[{"id":309456,"date":"2026-08-16T09:49:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T13:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309456"},"modified":"2026-08-15T00:51:58","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:51:58","slug":"abbe-lane-1931-2026-singer-and-actress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/abbe-lane-1931-2026-singer-and-actress.html","title":{"rendered":"Abbe Lane (1931 &#8211; 2026) Singer And Actress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Abbe Lane - Me lo dijo Adela - (1957)\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/k6t1MgeUU18?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309456","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309456","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309456"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309456\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309457,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309456\/revisions\/309457"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309456"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309456"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309456"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309499,"date":"2026-08-16T09:38:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T13:38:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309499"},"modified":"2026-08-16T09:38:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T13:38:05","slug":"madonnas-best-dance-breaks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/madonnas-best-dance-breaks.html","title":{"rendered":"Madonna&#8217;s Best Dance Breaks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Madonna&amp;apos;s Best Dance Breaks\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/yXomjcFOhRI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309499","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309499","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309499"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309499\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309500,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309499\/revisions\/309500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309499"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309499"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309499"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309495,"date":"2026-08-16T09:32:14","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T13:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309495"},"modified":"2026-08-16T09:32:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T13:32:14","slug":"the-dance-floor-saved-madonna-then-she-made-it-big-enough-for-everyone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/the-dance-floor-saved-madonna-then-she-made-it-big-enough-for-everyone.html","title":{"rendered":"The Dance Floor Saved Madonna. Then She Made It Big Enough for Everyone"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Gia Kourlas in\u00a0<em>The New York Times:<\/em><\/p>\n<div class=\"css-53u6y8\">\n<p class=\"css-12m5bll evys1bk0\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-309496 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/madonna-dance-top-v1-83108-cover-master675-288x360.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"288\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/madonna-dance-top-v1-83108-cover-master675-288x360.jpg 288w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/madonna-dance-top-v1-83108-cover-master675-240x300.jpg 240w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/madonna-dance-top-v1-83108-cover-master675.jpg 675w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 288px) 100vw, 288px\" \/>Madonna moved to New York City to be a dancer. Of course, her artistry blossomed into something much bigger. But she never stopped using dance to guide the way.\u00a0So much of Madonna\u2019s performance universe has focused on reinvention \u2014 by way of hair and makeup, costume transformations, sets and settings. But what has endured is the grounded fluidity of her body. Her singing is galvanizing, her activist voice is loud. Yet her body is the primary force behind it all: inexhaustibly alive, with a gallant, buoyant internal pulse.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-12m5bll evys1bk0\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\">Dance, her first love, is the most natural part of her artistry, her base, her place of worship. Watching her move without the music, as these clips reveal, you can see the suspension in her body, the ease at which she can shift her weight, the tautness of her muscular chain.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/16\/arts\/dance\/madonna-dance-music.html?unlocked_article_code=1.51A.nQWU.EjbCBL_1jdFe&amp;smid=url-share\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gia Kourlas in\u00a0The New York Times: Madonna moved to New York City to be a dancer. Of course, her artistry blossomed into something much bigger. But she never stopped using dance to guide the way.\u00a0So much of Madonna\u2019s performance universe has focused on reinvention \u2014 by way of hair and makeup, costume transformations, sets and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309495","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309495"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309495\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309498,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309495\/revisions\/309498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309454,"date":"2026-08-16T08:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T12:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309454"},"modified":"2026-08-15T00:46:55","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:46:55","slug":"arlene-smith-1941-2026-singer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/arlene-smith-1941-2026-singer.html","title":{"rendered":"Arlene Smith (1941 &#8211; 2026) Singer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The Chantels - Maybe (Dick Clark&amp;apos;s Beech-Nut Show Ep #3 March 1st,1958)(Stereo)\" width=\"640\" height=\"480\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ESgxJ8df7kc?start=152&amp;feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309454","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309454"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309454\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309455,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309454\/revisions\/309455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309452,"date":"2026-08-16T07:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T11:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309452"},"modified":"2026-08-15T00:43:41","modified_gmt":"2026-08-15T04:43:41","slug":"richard-lingeman-1931-2026-historian-and-biographer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/richard-lingeman-1931-2026-historian-and-biographer.html","title":{"rendered":"Richard Lingeman (1931 &#8211; 2026) Historian and Biographer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Writing Writers&amp;apos; Lives: American Modernists\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/v79GqXWCwMI?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309452"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309453,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309452\/revisions\/309453"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":308981,"date":"2026-08-16T05:00:39","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T09:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=308981"},"modified":"2026-08-16T11:18:04","modified_gmt":"2026-08-16T15:18:04","slug":"i-am-not-the-man-you-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/i-am-not-the-man-you-knew.html","title":{"rendered":"I Am Not the Man You Knew"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Akim Reinhardt<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309501\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-227x360.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"227\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-227x360.png 227w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image-189x300.png 189w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/image.png 440w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 227px) 100vw, 227px\" \/>I was born before language. Only waterfalls and wind and tumbling rocks.<\/p>\n<p>Nothing needed to be said if you only knew how to listen.<\/p>\n<p>I still remember my grandparents phone number. 828-3973. They, on the other side of the Bronx, had the same area code as us, as the whole city: 212. No need to add it. Seven digits were plenty.<\/p>\n<p>Placing my finger in our rotary phone\u2019s circular template led to a swirling dance when dialing their number. Long, short, long short, long, long, short. Our own number was a marathon for whoever dared to spin it. 2 sixes, 3 sevens, an eight, and a nine.<\/p>\n<p>My grandmother was the talkative one. A natural polyglot who got spit out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and eventually into the Lower Eastside before she married my grandfather and he took her up to the South Bronx. Hungarian from her family, Yiddish from being a European Jew, Romanian from the post-WWI schools, and English in the new country. She was completely fluent in her fourth language, with some slight quirks. \u201cDo you have what to drink?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>My grandfather never spoke another word of Polish after he and his family got chased out, and just in time. Despite coming over as a teen, his English was forever deeply accented and a little broken. Yiddish was his main language, and as a result, my mother\u2019s first. She learned English on the playground. I loved my grandfather deeply, but talking to him on the phone was awkward. He would ask rote questions, mostly the same ones each time. I would offer quiet, curt responses. We were much better in person, where he taught me how to play chess and read the stock page.<\/p>\n<p>My best friend during elementary school lived in the next building. Our phone time was minimal. Why bother when we could just meet in the playground, or one of us could hop over to the other\u2019s\u00a0 apartment on a bad weather day. You home? Okay, I\u2019m coming over.<\/p>\n<p>By high school, some of my friends were a little further flung, a neighborhood away. But by then we were building our masculinities. Our fathers and popular culture made it clear that yakking on the phone was for girls. Don\u2019t be a chatty Cathy. Or a yenta, in my grandparents\u2019 lingo.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>When I walked into my college dorm room for the first time, one of the first things I saw was the phone, affixed to the wall near the door. I lifted the hand piece from the cradle and saw that the last four digits were 1871. \u201cHuh. The year of the Franco-Prussian War,\u201d I thought to myself. This phone was for just me and my roommate, an art major from some St. Louis suburb. I was 600 miles home, free to do whatever I wanted, and missing my friends. But long distance calls were expensive. Ma Bell had been carved up, and the new telecommunications companies were significantly cheaper, but not actually cheap. I made hardly any long distance calls. But the night that roommate\u2019s girlfriend back in Missouri dumped him, he was on the phone with her, crying and begging, for hours. I shudder to think what it cost. Afterwards, he kicked over a large box of pretzels.<\/p>\n<p>In my mid-20s, I ditched my Discover Card and got an AT&amp;T Mastercard so I could make reasonably priced long distance calls from a payphone when needed. This became a vital tool of my many cross country trips. It meant pressing a lot of buttons: the number to connect to AT&amp;T, the number you were calling, and all 16 digits of the credit card. One time, my numbers got stolen, probably by someone with a zoom lense while I punched it into a payphone at the other end of Port Authority in Manhattan. I ultimately did not have to pay the several hundred dollars worth of long distance and international calls that got rung up on my card.<\/p>\n<p>I first saw a cell phone out in the wild some time around 1996, while back in the Bronx for the holidays. I assumed they were for douchebags and doctors. Then I saw HS kids with them. Just another teen fad, I figured. Why the fuck would anyone wanna talk on the phone while they were walking down the street?<\/p>\n<p>Then came the wizard phones. The first one I saw was at a poker game. A friend brought something called an \u201cEye Phone\u201d or whatever. He showed us how, if he paid a 99\u00a2 for an \u201capp,\u201d he could press a button and make fart sounds whenever he liked. I was in no rush. I stuck with my regular phone, but soon started referring to it as a \u201cland line,\u201d lest people not know what I was talking about. \u201cPhone\u201d had come to mean something you carried around with you even though people were using it less and less as a phone.<\/p>\n<p>I didn\u2019t bother getting a basic cell phone until 2012, when I finally had nowhere left to turn; there just weren\u2019t anymore payphones left. Communicating while traveling without one was more difficult than it had been since the 19th century. Progress. I gave in and got a little brick cell phone.<\/p>\n<p>In the early 2020s, I finally gave up the land line. The scumbags at Verizon were not only charging way too much for it, but also letting their land line infrastructure fall apart. At least once a year, my land line would go down for a few days. Why pay 80 bucks a month for a land line hardly anyone called and occasionally didn\u2019t work, when I my flip phone was running me only $10\/month?<\/p>\n<p>This whole thing started with my parents, I guess. They were always late adopters, entirely uncharmed by new technology. My father the general contractor didn\u2019t even like screw guns. He couldn\u2019t quite get the hang of those early models, which had no adjustable torq, and he kept stripping screws. All the summer and winter breaks I worked for him, we did everything with screwdrivers and hammers.<\/p>\n<p>It spilled over to the home. We were the last family to get a VCR or a touch tone phone. The one timely exception was the answering machine so that my father wouldn\u2019t miss messages from customers while we were out. He died nine years ago never having been on any kind of computer device. Sometimes he wrote poems on the back of a cardboard cereal box. My mother didn\u2019t get cable TV until the co-op apartment building she lives in foisted it upon her as part of her utilities in the early 21st century.<\/p>\n<p>I inherited a certain skepticism from them. They told me and my sister that Mother\u2019s Day, Father\u2019s Day, and that ilk were all bullshit holidays to be scorned, not celebrated. No one had coined the term Hallmark Holidays yet, but they knew. Just another way for corporations to rip off insecure and shallow people. Stick to the real holidays if you must, and do them sincerely. Don\u2019t go through the motions; put something heartfelt into it, or don\u2019t bother. Halloween costumes and birthday cards should be handmade, not bought. Birthday and holiday gift-giving should be expressive, thoughtful, and meaningful, not an orgiastic display of wealth or some desperate purchasing of love. My parents weren\u2019t cheap. Rather, they were sincere about living life in a late 20th century America that was increasingly plastic, disposable, and status-conscious. They weren\u2019t hippies, a little too old for that. They were just a couple of people set on doing things the right way, and not being suckers.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"width: 221px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"https:\/\/simplyrebekah.com\/\" src=\"https:\/\/simplyrebekah.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/stick-figure-and-sandbox-halloween-costume.jpg\" alt=\"8 Fun &amp; Frugal DIY Halloween Costumes for Kids - Simply Rebekah\" width=\"221\" height=\"295\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Credit: https:\/\/simplyrebekah.com\/<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>When I was a kid, like most kids, I found new gadgets and toys to be exhilarating. I had cajoled my parents into getting me a handheld electronic football game. And they let me spend part of my Bar Mitzvah money on an Intellivision video game console. But by my late teens, any lust for the shiny and the new had worn off. I loved music, but wasn\u2019t interested in getting CDs. I kept buying vinyl records as long as I could. When that was no longer possible, I got my first CD player at a pawnshop in 2001. And now, a quarter-century later, when no one plays CDs anymore, I still play CDs. I finally got on a Spotify account a couple of months ago when my sister added me to hers. I was also among the last to get home internet (2006), a flat screen TV (2011), or even a microwave (2017), a used that doesn\u2019t spin.<\/p>\n<p>And now I have a lot of explaining to do to a lot of people.<\/p>\n<p>On Thursday, July 23rd, a new smartphone arrived on my porch. Not from Amazon, of course; I don\u2019t have an account. And not a big name. Some marginal, intentionally misspelled brand you\u2019ve probably never heard of. It was $65 new and delivered.<\/p>\n<p>It took me another week to eventually get around to setting it up and switch over from my flip phone. I was less than eager. But much like the faltering land line before it, and the very heavy, big box TV before that, replacing an old, faltering flip phone with another one longer made sense. The old one was breaking down. New ones are getting harder to find. And this new, shitty, little handheld computer was actually twenty dollars cheaper than a new version of the flip phone model I had.<\/p>\n<p>I spent the first forty minutes removing as many pre-loaded apps as I could. The first call I made was to my sister. She would understand. I got her voicemail and left a brief message explaining why I wanted to kill myself. She sent me a video of <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/VChWwXr99PY?t=69\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Gene Kelly dancing with Sugar Ray Robinson<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>When I showed up at pub trivia an hour later, announced that a new era was upon us, and laid my new smartphone on the table, my friends, uh, well, they flipped. Shocked gasps, exaggerated facial expressions, and ringing exclamations. All of it genuine. One friend, among the most articulate I know, said: \u201cI don\u2019t actually know how to respond.\u201d I asked his twenty-one year old daughter how old she was when she got her first smart phone. Twelve, she said. I\u2019m fifty-eight.<\/p>\n<p>When I got home and called one of the only two people I know who still has a flip phone, he accused me of a grave betrayal before quickly pivoting and quietly admitting that his own flip phone sucks.<\/p>\n<p>I will die after language. Only the skittering of bugs, rustling of leaves, and lapping of waves will remain. I will say nothing and no one will listen.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">***<\/p>\n<p><em>Akim Reinhardt\u2019s website is <a href=\"https:\/\/ThePublicProfessor.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ThePublicProfessor.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Akim Reinhardt I was born before language. Only waterfalls and wind and tumbling rocks. Nothing needed to be said if you only knew how to listen. I still remember my grandparents phone number. 828-3973. They, on the other side of the Bronx, had the same area code as us, as the whole city: 212.&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[201,7200,7202,7201,7205,7204,7203,7206],"class_list":["post-308981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","tag-akim-reinhardt","tag-att-mastercard","tag-chatty-cathy","tag-franco-prussian-war","tag-gene-kelly","tag-intellivision","tag-port-authority-in-manhattan","tag-sugar-ray-robinson","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=308981"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309230,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/308981\/revisions\/309230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=308981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=308981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=308981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309122,"date":"2026-08-16T04:00:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-16T08:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309122"},"modified":"2026-08-10T03:43:22","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T07:43:22","slug":"on-the-objects-a-village-accumulates-and-what-they-know-before-you-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/on-the-objects-a-village-accumulates-and-what-they-know-before-you-do.html","title":{"rendered":"On the objects a village accumulates, and what they know before you do"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by David William Sheehan<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309123\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-08-163735-281x360.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"281\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-08-163735-281x360.png 281w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-08-163735-234x300.png 234w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-08-163735.png 760w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 281px) 100vw, 281px\" \/>There is a white marble panda at the edge of the pier road in Sneem, and as a boy I walked past it most mornings on the way to Christian&#8217;s shop without once wondering why a panda should be standing in Kerry. It was cold in the mist and faced whatever the morning brought in off the bay, and I gave it about as much thought as I gave the wet tarmac.<\/p>\n<p>This seems strange to me now because there is nothing remotely local about it. It looks as though it has been dropped out of another country and told to make the best of things. But children are good at accepting whatever is already present when they arrive. You could not have called it beautiful, though it was not ugly either. The panda belonged to Sneem in the same way as the smell of the sea, the sound of the Sneem River gathering itself under the bridge, and the grey light coming slowly over Lomanagh.<\/p>\n<p>It came from China.<\/p>\n<p>In 1986 the People&#8217;s Republic of China sent the sculpture to the village in memory of Cearbhall \u00d3 D\u00e1laigh. Sneem had fewer than three hundred people, which makes the whole business stranger the longer you look at it \u2014 states do not, as a rule, send diplomatic gifts to remote villages on the edge of the Atlantic. When they do, it is a sign that the real work was finished somewhere else long before. \u00d3 D\u00e1laigh had been Chief Justice of Ireland, a judge of the European Court and, in the end, President; he had also supported the admission of the People&#8217;s Republic to the United Nations at a time when saying so cost something. The panda arrived eight years after his death, and I knew none of this, growing up beside it.<\/p>\n<p>Sneem was full of things like that. <!--more-->There was the Steel Tree in the north square, polished stainless steel catching whatever light Kerry happened to provide; four stone structures beside the river that everyone called the pyramids; a statue of Isis in the south square; a memorial to Charles de Gaulle on the road towards the strand; the great figure of the Risen Christ in the grounds of St Michael&#8217;s. Later, there was a Millennium Seat with a time capsule beneath it, meant to be opened only in 2100. Nobody sat the children of the village down and explained the collection. You simply grew up among it.<\/p>\n<p>I think that matters, because the knowledge you take from a place does not always begin as information. Long before I knew why the panda was there, I knew it was important enough to be placed there, and the same went for the face on the de Gaulle memorial. I could recognise significance before I understood the reason for it. Only much later did the stories begin to attach themselves to the objects, and \u00d3 D\u00e1laigh&#8217;s was the first that changed the panda for me \u2014 not the jurist or the office, but the distance between the thing he had done and the recognition that eventually found its way back to Sneem.<\/p>\n<p>He resigned the presidency in 1976, after the Minister for Defence, Paddy Donegan, called him a thundering disgrace for referring an Emergency Powers Bill to the Supreme Court before signing it \u2014 which is to say, for exercising a power the constitution had given him. The government did not properly reprimand the minister, so he resigned. He retired to Sneem, died here in 1978, and lies in the churchyard now. Years afterwards, a marble panda arrived from China. There is something appealingly indirect about that order of events: a man takes a position in one corner of his public life, other people remember it, time passes, he dies, and then an object appears in the village, sent by people thousands of miles away who were settling a debt he never felt he was owed.<\/p>\n<p>Later, in other institutions, I sometimes saw recognition arrive before the thing it was meant to recognise. There would be a plaque, a photograph, a press release or a ceremony while the actual work still felt unfinished. Sneem had given me a different sense of the order of things. The panda appeared years after the decision that gave it meaning.<\/p>\n<p>The Steel Tree came late too, and out of a friendship that started on a Dublin street. \u00d3 D\u00e1laigh grew up near the South Circular Road, in the quarter the city called Little Jerusalem, and among the neighbours was the family of Ireland&#8217;s Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, who would later become the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Israel. His son Chaim knew \u00d3 D\u00e1laigh as a boy, spent childhood summers in Kerry, and grew up to become President of Israel as his friend became President of Ireland. In 1985, seven years after \u00d3 D\u00e1laigh was buried here, Herzog came back to the country where the two of them had been children and unveiled a stainless steel tree by the Israeli sculptor Tamara Rickman in the north square; on the same visit he opened the Irish Jewish Museum in Dublin. The plaque beside the tree runs in three languages \u2014 Hebrew, Irish, English \u2014 and its formal name is <em>Arbor Chalybeia Immaculata<\/em>, the immaculate steel tree, though I doubt anyone walking through Sneem has ever called it that, which is probably healthier for all concerned.<\/p>\n<p>The sculpture was several things at once \u2014 political, personal, Irish, Israeli, local, international \u2014 and it did not need any one of those meanings to cancel the others. That held until much later, when the tree became a surface for protest connected to conflicts far from Kerry. I had been interested in it as an object long before I had the vocabulary for the politics that gathered around it, and perhaps that is why the later trouble bothered me: the tree had not chosen any of it, and neither had the people who had lived beside it for years. We sometimes ask a place to carry an argument much larger than the relationships that made it. It taught me something about consent, in a roundabout way \u2014 that not every silence is agreement, and that people are sometimes simply holding a thing together rather than endorsing everything it has come to mean.<\/p>\n<p>A third memorial stands on the fair green in the south square \u2014 a work by the Cork artist Vivienne Roche, unveiled by President Hillery in 1983. Three separate attempts to hold one man in mind, arriving from three directions for three different reasons. He himself is in the ground behind the church.<\/p>\n<p>Sneem&#8217;s connection with another president, Charles de Gaulle, is different again. He came to Kerry in the spring of 1969, two weeks after losing a referendum and resigning the French presidency \u2014 not the general who had broadcast from London in 1940 with almost nothing behind him and spoken as though history had already taken his side, which in the event it had, but a man who had finally put all of that down. He spent six weeks in Ireland, including a fortnight in Sneem at Heron&#8217;s Cove, drawn to the area partly through Yvonne de Gaulle&#8217;s family connection with Kerry. He walked, read, rested and looked at the sea. He died at Colombey-les-Deux-\u00c9glises in November 1970, while playing patience.<\/p>\n<p>He left his own account of what Ireland had given him, and the words appear on the memorial in Sneem&#8217;s north square, a bronze plaque set into local limestone by the Valentia sculptor Alan Hall: <em>At this grave moment of my long life, I found here what I sought \u2014 to be face to face with myself. Ireland gave me that, in the most delicate, the most friendly way.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>What interests me about that stone now is not de Gaulle&#8217;s greatness \u2014 Europe has monuments enough for greatness. It is that Sneem enters his story precisely when greatness had become something he wanted a rest from. There are people who seem able to recognise when a part of their life is over and leave it there, without needing the position to go on proving who they are. Institutions are not always very good at allowing for this. They tend to admire endurance, even when endurance has ceased to be especially useful, and leaving can easily be mistaken for failure simply because staying is easier to explain.<\/p>\n<p>De Gaulle resigned when the referendum went against him and did not return to political life. I do not know whether he thought of that as an act of responsibility, pride, exhaustion, or simply keeping his word, and perhaps it does not matter. What remains in Sneem is the record of what came afterwards: a man who had spent most of his adult life carrying an enormous public identity finding, for a few weeks in Kerry, somewhere he could put it down. The north square has held that small part of the story ever since.<\/p>\n<p>Then there is Steve Casey, another Sneem man who travelled farther than most. Before the wrestling, the Caseys were rowers. Steve and his brothers won the Salter Challenge Cup at Killarney in 1930 and 1931; there was no regatta in 1932, and when they won again in 1933 the organisers initially argued that this did not count as three successive victories. The Caseys argued otherwise and went home with the cup. Three years later, four of the brothers won the All-England rowing championship and seemed bound for the Berlin Olympics, until it emerged that Steve and Paddy had been paid for wrestling and had therefore lost their amateur status. Nothing about that discovery made them poorer rowers. It simply put them on the wrong side of a definition.<\/p>\n<p>The distinction interests me because amateur rowing had long been full of definitions of that kind. For years its rules had excluded men simply for earning their living through manual labour, and although those rules were changing by the time the Caseys arrived, the assumptions behind them had a long life. Sporting ability and eligibility were not quite the same thing, particularly if you came from the wrong kind of work.<\/p>\n<p>Casey went on to Boston and became a world heavyweight wrestling champion. He was also good enough as a boxer to challenge Joe Louis, who declined, prompting the <em>New York Post<\/em> to report that &#8220;Even the greatest run scared of the Sneem Machine.&#8221; By then there was not much doubt about Casey&#8217;s ability.<\/p>\n<p>I have thought about that distinction in schools. We are used to saying that a student has not met a standard, and sometimes that judgment is perfectly fair. What is harder is remembering that the standard is itself something people made: somebody decided what would count, how it would be demonstrated and which abilities would be easiest to see. Casey&#8217;s story does not make standards unnecessary, but it makes me slower to confuse failing to fit one with lacking ability altogether. His statue in the south square, by Alan Hall again, is life-size, which in Casey&#8217;s case requires a good deal of bronze.<\/p>\n<p>The pyramids beside St Michael&#8217;s are four narrow structures of local stone and coloured glass, built in 1989 by the Kerry sculptor James Scanlon and a crew of local men. Scanlon wanted to call the work <em>Sl\u00edghe na S\u00edoga<\/em>, the Way the Fairies Went, after the <em>siodh ghaoth<\/em>, the fairy wind he had watched as a boy on the family farm in North Kerry \u2014 the small whirl that gets up out of nowhere on a still day, lifts the top off a haycock, and is gone. His crew called them the pyramids, and a local priest settled the matter by observing that there were only two sets worth discussing, the ones in Egypt and the ones in Sneem, which is a difficult kind of confidence to argue with.<\/p>\n<p>We were never formally taught much of the folklore behind any of this. It was simply around us. There were places where you were a little more careful, things you did not interfere with, and stories carried by older people that did not have to be proved before they were listened to. One of my classmates had a grandmother who wrote about encounters with the fairies in the woods nearby. Her family was Jewish and had come to Ireland from South Africa, yet she had become one of the people who kept those local stories alive. Nobody I knew seemed to find that unusual. The stories did not require ancestry papers; if you lived among them long enough, listened carefully and treated them with respect, you could become responsible for carrying them too.<\/p>\n<p>I have thought about that often since. Belonging to a tradition does not always begin with believing every part of it, and inheritance is not always something received by blood. Sometimes it begins simply by paying enough attention to realise that something has been entrusted to you.<\/p>\n<p>Isis stands not far away, an Egyptian goddess given by the people of Egypt in 1993, and for years she endured the Kerry weather with the composure the situation demanded of a deity. She has since been moved indoors, and I am not sure whether that counts as an improvement from her point of view.<\/p>\n<p>As a child I knew nothing of the mythology. I knew only that you slowed down around certain things, did not climb on them, and did not assume that everything in the landscape had been put there for your use. Much later I learned the story of Isis gathering together what had been broken apart, and that gave the statue another layer of meaning for me. Not because an Egyptian goddess had somehow become Irish, but because Sneem had made room for something foreign without needing to absorb it or explain it away. It could remain entirely itself and still become something the village looked after. There is a kind of belonging in that which has very little to do with possession.<\/p>\n<p>John Egan grew up down the road from me in Tahilla, and his mother ran the little shop beside the church where teachers would send me for tea bags or milk and where she would usually slip me a Stinger bar as well. Long before I understood what he had done in football, that was where he belonged in my mind: somebody from down the road whose family had the shop.<\/p>\n<p>Egan went on to win six All-Ireland senior medals with Kerry, eleven Munster titles, four National Leagues and five All-Stars, becoming one of the great players of his generation. Yet he never won a Kerry county championship with his own club. I have always found something moving in that imbalance. A man can collect almost everything the wider world has to give him and still carry one absence attached to the place nearest home.<\/p>\n<p>After his death, Sneem gave him a place in the village anyway. In 2017 a life-size bronze by Alan Hall was unveiled in the south square, facing the sports field where Egan had played for years. He is not standing on a heroic plinth. Hall has him seated with a football in his hand, close enough to the ordinary life of the square that people can sit beside him.<\/p>\n<p>And finally there is the Millennium Seat, near the bridge, with its capsule waiting underneath for 2100. The people who buried it knew perfectly well they would not be there when it was opened. Someone chose what went inside; someone will have argued about what might still make sense a hundred years later, whether a newspaper would survive, whether a photograph might outlast a letter, and what a stranger in 2100 could possibly want to know about a small Kerry village in the year 2000. Then they sealed it, put it in the ground beneath a bench, and went home to their dinner.<\/p>\n<p>I have grown more interested in that gesture as I have got older. So much institutional life is organised around things that can be seen within the term, the year or the tenure of the person responsible for them. The capsule belongs to a different timescale. The people who buried it prepared something for people they would never meet, with no certainty that those people would find it important and very little chance that they would know who had put it there. There is a kind of leadership in being willing to work at that distance from recognition, making provision for a future in which you have no part except whatever you chose to leave ready for it.<\/p>\n<p>None of these things belong together in any curatorial sense. A Chinese panda, an Israeli steel tree, a French president in limestone, an Egyptian goddess, a champion wrestler, four Kerry pyramids raised in honour of a fairy wind, a capsule addressed to strangers in 2100 \u2014 propose the collection as a public-art strategy and you would probably be sent back to write a clearer concept. That is exactly what I have come to love about it. Sneem did not decide one morning to become a lesson about memory or service or internationalism. The objects accumulated because people had lived lives that happened to cross the village \u2014 some born here, some returning here, some coming here because they wanted to disappear for a while. Those crossings left things behind, and eventually the things began to look as though they had always belonged. A place acquires its symbolic life in much the same untidy way that it acquires everything else.<\/p>\n<p>We spend a great deal of effort in education deciding what children should know, writing curricula, specifying outcomes, sequencing what comes next and naming the language in which learning ought to be demonstrated. All of that has its place. But some of the most durable things Sneem gave me were never formally taught. They were simply there: the knowledge that important lives could lead far away and still leave something at home; that recognition might arrive years after the work; that presidents could resign, champions could come from small places and old friendships could outlast whole careers; that you could look after something without owning it; and that grown men might build pyramids beside a river because someone once watched a wind lift the top off a haycock.<\/p>\n<p>I could not have explained any of that as a boy, and certainly could not have passed an examination on it. The names, dates and histories came much later. Later still came the connections between them, some of which I am probably making now rather than recovering intact, because memory has its own way of arranging a place after the fact.<\/p>\n<p>Yet when I think of Sneem I still begin with the panda on the pier road, because it is the object I understood least and somehow knew longest. I can picture the walk to Christian&#8217;s shop, the wet road, the river under the bridge, the morning coming slowly over Lomanagh and the panda where it always was, facing whatever came in off the bay. It never explained why it was there, and nobody seemed particularly troubled by that.<\/p>\n<p>Education is usually described in terms of what we deliberately put before children, but much of formation happens before anyone has decided to call it a lesson. A child learns how adults behave around certain objects, which stories are spoken carefully, what is looked after, what is allowed to remain unexplained and what a place considers worth keeping. I did not know I was learning any of this in Sneem. By the time I had enough words to describe it, most of the teaching had already happened.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">***<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by David William Sheehan There is a white marble panda at the edge of the pier road in Sneem, and as a boy I walked past it most mornings on the way to Christian&#8217;s shop without once wondering why a panda should be standing in Kerry. It was cold in the mist and faced whatever&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1991,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1991"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309124,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309122\/revisions\/309124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309427,"date":"2026-08-14T14:45:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T18:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309427"},"modified":"2026-08-14T10:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T14:28:08","slug":"c-p-snows-two-cultures-lecture-provoked-a-savage-response-from-fellow-critic-f-r-leavis-what-was-at-the-heart-of-it-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/c-p-snows-two-cultures-lecture-provoked-a-savage-response-from-fellow-critic-f-r-leavis-what-was-at-the-heart-of-it-all.html","title":{"rendered":"C P Snow\u2019s \u2018Two Cultures\u2019 lecture provoked a savage response from fellow critic F R Leavis. What was at the heart of it all?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sam Dresser at <em>Aeon<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309428\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-360x240.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-360x240.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-1024x683.png 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-768x512.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-1536x1024.png 1536w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-2048x1365.png 2048w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/screenshot-2024-09-18-at-17_08_16-300x200.png 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>When Charles Percy Snow rose to deliver the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, he had good reason to be satisfied with himself. By sensible tenacity he had reached an upper station of English society, an unlikely terminus for one raised by a lower-middle-class family from a suburb of Leicester. He had grown up surrounded by artisans and labourers, a distant but kindly father, three beloved brothers, and a smothering mother. But by his 55th year, around the time he presented his Cambridge lecture, one could find Snow living in the only red-brick building on Eaton Terrace in one of London\u2019s prestigious neighbourhoods, issuing calmly authoritative opinions on books and politics and science. He was, to his happiness, considered a serious man, with opinions worth hearing.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Of the many opinions he expounded at formidable length over his lifetime, only the phrase he introduced in his Cambridge lecture remains relevant: the \u2018two cultures\u2019. Within a few years, his term passed into common speech, and it is still quoted, a lifetime later, by people who have never read a word of Snow. But after more than half a century of overuse, it\u2019s largely been wrung of its original meaning so that today the two cultures refer rather blandly to distinctions between the sciences and the humanities, calling attention to two apparently incommensurable ways of going about understanding the world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">But this is a thin, surface reading of what Snow actually said.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/at-the-heart-of-the-snow-leavis-two-cultures-clash?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&amp;utm_campaign=062ce5a5db-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_07_24_COPY_01&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_-49ad69cbc2-40962949\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sam Dresser at Aeon: When Charles Percy Snow rose to deliver the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, he had good reason to be satisfied with himself. By sensible tenacity he had reached an upper station of English society, an unlikely terminus for one raised by a lower-middle-class family from a suburb&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309427","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309429,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309427\/revisions\/309429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309423,"date":"2026-08-14T13:45:21","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T17:45:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309423"},"modified":"2026-08-14T10:22:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T14:22:45","slug":"tracking-global-food-production-through-a-record-el-nino","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/tracking-global-food-production-through-a-record-el-nino.html","title":{"rendered":"Tracking global food production through a record El Ni\u00f1o"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Hannah Ritchie at <em>By the Numbers<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-309424\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-14-162149-360x226.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"420\" height=\"263\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-14-162149-360x226.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-14-162149-1024x642.png 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-14-162149-768x481.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-14-162149-300x188.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Screenshot-2026-08-14-162149.png 1318w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 420px) 100vw, 420px\" \/>This summer has been a hot one for many countries. With an extremely strong (and potentially record-breaking) El Ni\u00f1o on the way, next year is likely to be even hotter. If you\u2019re interested, Zeke Hausfather at the Climate Brink has a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.theclimatebrink.com\/p\/the-strongest-el-nino-ever\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very good article<\/a>\u00a0on how that is developing.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Two of my biggest concerns when it comes to climate change are the direct impacts of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/part-one-how-many-people-die-from-extreme-temperatures-and-how-could-this-change-in-the-future\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">extreme heat<\/a>\u00a0and the impacts on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ourworldindata.org\/crop-yields-climate-impact\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">food production<\/a>. I\u2019ve written a lot about both before.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">If you\u2019ve followed this Substack for a while, you\u2019ll know that I often do\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/hannahritchie.substack.com\/p\/food-projections-2025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">periodic updates<\/a>\u00a0on how global food production has been faring in a warming world.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">I do this by following the US Department of Agriculture\u2019s (USDA)\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.fas.usda.gov\/data\/world-agricultural-production-08122026\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">World Agricultural Production<\/a>\u00a0releases, which are updated monthly with the latest forecasts of production and yields for food products worldwide.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/hannahritchie.substack.com\/p\/tracking-global-food-usda?utm_source=post-email-title&amp;publication_id=1199196&amp;post_id=210996111&amp;utm_campaign=email-post-title&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=3ikjv&amp;triedRedirect=true&amp;utm_medium=email\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hannah Ritchie at By the Numbers: This summer has been a hot one for many countries. With an extremely strong (and potentially record-breaking) El Ni\u00f1o on the way, next year is likely to be even hotter. If you\u2019re interested, Zeke Hausfather at the Climate Brink has a\u00a0very good article\u00a0on how that is developing. Two of&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309423"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309426,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309423\/revisions\/309426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309440,"date":"2026-08-14T13:04:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T17:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309440"},"modified":"2026-08-14T11:05:02","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T15:05:02","slug":"the-mystery-cult-of-dionysus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/the-mystery-cult-of-dionysus.html","title":{"rendered":"The Mystery Cult Of Dionysus"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"the mystery cult of Dionysus || Euripides&amp;apos; Bacchae\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/veQbdn_mUIQ?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309441,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309440\/revisions\/309441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]