Chasing the ghost of Robert Johnson

Sometime in my early 20s, I fell in love with that beautiful yet enigmatic sound of the BLUES.

As soon as I heard those painful wails from Son House and Howlin’ Wolf, and that mournful guitar playin’ of Robert Johnson, and that erratic cry of the harmonica by Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson, and that somber yet soulful voice of Bessie Smith, I was hooked for life.

It did something to the soul and I never did quite recover. I devoured all the books I could find about this raw art form. I read biographies, learned about the toilsome lives of these old bluesmen, and the place they came from.

The Mississippi Delta. I had to go and experience it for myself.

So here I am, torn Levis, battered soul, and that old trucker hat sittin’ loosely on my hungover head, cruising down legendary Highway 61 south out of Memphis with the windows down and the radio up as Jim Morrison wails those Roadhouse Blues.

The future is uncertain and the end is always near.

Those words bite deep. I’m in a mood, man, and I figure there’s nothing left to do but LIVE and let go of the grudges and seek out moments that set the core ablaze with ecstasy. That’s my aim.

With a full tank of gas, a light rucksack, and a styrofoam cooler of cold brews sloshing around in the trunk, I’m heading down to a barren place of grueling poverty and open skies to discover the music of it all.

I’m in the Mississippi Delta. Deep down in it. The most southern place on earth. It doesn’t take too long driving around here to realize that this is one of the few places left in this country unscathed by the gnarled appetite of modernity.

And I’m here for it.

by Erik Rittenberry
from Poetic Outlaws

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Karl Vick in Time Magazine:

It might be difficult to discern through the black clouds billowing from bomb craters in Tehran, but Iran has spent most of the 21st century as the region’s rising power.

Until recently, things had really been going its way. In Iraq, the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein, then departed, having turned Iran’s largest and most dangerous neighbor from an enemy to a vassal even before Tehran’s militias rescued Baghdad from ISIS, and then stayed. The forces Iran sent to Syria did double duty, rescuing the Assad regime while opening an arms pipeline to Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia fighting beside them. Based in Lebanon, Hezbollah was the crown jewel in the “Axis of Resistance” that Iran had arrayed against Israel.

More here.

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Dario Amodei in the New York Times:

Picture this: You give a bot notice that you’ll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you’ve been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren’t changed, it will forward the emails to your wife.

This scenario isn’t fiction. Anthropic’s latest A.I. model demonstrated just a few weeks ago that it was capable of this kind of behavior.

Despite some misleading headlines, the model didn’t do this in the real world. Its behavior was part of an evaluation where we deliberately put it in an extreme experimental situation to observe its responses and get early warnings about the risks, much like an airplane manufacturer might test a plane’s performance in a wind tunnel.

We’re not alone in discovering these risks.

More here.

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Kai James in The Conversation:

Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.

You’ve resigned yourself to the grueling monotony of mining life. Then one afternoon, you witness a fellow worker doing something remarkable.

With an odd-looking contraption, he casually transports the equivalent of three times his body weight on a single trip. As he returns to the mine to fetch another load, it suddenly dawns on you that your chosen profession is about to get far less taxing and much more lucrative.

What you don’t realize: You’re witnessing something that will change the course of history – not just for your tiny mining community, but for all of humanity.

More here.

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Daniel Oppenheimer at Persuasion:

On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. “In the past,” he wrote, “I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they have become the party of division & hate, so I can no longer support them and will vote Republican. Now, watch their dirty tricks campaign against me unfold … 🍿”

This caught my attention because I’m a student of “Goodbye to All That” letters to the political left. These letters—or essays or books—were some of the key texts for my book Exit Right, which was a study of six prominent Americans who abandoned the left at various points in the 20th century. They were fascinating for what they revealed about their authors at a moment of peak intellectual and psychological stress, when their old identities were being sloughed off and new ones were taking shape.

The letters were fascinating, too, in their similarities across time.

More here.

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Paul Sutter in Undark Magazine:

American science stands on the precipice. On one side is the administration of Donald Trump and MAGA political leaders threatening to push us over the cliff; on the other is the quick plunge to oblivion.

This is no exaggeration. While ostensibly the administration’s actions are couched in the dual language of budgetary concerns and the elimination of DEI initiatives, the reality is much more broad, and much more bleak. Science across the nation is getting strangled, with funding streams to universities being summarily cut off, staff members of national agencies dismissed, and budgets getting axed.

More here.

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Sandra Cisneros in The Paris Review:

How does a woman writer make her own money? How does she find the time to write? As a young woman, I scoured every book-jacket biography trying to decipher this secret. My mother, a Depression baby, gave me sound advice: “Make sure you earn your own money. Especially if you’re married, do you hear me?” I did indeed. Once you’ve been poor, you’re forever hounded by the fear you’ll be poor again.

Jane Austen lived in a time when ladies of her genteel class had few options to acquire wealth, much less manage it themselves. If lucky, she might inherit a legacy like her brother Edward, adopted by wealthy cousins seeking an heir. She could marry money, possibly. Or she might seek a position in a prosperous household as a governess. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, published a generation later, would document why the governess route was unthinkable.

More here.

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…. Hindsight

That feeling came, when you know
you’re doing something wrong.
Even if it’s blessed.
Even if it’s approved, especially when
it’s what you’ve done for so long.
A comet in ten shades of fire
seared your quiet morning sky.
The unblinking sun blinked.
Birds, crickets, every chirping being
in a wide circle around you held a breath.
Held another, waiting …
The flame of your heart
gathered to a perfect burning
stillness where you turned
to this imagined, other way.

by Michael Dechane

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Dennis Duncan in the Washington Post:

If we think of languages as belonging to families, this is like finding out that an acquaintance is really a distant cousin: It points to a shared ancestor, a unity — and a divergence — somewhere in the past. What would it mean for those cultural origin stories — for Who We Are — to speak not of European but of Indo-European? “Of what ancient and fantastic encounters were these the fading echoes?” asks Laura Spinney in her latest book, “Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global.”

There are about 7,000 languages spoken in the world today; they can be divided into about 140 families. Nevertheless, the languages most of us speak belong to just five: Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic and Austronesian. And of these, Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan (which includes Mandarin) are the biggest. As Spinney notes, “Almost every second person on Earth speaks Indo-European.”

More here.

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Mythili Rao in The Guardian:

This book isn’t a directly political text, but its colourful tales from the animal world do have a point of view: biology, Lents argues here, comes down strongly against rigid categories. The story of sexual evolution is one of experimentation and constant improvisation, and that, he says, goes a long way to explaining why human sexual norms seem to be undergoing a transformation: “I assert that this moment of sexual turmoil is actually a rediscovery of the much more expansive relationship with sex that our ancestors once had and that other animals enjoy,” he writes.

What follows is an entertaining and informative romp through mating strategies in nature. From Komodo dragons’ virgin births to the bilateral sperm transfer of hermaphroditic slugs, The Sexual Evolution chronicles a “wondrous variety” of behaviour in the animal world. Garter snake orgies, gender-masking hyenas, lusty bonobos and the lesbian Laysan albatrosses of Hawaii – this book has it all.

All that diversity is fascinating, and frequently funny.

More here.

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Pranab Bardhan at his Substack:

In thinking about the positive basis of nationalism for post-colonial India, Tagore and Gandhi found the nation-state of European history—characterized by a singular social, usually ethnic or linguistic, homogenizing principle, militarized borders and mobilization against ‘enemies’ both external and internal—unacceptable and unsuitable for India’s diverse and heterogeneous society. Their idea of India was not monolithic state-centric, but pluralistic and community- or society-centric.

By the way, the singular social homogenizing principle mentioned above is not just western, it is also one of the basic tenets of Chinese civilization. The sinologist W.J.F Jenner in his book The Tyranny of History describes this basic tenet as ‘that uniformity is inherently desirable, that there should be only one empire, one culture, one script, one tradition’. In contrast, India, particularly in the historical perspective of Tagore, Nehru and their followers, has celebrated the diversity of Indian civilization. The current ruling cultural-political dispensation of RSS-BJP in India wants to displace that idea of India with the homogenizing principle of a Hindu-supremacist nation-state characterized by a ‘one nation, one everything’ motto. Their earlier ideological leaders (particularly Savarkar and Golwalkar) had expressed open admiration for the ‘efficient’ Nazi system of mobilizing and organizing the German nation.

The European scholar of nationalism who has shown the most sensitivity to the socio-cultural particularities in the construction or ‘imagination’ of national consciousness in different parts of the world was Benedict Anderson.

More here.

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Steven Shapin at the LRB:

Roger Penrose​ liked puzzles. In the 1950s, inspired by a catalogue of prints made by the paradoxical Dutch artist M.C. Escher, the young Penrose and his psychiatrist-geneticist father, Lionel, set out to produce drawings of ‘impossible objects’. Pictorial conventions cue us to perceive two-dimensional drawings as representations of three-dimensional things, but these conventions can also be used to deceive – for example, to depict things that could not exist in three dimensions. One of these objects became known as the ‘Penrose triangle’.

The Penroses were a family of puzzlers. Father and sons amused themselves by constructing polyhedra out of wood and cardboard that could be taken apart and put together in interesting ways. Everyone played chess: Lionel set puzzles and his wife, Margaret, like him a qualified physician, was a keen player; Oliver Penrose, Roger’s older brother, is a physicist and a proficient amateur player; and his younger brother, Jonathan, was a grandmaster and ten times British chess champion. But there was much more to Roger’s puzzling than this.

more here.

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      Barn, with Weather

The barn stands at the field’s edge
facing nothing. Not the house,
long gone, nor the road, which curves

out of sight. Only the open, vast
democracy of stalk and wind. Its
paint is a ghostly suggestion of white

that clings to the grain like an afterimage
of snow; its boards have split and warped,
like pages of a book left open in the rain.

The sky today appears in gradients:
smoke-blue, salt-blue, ink soaked in milk,
a ceiling coming loose at the seams

and streaming light that seems reluctant.
There’s a certain correctness to how the
structure weathers: collapse is not an event

but a series of small, careful concessions.
This is how some things leave themselves—
slowly, with dignity, a long slog in

time and sun. Meanwhile, the barn does
not resist being seen. It stands where put,
neither proud nor ashamed, only exact.

by James Gonda
from Rattle Magazine

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Dana Williams in Slate:

I first interviewed Toni Morrison about her work as a book editor in September 2005, in her office at Princeton. Though our meeting was scheduled for late afternoon, I took an early train from Washington to make sure I could situate myself in West College—which would be renamed Morrison Hall in 2017—while I rehearsed my carefully crafted questions. I was struck by the quiet gravity of the building and its hallways: sunlight slanting through stately windows, the scent of old books and weathered wood lingering in the air. The fact that I was about to sit across from a literary giant—celebrated worldwide for her novels yet virtually unknown for her groundbreaking work as an editor at Random House—was not lost on me.

My anxiousness reminded me that I had often wondered what it must have been like for authors to have the Toni Morrison as their editor. When the writer John A. McCluskey Jr. first met Morrison in 1971, she had published only The Bluest Eye. McCluskey, not yet 30 years old, saw her not as the Pulitzer Prize–winning Nobel laureate she would become, but as a fellow Ohio writer looking to make her mark as an editor. She was also, he discovered two years later, the kind of person who made a fuss when she learned that McCluskey’s wife and son were in the car waiting while they had their first author-editor meeting at the Random House offices on East 50^th Street to discuss his first novel, Look What They Done to My Song. Whatever else was on her schedule would have to wait. She wanted to greet Audrey and Malik. It was the least she could do since they had joined McCluskey for the drive from the Midwest to Manhattan.

More here.

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Jenny Lehmann in Discover:

Social insects like bees and ants have long impressed scientists with their ability to achieve remarkable feats, such as constructing towering nests and navigating complex environments. But how they manage this, especially with brains smaller than a poppy seed, continues to fascinate researchers. The secret, it turns out, isn’t in the individual — it’s in the group.

A recent study from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel took a closer look at how ant colonies use “swarm intelligence” — a type of collective behavior where simple individuals work together to solve complex problems. The team was inspired by something that looked a lot like planning: ants clearing obstacles in advance of incoming food. “This is the first documented case of ants showing such forward-looking behavior during cooperative transport,” said study co-author Ehud Fonio in a press release.

More here.

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Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW

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Fernanda Eberstadt at the European Review of Books:

Some years ago, I saw a painting that knocked my sense of the sexes sideways. It was an 1884 work by an Impressionist named Gustave Caillebotte of a nude figure emerging from the bath — the same trope that Degas or Bonnard so often employ because it allows you to observe a woman’s naked body in motion, absorbed in a private ritual replete with sensual pleasure.

Except that the nude that Caillebotte is presenting for our delectation is male, and this gender-switch totally upends our preconceptions about masculine power and prerogatives, about who gets to look at whom doing what.

Homme au Bain’s model is young, sturdy, athletic-looking. He has his back to us. He has just stepped out of the tub and is towelling himself dry; his large muscular buttocks are ruddy, seem chafed either from the steamy water or the towelling. The painter draws our eye to the shadowy violet-blue crease just north of the young man’s bottom, and between his legs we spy the dark hanging globe of his scrotum. The model’s fuzzy head is bent down, his gaze apparently fixed on the wet floor.

More here.

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Lyndie Chiou at Scientific American:

On a weekend in mid-May, a clandestine mathematical conclave convened. Thirty of the world’s most renowned mathematicians traveled to Berkeley, Calif., with some coming from as far away as the U.K. The group’s members faced off in a showdown with a “reasoning” chatbot that was tasked with solving problems they had devised to test its mathematical mettle. After throwing professor-level questions at the bot for two days, the researchers were stunned to discover it was capable of answering some of the world’s hardest solvable problems. “I have colleagues who literally said these models are approaching mathematical genius,” says Ken Ono, a mathematician at the University of Virginia and a leader and judge at the meeting.

The chatbot in question is powered by o4-mini, a so-called reasoning large language model (LLM). It was trained by OpenAI to be capable of making highly intricate deductions. Google’s equivalent, Gemini 2.5 Flash, has similar abilities.

More here.

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