings change. Read more »
by Tim Sommers
I usually begin my “Ethics” course by asking, “What is the difference between ethics and morals?” I used to begin by literally asking the students that question, until I realized no one is happy about your very first question being a trick.
So, here’s the difference. “Ethics” comes from Greek, “morals” come from Latin. That’s it. Particular philosophers sometimes make some kind of (potentially) useful distinction between the two words, but the bottom line is, absent some stipulation with a theory behind it, ethics and morals don’t differ in meaning. The same goes for a “democracy” versus a “republic.”
During the recent Washington State Republican Convention, one delegate received a standing ovation for complaining that “We are devolving into a democracy,” and suggesting that “we should repeal the 17th Amendment” (Senators are to be elected by a popular vote, rather than appointed by state legislatures). Lest you think this a lone voice in the wilderness, the current Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, the person holding the second most powerful political position in our system of government, recently said, “We don’t live in a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic.” Utah Senator Mike Lee also says we live in a republic and that “Rank democracy thwarts” human flourishing.
Frankly, this is a worrying line. Read more »
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
Recently the Biden administration has clamped down on so-called “forever chemicals” which are thought to potentially cause diseases in human beings and damage to the environment. As with any molecule, the basic chemical structure and properties of these compounds are responsible for their function. In this video I break down some of the basic chemical features of these perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and talk about why some of the concerns might directly follow from these features.
by Ed Simon
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at edsimon310@gmail.com
The shortest lyric in Natalie Diaz’s 2013 collection When My Brother Was an Aztec has two less words than its title does. At only five words, the poem “The Clouds are Buffalo Limping Towards Jesus” is, because of its length, an incongruous entry in the collection, which for the most part combines more conventional quasi-formal and free verse that ranges from a few dozen lines to a few pages. Brevity is, of course, not necessarily a marker of radicalism; after all, the lyric as a form was originally defined not just by a strong individual voice, but also by representing a brief observation or emotion rather than a narrative with epic scope. The traditional Japanese genres of haiku, sijo, and tanka are marked by an economy of precision, but in the West even that most venerable form of the sonnet makes its argument and takes its logical turn in a short fourteen lines. Then there are the poets with a reputation for parsimony, masters of concision such as Emily Dickinson or Edna St. Vincent Millay. Still, a short Millay work such as “First Fig” (“My candle burns at both ends.”) with its four lines and twenty-five words might as well be the Iliad; a Dickinson lyric such as “Poem 260” (“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”) at eight lines and 42 words is a veritable Odyssey when compared to Diaz. When a poem counts in at under a dozen words, or even under half-a-dozen, there is a suspicion that the poet is courting the gimmick more than anything, the purview of the limerick and bawdy lyric, of Strickland Gillian’s “Lines on the Antiquity of Microbes,” which has been claimed as the briefest poem in the language, reading in its entirety “Adam/Had ‘em.” Read more »
by Brooks Riley
by Nils Peterson
I
I was telling a joke the other day on Zoom before a fairly large audience and I was telling it pretty well, Swedish accent and all. It’s a joke I have told before and it’s usually well received. However, it requires the word tailgate for the punchline, and that word never came. I sort of hung there on the hook, on the punchline of my joke, dangling like a participle. Eventually someone figured out the word I was missing, finished my joke and we went on to the next teller.
Mostly the words are there on the end of my tongue when they are bid, but an old man’s memory has a will of its own. It will recall what it wants to recall, no longer a servant to the old man’s will. Once I wrote “…sometimes Memory’s the CEO of a corporation grown too large. The boys in the mailroom can’t keep up. Incoming and Outgoing bins overflow. Mail carts lose their letters as they plod from office to office.” Another image I’ve had is that of the word heroically setting off from a distant country maybe located at the base of the spine, but the journey is a heroic one, it’s riding a slow camel and must stop at oases on the way. No wonder it doesn’t arrive till tomorrow, which, of course, never comes.
I wrote the above paragraph yesterday. This morning I remembered that a few months ago I’d tried to tell the same joke and lost it at the same word. So, is there a reason why tailgate has chosen to remain elusive, declaring its independence, refusing to come when called? Maybe it’s joined some hidden cabal of words that no longer want to be biddable, though they’ll arrive sometimes when they feel like it. If I ever tell the joke again, I’m going to write the word down on paper before I set off. I’m sure it’s quite possible that I’ll know the word when I begin the joke, but by the punchline it might well have gone off on its own. Read more »
by Dwight Furrow
One longstanding debate in aesthetics concerns the relative virtues of formalism vs. contextualism. This debate, which preoccupied art theorists in the 20th Century, now rages in the culinary world of the 21st Century. Roughly, the controversy is about whether a work of art is best appreciated by attending to its sensory properties and their organization or should we focus on its meaning and the social, historical, or psychological context of its production. The debate is similar in the world of cuisine. How best should we appreciate the food or beverages we consume? Should we focus solely on the flavors and aromas or does authenticity and social context matter?
Formalists argue that works of art are fundamentally vehicles for sensory experience. In painting, the arrangement of lines, shapes, and colors are the primary source of aesthetic pleasure. In music it is harmonic structure, timbre, and the arrangement of musical themes and variations that matters. Narrative, depiction, meaning, and historical context may be interesting but are superfluous to genuine aesthetic value and tend to distract us from the sensory properties which constitute the essence of a work, so claim the formalists.
Diners, chefs, and critics who think that flavor is primary and questions about the origins of food and its authenticity are secondary seem to be channeling the formalist argument.
By contrast, contextualism places great emphasis on the fact that a work is created and appreciated at a particular time and place and by particular individuals. Facts about the social and historical context of a work are essential to it, not merely contingent features. According to contextualists, works lack clear meanings and determinate aesthetic properties when the conditions under which they are created and experienced are not the focal point of attention.
The discourse around food appreciation has taken a decidedly contextualist turn. Read more »
by Richard Farr
Historians often ask what led to Trump’s landslide victory back in 2024. All those guilty verdicts in the “PornHush” trial certainly helped — the final proof, for many, that the President was an innocent lamb set upon by crooks. And the November exit polls showed that millions of patriotic Americans found democracy a chore anyway, or were actively Fascism-curious, or simply got a buzz out of the fact that, being disempowered in every other meaningful way, they could at least step up and play a part in destroying their own children’s future. But surely the decisive factor was Trump’s inspired choice of running mate — philosopher and controversialist Thomas Hobbes.
Sharp as a tack, a hard-bitten political realist, an intellectual heavyweight, and a precise, stylish communicator — he was so different from anyone else Trump could have chosen! The sore losers claimed he had not been born in the United States, or pointed out that he’d died in 1679. None of that mattered when the electorate saw what an ideal ticket it was.
Like the other VP aspirants, Hobbes described Trump as our only hope in dark times. In fact he iced that particular cake by calling him “our very Salvation, our Messiah, in whose Second Coming should we not earnestlie beleeve?” Like them, he also said that modern intellectual fads such as democracy, the separation of church and state, an independent judiciary, a free press and the rule of law were “monstrous and absurd Doctrines, manifest Phantasmes of Satan” and “beleeved in not, save by Idiots.” But he didn’t just say those things because it was the only way to land a lucrative government sinecure from which he he could denounce the evils of government, or because his highest aspiration was to visit Palazzo a Lago and rub shoulders with the shiftless rich. No — he said them because he could prove them.
His election-cycle bestseller Leviathan used rigor and logic to demonstrate two key political facts:
First, the ideal system of government — indeed the only system of government a rational agent will choose — is absolute monarchy. Argument in a nutshell: (i) it’s not just Trump who’s a vicious, self-interested brute — we all are; (ii) human nature being so dire, safety is more important than liberty; (iii) sorry but you can’t have both. Read more »
I place my body — life, in hands of
corporate heads and engineers
I am in my seat perched above a wing
and through this little porthole peer.
I slide my sight along its graceful lines,
to its distant tip, vague among clouds.
We’re far from earth up here.
I know this wing’s shape from books,
a form imagined by the brothers Wright
and other seers; a shape that lifts and
holds us up, aloft, until a runway meets
our landing gear, until all nuts and bolts
designed to be just here, just there,
perfectly in place, set and tightened
to the breadth of a hair are proved in hope
that no other inclination drives the calculus,
trusting that the bottom line of corporate worth
is not the top line for which its top dogs care,
Jim Culleny, 5/31/24