by Brooks Riley

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by William Benzon

It began at The New Republic. I don’t know just why I did it, but I bought a subscription to that magazine the year I went off to college. I remember when Robert Wright was there and I remember when he published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), which was about cultural evolution, a subject I’d been thinking and publishing about for decades. So I was paying attention when he formed Bloggingheads.tv in the mid-2000s. By that time The New Republic was no longer the magazine I’d originally subscribed to in the Jurassic Era. So I dropped it, even the online straggler version. But I loved Bloggingheads, which was a video webzine where two people would discuss important things.

That’s where I first became aware of John McWhorter, who appeared as a dialog partner with Glenn Loury, whom I also knew from having read an article or three in The New Republic. In time they became known informally as “the Black guys,” or so Loury likes to say. And I became a regular viewer.

Thus it came to pass that one Saturday evening I was attending a party at Rebecca and Kevin’s place on Pacific Avenue. They lived a couple of blocks from me in the Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City. It’s the oldest neighborhood in the city and is bisected by Communipaw Ave. (According to Local Rumor, Communipaw as once a path the Lenape Indians took to go fishing in the river where, in 1609, they rowed out to meet Henry Hudson, who was looking for the Pacific Ocean. I digress.) I was resting on a couch in Rebecca and Kevin’s front room when I looked up and saw this tall dark stranger. Is that…? I got up: “Are you John McWhorter?” He was.

The world collapsed. The World Wide Web was now in front of me in the flesh in an old neighborhood in Jersey City, only five blocks away from a house where A. Phillip Randolph housed Pullman porters on layover from their train trips, and four blocks from a church that hosted Oscar Wilde in the 19th century, the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and is now home to a Hispanic charismatic Christian congregation. Again, I digress. John and I started talking.

That’s when I learned that, in addition to being a nationally reputed commentator on race matters, McWhorter was also a linguist, with a particular interest and expertise in creoles, a pianist with an affinity for Broadway musicals, and a fan of Looney Tunes. These days he’s most widely known as a columnist for The New York Times, which mercifully hasn’t fallen as far as The New Republic. No matter. Because we’re going to talk about something really important: cartoons.

Caveat: The on-line availability of these cartoons is, shall we say, sporadic. They were available as I’ve indicated at the time I uploaded this article on January 26, 2025. Who knows what may have happened by the time you read it.
Read more »

Oscar Murillo. Manifestation 2019-2020.

Oil, oil stick, graphite, cotton thread on velvet, canvas and linen.

More here and here.

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Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was very hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Christopher Hall
2. Alizah Holstein
3. Kevin Lively
4. Ken MacVey
5. Priya Malhotra
6. Kyle Munkittrick
7. TJ Price
8. Scott Samuelson
9. Max Sharam
10. Charles Siegel
11. Lei Wang

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “3QD Magazine” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers on or before the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new writers!

Best wishes,

Abbas

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A Matter of Love

The question, “Can you tell me a certain thing
that is a moral fact?” is specious, because
the fact of the “certain thing” exists as a thing
essential to the survival of homo sapiens
in creating civilization.

But civilization is not always up to
the task of protecting its essential,
instead, it hacks with a cleaver at its root
in a fever dream concocted by skilled
charlatans who speak only for themselves
—who strike at the root of what is essential
to being civilized.

So then, the fact of: chaos, or free natural inclination,
becomes the universal mode simply because
morality, when it is accepted as subjective,
will not be universally defined, and we all become
hawks or vultures to each other, feeding on
carrion doves

The question, “Can you tell me a certain thing
that is a moral fact?” —has a confrontational odor
and will most often be posed by those in the
fever dream of overarching self-concern, AKA,
the very source of immorality.

It’s a question whose answer, is not always
an easy act, but is, nevertheless, a choice called

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by Ed Simon

Bad poetry can tell us as much about the art of writing verse as can good poetry. Much can be learned by close reading poetry, which is well written, that has withstood the test of time or for which there is a general critical consensus regarding excellence in terms of technique or influence, impact or experimentation. By reading bad poetry, however, the critic can analyze the multitude of things that can go wrong in verse, the awkward turn of phrase, the strained rhythm and meter, the convoluted rhyme, the tortured metaphor, or the inappropriate image. There is a temptation to understand bad poetry in terms of a variation of Tolstoy’s contention about unhappy families, for there are as many ways to pen a bad lyric as there are ways to write one. Of course, the vast majority of verse ever written hasn’t been good, much less great, though it would be hard to gauge what percentage is truly bad (it might not be unfair to presume that most of it is, though thankfully the bulk of that is inaccessible to the average reader, hidden away in Moleskin or silicon). Most of us have little to gain in reading such work, much less in penning a hatchet job about their (lack of) merits. Which is to say that to close read the sophomore effort as a means to denigrate a poetic attempt is neither pedagogically or ethically sound, but there are some published poems, written in such unthinking and foolish pomposity, that we do gain knowledge by considering them.

Consider the nineteenth-century versifier Julie A. Moore, whom Britanica informs us was an author of “maudlin, often unintentionally hilarious poetry” that was “parodied by many.” Moore falls into a common pitfall of the bad poet, which is to valorize the strictures of form beyond anything else. When an idol is made of structure, you can inadvertently end up with lines like “’Lord Byron’ was an Englishman/A poet I believe, /His first works in old England/Was poorly received./Perhaps it was ‘Lord Byron’s’ fault/And perhaps it was not. His life was full of misfortunes,/Ah, strange was his lot.” Even after we get past the ungrammatical construction in the second-line, and the garbled meter, Moore’s poem about Byron sacrifices syntactic sense in favor of maintaining her plodding rhyming couplets. It’s not that the rhyme scheme itself is bad – after all, John Dryden and Alexander Pope made great use of the same rhyme scheme – but that here it’s a Procrustean bed hacking at meaning rather than limbs. Why does Moore write that Byron was a “poet I believe?” The speaker presumably knows that Byron is indeed a poet, and the verse itself appears allergic to any kind of ironic interpretation. Why the quotation marks around “Lord Byron?” What was “strange” about his lot – we’ve been given no indication. What’s conveyed isn’t mystery or ambiguity, but mere befuddlement, and not on the part of the reader but rather of the poet. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

I. The Best Meal Ever

My mother’s father died during, but not because of, WWII and so she went back to Sweden on the first possible boat – 1946 – September leaving my father, brother, and me to get along. I, soon to be 13, had just started high school.

We’d always walked home from Evergreen Grammar School for lunch which mother made for us, then back again to school. It must have been an hour break and the walk was not short. But now we had to do other. There was a lunch program at the grammar school my brother went to, and there was a cafeteria at my high school. If you ate quickly, you could go out and pitch pennies against the curb of the graceful, curved driveway with the other guys – the trick was to toss your penny up close but not to touch the curb. if you touched it, you lost your coin. If you were closest, you got to pick up all the pennies which would jingle comfortably in your pocket all afternoon. Maybe “Open the Door, Richard” was the big song, at least for me, though lurking somewhere by way of I think by way of Life Magazine was Slim Gaillard’s “Cement Mixer, Putti, Putti.” But I liked a lot of things on Your Hit Parade too.

But some days I would meet my father for lunch. The war had given him a place where his ability could be recognized – and he moved from the maintenance department – his first job with Mack Motors, the company he’d joined to help with the war effort passing the chauffeur’s job, which he liked, over to Victor Nicholson – to night foreman, to day foreman, to plant manager, this from a man who had to leave school at the age I was at that moment and go to work in a factory which then made two thirds of the world’s stick matches.

So I’d walk out of Plainfield High School, up Park avenue to the White Tower and my father would drive down to meet me and we lunched side by side – sitting on stools before the counter with other working men – my father dressed now in a suit – and we’d order hamburgers made of thin slices of ground meat, topped with grilled onions and slices of sour pickle. I don’t think the world, our world, had yet discovered French fries. The bun was soft. I don’t think we added ketchup. Maybe my father did. Fifteen cents they cost, maybe a dime, but the fancy lunch my godmother was cooking for the rich up on Hillside Avenue was not more heavenly than this gritty texture of meat, tart sharp salt taste of pickle, and onions, the onions, a heaven of fried onions –their taste, their smell, the crispness of the ones slightly burned – and sitting there on stools side by side with my father in this lunch heaven of working-male energy, our varied futures waiting outside the door to carry us away when the milky coffee was finished. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

Of all the jobs I have had over the long years of working, from being  a salesperson, a waitress, a cook, a travel agent, a teacher (elementary school to high school, college, and night school for adults), a high school counselor, a school administrator and a mental health therapist, my favorite has been teaching high school. I was fired from only one job, as a waitress in an Italian restaurant, when I was told by the much younger restaurant manager that I was not taking my job seriously on a day I was a little late for the lunch crowd, due to having been on an interview for a better paying and more stable position. I told her I agreed with her and returned my uniform. She was nervous and I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable, so I reassured her that she is doing the right thing. At another waitressing job in Philadelphia, when I was 25 years old, I learned a lot about human behavior. My regular after-work drinking crowd would get louder and louder as the evening went on, flirting after too many drinks and oversharing their feelings. Random people would tell me their deepest secrets, especially in the early afternoons when the place wasn’t crowded. One guy whose fiancée went to the restroom asked me out and when I told him she just showed me her engagement ring, he explained that he is not going to marry her, but she doesn’t know that yet and that’s why we could go out. When she returned, he acted all normal again and when he paid the check, he added his phone number by the signature line in case I changed my mind.

The corporate travel business was like factory work, all of us in large rooms, connected to a head set and a computer. The supervisors distracted everyone by treating them to donuts some days, or after work drinks at the bar across the street from the company. I told colleagues that management was distracting everyone with free food and drinks, but my colleagues didn’t care because they were mostly young and care free and loved partying. I, on the other hand, wanted more money that the measly $180 I was making per week. After one year at this place known for being an established travel agency in Philadelphia, I asked for a raise of $20 per week. My argument was that I was a hard worker and I had a college degree. My manager, a beautiful blond who never smiled and did not have a college degree denied my request and said I had to jump through different hoops if I wanted a raise, specifically being more enthusiastic on the phone with clients about selling our name and brand. I saw her a few years later at a dentist office as a receptionist, after she was let go for probably not being enough of the cheerleader they were looking for.

When I finally landed a job as a teacher that matched my children’s school schedule, I considered myself very fortunate. I was now an ESL teacher (now called many other things) to students from kindergarten all the way to high school, and even adults in a night program. I understood what it was like being in a new country where you don’t speak the language and don’t know how to navigate the system. Read more »

Reflections in puddles on train tracks in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Jeroen van Baar

Since the murder of UnitedHealthcare (UHC) CEO Brian Thompson drew everyone’s attention to the insurance company, two reports on its dealings have made my blood boil. Background info: UHC’s parent company, UnitedHealth, also owns a service provider branch called Optum and a pharmacy branch called OptumRx. The Wall Street Journal wrote in December that UnitedHealth had bonused Optum doctors to diagnose elderly patients with conditions that did not require treatment but did allow UHC to claim more money from the federal Medicare Advantage fund. Weeks later, the Federal Trade Commission alleged that OptumRx unnecessarily marked up the prices of some life-saving drugs by more than 1,000% to boost revenue, which was made possible by controlling companies throughout the drug supply chain. The profits, of course, were billed to by tax payers and consumers.

It’s particularly easy for me to get mad at all this because—perhaps you guessed it—I am a UHC customer. When I acquired U.S. health insurance last September, I was initially pleased. UnitedHealthcare sounded great: who wouldn’t want to be united, healthy, and cared for? The name of my plan—Choice Plus 80—sounded even better. And I trusted my employer, Columbia University, to select the right insurer for me. I rested easy, knowing I could not be blindsided by Kafkaesque communications and frivolous bills.

That trust is now thoroughly shattered. When I need medical attention, my insurance company might try to draw extra profit. If I just need rest, I might get a costly referral. If I need medication, I might be overcharged. And everyone I deal with in these interactions might secretly be working for The Company. Instead of cared for, I feel exploited; rather than protected, I feel exposed.

At the face of it, the American health insurance debacle is in line with other products’ recently losing their appeal. In online platforms such as Facebook and X, ‘enshittification’ has made the user experience progressively worse as tech companies start to sacrifice quality for advertiser revenue and eventually shareholder value. Aerospace giant Boeing revealed its incompetency when a door plug fell off a plane mid-flight last year, causing passengers to rush to Airbus-only filters on booking sites. And even mundane items like clothes are of much poorer quality than even ten years ago. We tend to respond to all this with a shrug of resignation. Oh well, we say, it’s a shame we can’t trust classic brands anymore, but we’ll just shop around for an alternative.

But insurance is a special case. With insurance, the trust is the product. Indeed, trust itself produces the outcome health insurance is meant to promote in the first place: health. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

In Bowers v Hardwick (1986), the Supreme Court Case that affirmed the government’s right to criminalize sodomy, Justice Antonin Scalia famously insisted there that there was no “right to homosexual sodomy.” This was disingenuous in more than one way. First, the statue in question criminalized sodomy in general and not homosexual sodomy in particular. But, more fundamentally, no one was arguing for sodomy as a basic right. They were arguing for a basic right to be free to make their own decisions about their own bodies, consensual intimate relations, and families – including intimate relations and the families shared by people of the same sex.

Such a right, if it exists, is unenumerated. That is, it’s not specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, the Ninth Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The tricky bit, of course, is how to know which other rights might be retained by the people though unenumerated.

In Roe v. Wade, Justice Douglas cited a “line of decisions” that established a “penumbra” of privacy. He was much lampooned for his language, “penumbra” in particular, but there’s a relatively straight forward line of reasoning available here. One way to derive an unenumerated right is to show that it is implied by, or follows from, an enumerated right. The enumerated right of citizens to be secure in their persons, houses, and papers and effects (the 4^th), for example, makes no sense without the underlying assumption that you have a right to be in control of your person in the first place. Further, the “liberty” and “property” that the 14^th Amendment says shall not be denied “without due process of law” surely includes the right to some degree of control over your own body.

One of the few things that Justice Alito gets right in the Dobbs (2022) decision (allowing States to criminalize any kind of abortion and, to some extent, birth control) is that he doesn’t describe the issue primarily as “privacy” – but rather as an appeal “to a broader right to autonomy.”

The relevant string of cases that develop and extend this right to autonomy and, yes, privacy, too, includes (at a minimum) Loving v The State of Virginia (the most aptly named SCOTUS case in history since it decriminalized interracial marriage), Griswold v Connecticut (access to birth control for married people), Roe v Wade (abortion decisions are left to pregnant people), Lawerence v Texas (reversing Hardwick, it decriminalized same-sex intimacy), and Obergefell v Hodges (legalized same-sex marriage). Defenders of this tradition argue that it, like the Bill of Rights itself, this is not part of a haphazard list of freedoms, but what follows from a cohesive conception of liberty. “The only freedom which deserves the name,” John Stuart Mill wrote, “is that of pursuing our own good in our own way.” Read more »

Anjum Saeed. Untitled (After Rumi). 2012.

Oil on canvas.

“I am the dust particle in sunlight. I am the round sun … I am the wind … I am a tree … Rose, and
the nightingale lost in the fragrance … You the One in all, say who I am. Say I am You.”
Jalaluddin Rumi

With permission from the artist.

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by Katalin Balog

In the past, when I asked students if they would want to enter the Experience Machine – a fictional contraption thought up by the philosopher Robert Nozick – they would generally say no. In the Experience Machine, one would have virtual experiences: for example, of a life blessed with mountains of pleasure, great love, monumental achievements. But one would lose touch with one’s actual life. My students did not want to leave their actual lives behind. In the last few years, things have changed. Most of them now proclaim their readiness to ditch it all for the virtual pleasures of the Experience Machine.

My students’ recent eagerness for the virtual is a symptom of our culture’s alienation from the world. During my life, I have witnessed the slow but unstoppable advance of commodification and technology, which has brought us to the threshold of escape from the world – certainly in fantasy, but perhaps in reality, sometime soon.

1 Consuming Experiences

When I was young in my native Budapest, we – my family and friends – didn’t think of life in consumerist terms. We couldn’t, as it was communism, and there was not much to consume – but in any case, the idea of collecting pleasant experiences seemed frivolous and alien. Beautiful Budapest was run down, its buildings still showing bullet holes decades after the war. Tourists didn’t crowd around its “attractions”. It was our city. Sure, we listened to music and attended plays, there were parties where everyone wanted to be, we bought ice cream and cakes, but we didn’t make a habit of maximizing pleasurable, beautiful, or edifying experiences; we didn’t have a plan that would ensure the best results. Much was left to chance and improvisation, as life in those days was hard-scrabble, and things could – and often would – go wrong. Everyday necessities were sometimes hard to obtain, and we had to stand in line a lot. People were generally rude and wielding whatever little power they had in a hostile manner. Our goal was just… to live our life and have the experience that comes with it. But we were also not fazed or annoyed by unexpected obstacles in the way a more committed consumer or tourist would be. Of course, some people I knew went skiing and climbing in remote and beautiful places; that was a thing one could do as well. But most of the time, normal people did normal things, and that was our life. Communism, for a while at least, constrained the consumer in us. I am not idealizing this state of affairs – I was in the underground resisting the oppression that maintained it; just pointing out the difference it made in our attitude to life.

I noticed the contrast between this and what was normal in the West especially clearly when, after moving to New York, I was already between worlds. Read more »