Monday Poem
Category: Monday Magazine
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).
The Man Who Shredded the Newspaper
by Anton Cebalo
In the decade before World War I, the newspaper dominated life like it never would again. The radio was not yet fit for mass use, and neither was film or recording. It was then common for major cities to have a dozen or so morning papers competing for attention. Deceit, exaggeration, and gimmicks were typical, even expected, to boost readership. Rarely were reporters held to account.
This characterization is not mine but taken from Austrian writer Karl Kraus. Kraus believed this environment had to be held responsible for plunging Europe into war. He parodied its excesses in his 1918 play The Last Days of Mankind where he developed his signature montage style. In a time of upheaval, Kraus cut through the noise by repeating its own voice back at it, splicing quotes together into a new interpretation. As he recounted in the play’s preface, “the most improbable deeds reported here actually took place. The most implausible conversations… were spoken verbatim.” Kraus pursued a unique kind of literary realism with the perceptive eye of a documentarian, and in his crosshairs was the newspaper.
Like many writers and artists of the early 20th century—whose perspectives ring so familiar to us today—Kraus sought to dramatize how mass media, particularly the newspaper, was distorting the urban individual’s sense of place. Is it so surprising that writers and artists then, argues critic Lucy Sante, “took such pleasure in shredding it”? After all, the stakes were dire.
I have been reading Sante’s translation of one such “shredder”: Félix Fénéon. He is an individual who remained largely unknown during his life, but played an outsized role in modernism and early 20th-century literature. Fénéon found himself close to the heart of this media whirlwind I am describing, writing anonymously for the French newspaper Le Matin in 1906. But rather than get caught up in its bluster, he instead opted for an approach that was unique in its candor, simplicity, and intended speed of consumption. Read more »
Robert Frost’s Ghost: The Bread Loaf Writers Conference
by Leanne Ogasawara
1.
I walked through woods muddy and wet, feet sinking down into the boggy earth. With each step, mosquitoes rose up in clouds. It felt more like I was forging a river than walking a path through woods.
I was told that it was less than two miles to Robert Frost’s writing cabin in the woods. According to the Bread Crumb, the daily newsletter put out by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, it was a must-see. Just follow the pink ribbons…it instructed. And sure enough, pretty pink ribbons were tied to tree branches, marking the way, whenever two roads diverged through the woods.
I had only applied to the conference on a whim. Well, not a whim exactly, but more like a major disappointment and a bad experience with a literary agent sent me spiraling… but then after a week of tears, I decided to just get back up again. What else could I do anyway? “Fall down seven times, get back up eight” 七転び八起き says the old Japanese proverb.
And so, I applied to several workshops and one residency.
I don’t recall where or how I first heard about Bread Loaf. Maybe it was from that old Simpson’s episode, when Lisa launches tavern-owner Moe’s literary career by sending his poem to a magazine:
Howling at a concrete moon,
My soul smells like a dead pigeon after three weeks.
I shut my window and go to sleep.
In my dream I eat corn with my eyes.
Moe’s poem creates a literary splash, and he is immediately invited to attend Word Loaf, where Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon—both played by themselves—end up getting into a fight. And, everyone but Lisa goes on a hay ride.
Thinking about it, though, I wonder if I didn’t first hear about Bread Loaf in connection to the great American poet Robert Frost.
Do American kids in public schools still memorize his poems? Read more »
Join My Cult
by Scared Ignoramus Fellowship Leader Akim Reinhardt
You don’t have to fuck me. Or give me any money. You don’t have to shave your head or adopt a peculiar diet or wear an ugly smock or come live in my compound among fellow cult members. You don’t even have to believe in anything.
Actually, that last bit’s the key: don’t believe in anything.
Do you believe in anything? If so, stop.
My Church of Sacred Ignorance implores followers to embrace their dunderheadedness. You don’t know shit. Neither do I. Let’s stop pretending.
Yes, we all know some basic facts. Sun go up, sun go down. Ice is cold, fire is hot. Chocolate makes you happy (unless you’re one of those people). But the rest of it? Mostly make believe. And it’s time to face up to it. Let us come together in our dumbness and sit quietly beneath the stars, waiting for big cats to eat us. Through such acts of honesty and modesty will we find salvation . . . which doesn’t actually exist, but maybe we’ll trick ourselves.
But I don’t wanna be pushy. I understand that choosing to join a cult is a Big Decision. You probably have some questions. It’d be weird if you didn’t, even if we accept that you won’t understand the answers, and that the questions themselves are largely random, inadequate expressions of anxiety and confusion. Nonetheless, I’ve prepared the following FAQ to help ease your towards your destiny.
How much will this cost?
There are many ways to answer that question, most of them Socratic. For example, once you stop believing in money, what will you do with yours? Will you give it all away? Will you destroy it? Will you smother it in gravy and eat it? Will you hand it out to those poor schlubs who still believe in it? Will you gather it up in a big pile and stare at it, wondering why you ever cared?
Does truth have a cost?
Or I could just say $49.95 + tax if that sounds better. Read more »
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. At Totem Farm, April 2021.
Digital photograph.
The Philosopher of Quantum Reality
by David Kordahl
This column is ultimately a review of A Guess at the Riddle: Essays on the Physical Underpinnings of Quantum Mechanics, the short new book by David Z Albert, a philosopher at Columbia University and (as I found out last week) the graduate advisor of the founding editor of 3QuarksDaily, S. Abbas Raza. Unlike Raza, I have never met Albert, but my parasocial relationship with his work is midway through its second decade, which I am now acknowledging upfront.
I first became aware of David Z Albert when I was an undergraduate at a small Lutheran college in rural Iowa. On its top floor, the Wartburg College library had a large painting of Martin Luther, our hero, overseeing a bonfire of Catholic theology. But in the basement, where the unburnt books were held, I found a copy of Albert’s 1992 debut, Quantum Mechanics and Experience. The book’s style seemed wholly unusual to me. As a physics student, I wasn’t accustomed to books that were at once about science but somehow separate from it. I was impressed how Albert had retained only enough detail for a conceptual critique. I didn’t know, then, that its peculiar patois was just that of the analytic philosophers, with Albert merely adopting an eccentric dialect of that communal tongue.
In my last column for 3QD, I wrote about how quantum models work. A physical system is associated with a quantum state. As time passes, the quantum state changes according to a deterministic rule, the Schrodinger equation, branching smoothly into distinct outcomes. At the end, you compare how much of the wave-function—what percentage of its total squared amplitude—is parked in each possible branch, and this gives you the probability of observing each outcome.
Quantum Mechanics and Experience is a book about the measurement problem in quantum mechanics, which (roughly) is the question of how nature decides which one of the predicted possibilities within the final quantum state we actually end up observing. Albert’s book wasn’t my first exposure these issues—I had read Nick Herbert’s 1987 book, Quantum Reality, a few years earlier—but it represented the first time I got the sense that these issues were still debated, and still up for grabs. Read more »
Tolkien, Auden, Jara
by Gus Mitchell
This September marks 50 years since the deaths of three men. One died at the very beginning of the month, in Oxford, one in the middle, in Santiago, and one at the end, in Vienna.
Anyone likely to be reading this will have heard of J.R.R. Tolkien, who died on 2 September in Oxford, city of his life and work, aged 81. Unfortunately the contemporary world has absorbed Tolkien to an unhealthy extent that sweetens and ultimately sickens his achievement. His achievement was to create myth anew. I use that word order deliberately, as opposed to “created a new mythology”.
I don’t know how many people will have heard of Victor Jara. If they haven’t, they ought immediately to stop reading until they have given their full attention to “Manifiesto”, one of the really incomparable things ever committed to record. “Manifiesto” was recorded in August 1973. It was released posthumously; in its closing lines, Jara had written: “For a song has meaning / When it beats in the veins / Of a man who will die singing / Truthfully singing his songs.” And Jara was murdered the following month, on September 16th, doing what he himself had predicted.
Many people will have heard of W.H. Auden. Another acronymous luminary of 20th century British letters, he is also its greatest poet. Auden died on 29 September in Vienna, aged 66: rather lonely, estranged from his partner Chester Kallman, intending himself to make his way back to Oxford, and having likely swallowed his habitual nightly dose of barbiturate and vodka (his practice for three decades.) Auden was the kind of poet that doesn’t really exist anymore: a grand reflection of his age.
September also marks fifty years since the Pinochet coup in Chile, a coup supported by both the United States and the United Kingdom, and that would lead first to the deaths of the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende, then at least two thousand more Chileans, and the torture and imprisonment of more than thirty thousand more. On the 12 September 1973, the morning after the coup and Allende’s suicide, Victor Jara, along with five thousand others were arrested by the fascists and taken as prisoners to the Estadio Chile in Santiago. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
On Trudeau’s Marxism
by Marie Snyder
It’s such a go-to now to call the enemy some version of a communist in a weird throwback to 1950s America and McCarthyism. And now the leader of the opposition accused Canada’s Prime Minister of being a Marxist, and he said it like it’s a bad thing!Lisa B0923 5 minute Tiktok explains why Trudeau is decidedly not Marxist:
“This is what Marxists believe: ‘Marxism analyses the impact of the ruling class on the laborers, leading to uneven distribution of wealth and privileges in the society. It stimulates the workers to protest the injustice.‘ Now I guess compared to the current CPC the liberals may look Marxist because the current CPC is so far right, like, you can’t even see them in the distance.”
But let’s dive a little deeper into what Marx said to see that philosophically, communists and capitalists aren’t that far apart, but both are nowhere near the neolibertarian capitalists. Kinda like Lisa said above, neoliberals are just so far to the right that everyone looks like a commie from their vantage point.
Commies, Capitalists and Neoliberal Capitalists
What I think is interesting is that one of the fathers of capitalism, John Locke, and one of the fathers of communism, Karl Marx, were reacting to their different situations in very similar ways. Read more »
All Will Unite: An Epithalamium
by Rafaël Newman
All will unite—no sooner had our world
Combusted (see “The Big Bang”) than it sought
Accretion of the bits that had been hurled
To every corner (where there once was naught,
One nanosecond previous, un-warmed
By ours or any other burning stars,
Un-lit by lunar satellite), and formed,
In steady labour, suns and planets, Mars,
And Jupiter, and Venus, and the rest:
Great gatherings of what was late alone,
But now into a merry round compress’d
Was through our skies in conjunct chorus thrown.
And so it is with us, made of those bits
As well, and yearning for return to what
We once were, unities before the blitz:
One rounded whole, harmonic and uncut
As yet by gods invidious, those same
Whom we’ve appeased in solemn ritual,
With sacrifice, and planetary name,
And ceremonies individual. Read more »
Monday Photo
Found this dead and dried out dragonfly lying on a sidewalk in Brixen, South Tyrol.
A New Counter Culture: From the Reification of IQ to the AI Apocalypse
I have been thinking about the culture of AI existential risk (AI Doom) for some time now. I have already written about it as a cult phenomenon, nor am I the only one. But I that’s rather thin. While I still believe it to be true, it explains nothing. It’s just a matter of slapping on a label and letting it go at that.
While I am still unable to explain the phenomenon – culture and society are enormously complex: Just what would it take to explain AI Doom culture? – I now believe that “counter culture” is a much more accurate label than “cult.” In using that label I am deliberately evoking the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s: LSD, Timothy Leary, rock and roll (The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and on and on), happenings and be-ins, bell bottoms and love beads, the Maharishi, patchouli, communes…all of it, the whole glorious, confused gaggle of humanity. I was an eager observer and fellow traveler. While I did tune in and turn on, I never dropped out. I became a ronin scholar with broad interests in the human mind and culture.
I suppose that “Rationalist” is the closest thing this community has as a name for itself. Where psychedelic experience was at the heart of the old counter culture, Bayesian reasoning seems to be at the heart of this counter culture. Where the old counter culture dreamed of a coming Aquarian Age of peace, love, and happiness, this one fears the destruction of humanity by a super-intelligent AI and seeks to prevent it by figuring out how to align AIs with human values.
I’ll leave Bayesian reasoning to others. I’m interested in AI Doom. But to begin understanding that we must investigate what a post-structuralist culture critic would call the discourse or perhaps the ideology of intelligence. To that end I begin with a look at Adrian Monk, a fictional detective who exemplifies a certain trope through which our culture struggles with extreme brilliance. Then I take up the emergence of intelligence testing in the late 19th century and the reification of intelligence in a number, one’s IQ. In the middle of the 20th century the discourse of intelligence moved to the quest for artificial intelligence. With that we are at last ready to think about artificial x-risk (as it is called, “x” for “existential”).
This is going to take a while. Pull up a comfortable chair, turn on a reading light, perhaps get a plate of nachos and some tea, or scotch – heck, maybe roll a joint, it’s legal these days, at least in some places – and read.
When America was Great
by R. Passov
In 2010, the company for which I was then Treasurer was invited to send me to China. The purpose of the trip was to meet with senior members of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) as well as the Shanghai stock exchange as a prelude to becoming the first US company to issue bonds to be traded on the Shanghai exchange.
Before discovering that there were numerous companies in line to be ‘first’ I met with a senior official of the NDRC. Along with my travel companion, a Chinese national who had relocated to New Jersey and worked on my team, I arrived at a palatial office exactly at the right time, only to wait perhaps as along as 45 minutes, maybe longer.
Eventually my companion and I were escorted into a cavernous conference room, in the center of which was an impossibly long table surrounded by as many as 40 high-backed, elaborately upholstered chairs. We were instructed to take seats away from the table against a far wall. After more waiting, a senior official entered the room followed by two assistants and proceeded to a chair at the very center of the table.
After the official was comfortably seated we were instructed by his assistants to move to the table and occupy the two seats directly across. One of the assistants left and our host began the meeting.
Introductions were short. The NDRC official knew who we were, and perhaps a lot more. I only knew that he was a Vice Chairman and according to my colleague ‘very, very senior.’ The Vice Chairman was politely condescending and direct: When, he wanted to know, would my company be able to commit to a securities offering. Read more »
On the Road, Downtown
by Bill Murray
This month’s travel column includes suspiciously little travel – just two short walks, to a courthouse and a jailhouse. I live in Atlanta, where quite a bit of national politics has happened in those two buildings these last few weeks.
I walked downtown a couple of weeks ago when things were going on down there that you wouldn’t call festive, August is too hot for festive, but they were purposeful, and expectations ran high. Peoples’ opinions diverge, don’t they, but until the Trump indictments were actually handed up August 14, everybody at least agreed something important was coming and that it would shape events.
To walk from my part of town, Atlanta’s big busy Midtown, to the sprawling government complex downtown, is to walk “right down Peachtree,” as much loved Atlanta Braves baseball announcer Ernie Johnson used to say when describing a pitch right down the middle.
From Midtown you walk Atlanta’s main street a couple of miles south. There’s a dodgy block or two and then a positively anti-human overpass where noise, grit and gridlock coalesce over a squeezed together forced marriage between interstates 75 and 85. We call that the Downtown Connector.
Once that’s over you forge alongside Woodruff Park (for sixty years Robert W. Woodruff personified Coca-Cola); you are now in the heart of downtown, and continue beyond an iconic neon Coca-Cola sign and through the disused entrance to what has been, on and off again, Underground Atlanta.
After that barriers were up, roads were shut and cadres of traffic cops moved about. TV trucks staked out the Lewis R. Slayton Courthouse for a couple of weeks down there and everybody with a supporting role in presenting the Donald Trump drama, TV techs, cops, drivers, caterers, couriers and a few protesters deserved hazardous duty pay for managing in the 100 degree-plus daily heat.
Out here in the provinces these felt like important events; it seemed like purposeful people were busy with weighty affairs, even if it was only all in the service of getting one man and his associates in trouble with the law. Read more »
Monday, September 4, 2023
September 1, 1939: A tale of two papers
by Ashutosh Jogalekar
Scientific ideas can have a life of their own. They can be forgotten, lauded or reworked into something very different from their creators’ original expectations. Personalities and peccadilloes and the unexpected, buffeting currents of history can take scientific discoveries in very unpredictable directions. One very telling example of this is provided by a paper that appeared in the September 1, 1939 issue of the “Physical Review”, the leading American journal of physics.
The paper had been published by J. Robert Oppenheimer and his student, Hartland Snyder, at the University of California at Berkeley. Oppenheimer was then a 35-year-old professor and had been teaching at Berkeley for ten years. He was widely respected in the world of physics for his brilliant mind and remarkable breadth of interests ranging from left-wing politics to Sanskrit. He had already made important contributions to nuclear and particle physics. Over the years Oppenheimer had collected around him a coterie of talented students. Hartland Snyder was regarded as the best mathematician of the group.
Oppenheimer and Snyder’s paper was titled “On Continued Gravitational Contraction”. It tackled the question of what happens when a star runs out of the material whose nuclear reactions make it shine. It postulated a bizarre, wondrous, wholly new object in the universe that must be created when massive stars die. Today we know that object as a black hole. Oppenheimer and Snyder’s paper was the first to postulate it (although an Indian physicist named Bishveshwar Datt had tackled a similar case before without explicitly considering a black hole). The paper is now regarded as one of the seminal papers of 20th century physics.
But when it was published, it sank like a stone. Read more »
Through a Glass, Darkly
by Jerry Cayford
The topic today is misinformation and knowledge, conspiracy theory and evidence, not biblical exegesis. When Saint Paul tells the Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face” (1 Corinthians 13:12), he is contrasting partial, human knowing with the perfect knowing that will come when we reunite with God. He is not dissing human knowledge, and yet one detects an unmistakable yearning for that better sort of knowledge.
These two kinds of knowledge express two different philosophical theories of truth. When the Scientific Revolution came along some sixteen hundred years after Paul wrote, people had had enough of this “through a glass darkly” stuff and decided it was time to move on to seeing reality “face to face.” That moving on, though, never quite left the dark mirrors behind, and we are living today through an acute conflict between these theories.
Today, we are at another moment of historic transition, with the atomic bomb behind us and artificial intelligence ahead. In writing about our moment, I will do a bit of philosophy and some intellectual history—about as quick and dirty as you saw in the previous paragraph—through the lens of three pieces by New York Times columnists (you don’t need to read them). All three discuss conspiracy theories and how to confront them. We will find our two competing theories of truth between the lines. Seeing them in action can illuminate our moment, and maybe the path ahead.
The first column, by Farhad Manjoo, explains why it is pointless or even counterproductive to argue with conspiracy theorists like Robert Kennedy Jr. The rebuttal to Manjoo by Ross Douthat explains that the alternatives to arguing are far worse. The third, by Paul Krugman, explains how to argue. I think the three together are instructive about how we can know things, even when we never confront reality face to face but see everything through a glass, darkly. Read more »
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Shredder Self-portrait, NYC, August 2023.
Digital photograph.
A Writer Attends the Frankfurt Book Fair
by Lydia Stryk
Riding the train to the small city of Darmstadt to sleep over with a friend after a day spent at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I observed an impeccably dressed elderly gentleman sitting several rows away from me across the aisle.
He wore an elegant calf-length overcoat which men of a certain class in Germany are partial to wearing. His shoes were fine leather and shining. He was tall, with excellent posture, a full mane of white hair and the bluest of eyes, which I noted because they reminded me of my father’s eyes and because they were staring into the beyond behind me. He was in possession of a large expensive-looking wrist watch to which he turned his attention occasionally. And though I could see no evidence of a briefcase, his would have been top of the line.
He had, in fact, the air of a publisher of tasteful literary titles on his way home from a successful but tiring day at the fair. And I pictured him the sort who would have attended the fair every year without exception until the pandemic temporarily shut it down and would continue to attend, out of habit, for as long as he was able. Perhaps, he was the scion of a publishing empire, I told myself, a fitting story.
It had been a long day, and I was happy to be on the train. Nothing else about the day had been happy, so eventually my mind wandered away from the old man to my own state of affairs. I was cold and hungry and admittedly forlorn, none of this conducive to conjecture and true curiosity. I closed my eyes.
And that is when a certain commotion broke out on the until-that-moment quiet and peaceable train. Concerned women’s voices could be heard, and I opened my eyes to find the concern centered around the elegant elderly man. My station was approaching and though readying to disembark, I was able to make out the following: The elderly gentleman had apparently turned to his seat companion and asked her where the train was heading and if she could tell him where he was. Upon questioning, it became clear that he did not know where he wanted to go. The literary lion of my imagination had presumably boarded a train with no direction or purpose and was lost. Read more »
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley
Top 10 Reasons Experts Should Not Debate Nonexperts (plus a postscript on “Standing”)
by Tim Sommers
Back in June, Dr. Peter J. Hotez, an expert on neglected tropical diseases and vaccines, made a splash when he categorically refused to participate in a public debate on vaccines with vaccine-denier Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Dr. Hotez had been on Rogan’s show before, more than once, and said he would go on again – but not to debate. Among those “urging” him (to put it politely) to do so were Rogan (who offered him $100,000 dollars), Elon Musk (the richest man in the world) who said that Dr. Hotez is “afraid of a public debate because he knows he’s wrong,” a social media mob of thousands, and finally a pair of stalkers arrested outside his home.
Why didn’t Dr. Hotez just do the debate? I don’t know. But I think it’s because he knows that experts should not participate in public debates against nonexperts.
Maybe, I should mention why I feel qualified to address this topic. I participated in competitive academic and public debates, of various sorts, as a debater, a judge, and a coach for ten years. I have used debate to teach philosophy courses, and have written four academic papers on how to make academic debate more relevant to teaching and scholarship.
So, here we go. Top ten reasons experts should not debate nonexperts in public debates. Read more »