by Rafaël Newman

Around ten years ago—before the physical and cognitive decline that began during the pandemic; before his removal from autonomy to a care home in the north end of Montreal; before his death there at the beginning of this month—my father entrusted me with his personal collection of jokes.

As he approached his eighties, the decade of their lives in which both of his parents had died, dad had begun to feel increasingly elegiac, a mode not easily compatible with his professional role as a raconteur. Indeed, by his own account, his narrative powers generally—upon which he had relied, during his career as a novelist, poet, and professor of creative writing—were on the wane. “I feel like I no longer have a story to tell,” he said during a visit I made to his apartment in 2013: and thus, a fortiori, he must also no longer be a teller of jokes.

The Word file my father mailed me, ten years ago, from his PC in Montreal’s Mile End to my MacBook in Zurich’s sixth district, is some 250 pages long and counts almost 122,000 words. It comprises between 700 and 900 jokes—it’s difficult to give a precise tally, since some of the entries are of shaggy-dog length, while others are multipart variations on a theme: spoof ad campaigns for Viagra, mock letters to Dear Abby, ostensibly alien words that turn out simply to be the phonetic rendering of “redneck” pronunciations. There are cameos by all the types familiar from the commedia dell’arte of Golden Age American stand-up: St. Peter; various “blondes” and Mothers Superior; talking parrots; bartenders; “Irishmen”; and, of course, The Lord Almighty Himself, in His aspect as begrudging distributor of attributes to tardy recipients.

What is notably absent from my dad’s jokes, however, is anything that might properly be termed a dad joke. This may be because “dad jokes” typically arise ad hoc, out of a particular real-world context, and are thus less suitable for isolated transcription and transmission than more generic, self-enclosed, typologically defined anecdotes. Or perhaps it is due to the fact that, according to my own observations, the typical dad joke is not sexist, not racist, not violent—and therefore not conventionally funny, since humor derives its explosive force, in psychoanalytic interpretation, from its ability to release otherwise shameful aggression in a socially acceptable fashion. Dad jokes also often feature—indeed, are often centrally built around—puns, which are likelier to elicit groans than laughter; and my dad, for all his professional attention to the concrete effects and semantic vagaries of language, typically grew impatient at what seemed a fetishistic dwelling on the phonemic or even lexical surface of words. What interested him, when telling a joke, was getting a laugh. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Here’s what a bubble looks like.

I walk into the local convenience store, and next to the two ATMs is a third machine selling Bitcoin. You can slide a bank card into the ATMs and get cash. You can slide your credit or debit card into the third machine and buy a Bitcoin, or a percentage of one if you can’t afford to shell out roughly $65,000 for a whole one.

But you know what you can’t do? Turnaround and use your brand new bitcoin to buy anything in the convenience store where you purchased the bitcoin.

There’s a machine in the store that will sell you money that you can’t use to buy anything in the store.

I’m tempted to say this is my Bernard Baruch moment. The famous apocryphal story is that Baruch realized it was time to get out of the stock market, just ahead of the 1929 crash, when a shoeshine boy tried to give him a hot stock tip. When everyone wants to get in, it’s time to get out.

But this can’t be my Bernard Baruch moment because Baruch made a fortune on the market before it crashed, while I’ve always steered clear of Bitcoin, never having had faith that it, or other block chain currencies, would prove to be anything but a game of musical chairs speculation. I can’t get out if I never got in. Instead, the convenience store Bitcoin machine was just a moment of confirmation. Perhaps something like, it’s been years since you believed in Santa Claus, and then one Christmas Eve you happen to catch daddy drinking the milk and eating the cookies.

Recently, we may have seen less Baruchian sign that yet another bubble is near popping: Donald Trump’s Cult of Personality. It certainly feels like something has changed over the last month. Read more »

Wall with trees painted on it with a window showing real trees in Klausen, South Tyrol.

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by Monte Davis

Climate change first came to many Americans’ attention in June, 1988. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the signal of long-term warming from increasing CO2 in the atmosphere had emerged unmistakably from the noise of year-to-year variation in weather.

Four of the warmest years on record had come earlier in the 1980s, and 1988 would be another. One wildfire after another had begun to spread in Yellowstone Park. As that summer advanced, what would be a historically severe and costly three-year-drought took hold in most of the United States.

How long had this moment been coming?  The unmatched resource for answers is Spenser R. Weart’s superb 2003 book The Discovery of Global Warming, and its greatly expanded, steadily updated, richly linked hypertext version online.

In 1824, Joseph Fourier reasoned quialitatively that the atmosphere must let the sun’s visible light in more readily to warm the earth than it lets that warmth out as infrared radiation.

In 1859, Joseph Tyndall identified water vapor and carbon dioxide, CO₂, as the most important components that absorbed — “trapped” — and re-radiated downward some of the infrared energy.

In 1896, a century into the industrial revolution and its hunger for fossil fuels, Svante Arrhenius calculated very roughly that a 50% increase in CO₂ would warm the planet on average by 5° to 6° C. The good news is that his estimate was almost four times too high.  The bad news is that the next century of the Industrial Revolution – and more coal and more oil and gas, and population growth – blew out all expectations. Arrhenius speculated such an increase would take many centuries, but we will reach it in 2026. And keep going. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. M – Through The Honeycomb. Oolloo House, August 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by  Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like Chelsea Handler and John Oliver have leaned into them. Friends on social media have traded quips about Vance’s “one nightstand” and his illegitimate “love seat.” Kamala Harris’ own PR team even joined in on the fun.

The parade of puns all stemmed from one satirical tweet that was never meant to be taken seriously or believed literally. The fact that Democrats nonetheless embraced the idea, couching their attacks on Vance in sofa jokes, signals a fascinating shift in psychology that merits a closer look.

When we say that something is true, we generally mean one of two different things. The first is that whatever claim we are making is factually accurate. “Kamala Harris attended Howard University” is true because she did, in fact, graduate from that institution.

The second is a bit more slippery. Think of the way in which a great work of fiction like Heart of Darkness or The Color Purple can express profound truths about the human condition. Novels aren’t factual, but what they reveal can still be true in a deep way. That’s what we call narrative truth, rather than factual truth.

19th-century philosopher William Whewell wrote that facts are like pearls, valuable in their own right, but that in order to make a necklace out of them, we need a string: a coherent story that connects all the facts together in order to give us a deeper understanding. The narrative that allows us to make sense of the world is as important as the facts it connects.

Democrats have long been obsessed with factuality, with the pearls. “Find the Falsehood” is practically an Olympic sport on the left. Steve Bannon knew this, and he encouraged Donald Trump to “flood the zone” by telling as many whoppers as he could, turning Democrats’ fact-checking obsession into something akin to the last level of Space Invaders, when there were so many alien ships you could barely shoot them all down.

The GOP, on the other hand, has built its entire platform out of “alternative facts” that are thoroughly derided by “the reality-based community.” In the last few days, Trump has tried to disallow live fact-checking during his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, and he’s refusing to allow fact-checking during any future debate he might have with Kamala Harris. Republicans love narrative truth, accessorizing their campaign outfits with one faux pearl necklace after another. Read more »

by David Greer

A group of island neighbours were enjoying a glass of wine in the old wooden boathouse when our quiet conversation was interrupted by an explosive Whupf! from the direction of the sea. We turned to look just in time to see the black-and-white hulk of a six-ton orca, curving gracefully into the water after a deep breath, its six-foot-high dorsal fin marking it as a mature male.

Where there is one orca, others are sure to follow. Loud blasts of spray echoed through the evening air as other members of the pod appeared, mothers with calves, juvenile males, a couple more large mature males. Some close to shore, others a half a mile out at sea. The whales’ appearance hadn’t been a complete surprise, one of our group having received a text alert from a fellow sighter in the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Sighting Network that the orcas had been seen heading west from Saturna Island towards our vantage point by Brooks Point on South Pender Island, the southernmost of the Canadian Gulf Islands, in the heart of the Salish Sea and smack in the middle of southern resident orca critical habitat.

As suddenly as they had arrived, the orcas were gone, continuing west towards Vancouver Island. Then, moments later, a much louder explosion of breath took us by surprise. This we were not expecting. Gazing seaward again, we watched as a far larger black body edged silently above the surface, like a nascent island arising from a seafloor volcano, a high cloud of fine mist dissipating above its pair of blowholes (orcas have only one). The adult humpback, forty tons give or take, perhaps more easily imagined as the size of a school bus, had passed less than a hundred metres from the point, heading northeast. Unlike the orcas, the humpback travelled alone, and there was no apparent interaction between the two species. To watch both in the space of ten minutes at relatively close range left us awestruck. Leviathan tends to have that impression on puny human observers.

Humpbacks and Orcas–Gentle Giants and Dolphins with Attitude

The contrasts between orcas and humpbacks are striking. Both are cetaceans, the animal group whose name derives from the ancient Greek word for sea monster. Cetaceans comprise two groups: whales with teeth (toothed whales) and whales without (baleen whales, including the humpback). Toothed whales include narwhals, belugas, sperm whales, beaked whales, porpoises, and dolphins. All dolphins are whales but not all whales are dolphins. The largest of the dolphins is the orca (Orcinus orca), commonly known as the killer whale, an apt descriptor for a meticulous and cunning predator with very specific tastes: chinook salmon for southern resident orcas, marine mammals for transit orcas otherwise known as Biggs orcas. Orca pods have been known to attack humpbacks on occasion, but generally only when an adult is accompanied by a juvenile, a potential meal for mammal-eating orcas. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

I do not specifically remember when I lost my you-know-what about the way the word “humanitarian” is being tossed around these days. Possibly it was when a State Department spokesperson referred to what he called “humanitarian circumstances”, implying thereby that the designation could be sensibly applied to purely chance events. Or maybe the sheer obscenity of tagging the word to “zones” in middle of what is probably the most hellish place on earth right now (only to bomb the same areas anyway, subsequently) did the trick. Whatever it was, I have decided to try, for what it is worth, to come to terms with the matter. So here goes.

In my lifetime, which has spanned 63 years and some change now, I don’t recall the word being used that much except to describe individual persons and certain organizations, until rather recently. But, maybe starting in the ‘nineties, conditions began taking on the designation, especially in the media and in public relations; and phrases like the one I have chosen for my title, “humanitarian disaster”, or “humanitarian catastrophe” became more common. I distinctly remember at this time being annoyed by this: was the disaster supposed to be experienced primarily by the humanitarians?  It kind of sounded to me like that was a real possibility. If that was not the case, why use the word humanitarian at all? Why not just call it a disaster or catastrophe? It seemed like something unseemly lay at the core of the reasoning that surrounded the employment of such phrases; like something rather sanctimonious was being smuggled in, too.

So I decided to try to understand what might be at the logical core of this kind of usage of words. What struck me at first was the employment of the word humanitarian was possibly being invested with a tacit, but palpable preeminence amongst possible adjectives in any specific case. Humanitarian concerns are somehow supposed to reflect a self-evident moral superiority over other ones, so that when the word is employed, there is a suggestion that the humanitarian concern should, perhaps prima facie, be considered the most important consideration. I am certain many people would, naively or otherwise, assent to this assertion (some environmentalists might consider environmental concerns to be paramount compared to humanitarian ones in certain cases, but, even here, many of them would consider both environmental and humanitarian matters to be of utmost importance). Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

My sister Leyla and I are walking in New York City, talking about how some people love their dogs almost more than their children. In fact, in a very uncharacteristic moment, Leyla shares that she can’t stand the late night tv ads for abused dogs when there are people who are going hungry and suffering; and not only do I agree with her, but add about dogs’ different odors and that dog people think their dog doesn’t smell even though I can tell a house has dogs the minute I walk into one.

Growing up in Iran, we had two dogs at different times and invariably, something unexpected would happen to them. Shouka, a beautiful black and white hunting dog, lived with us, a large family of two parents, five girls, and two grandmothers. He was quite playful and once he made it all the way upstairs from the yard where he lived, to my sister’s bedroom. My sister woke up startled and Shouka was punished for frightening her. I felt bad for my sister who was getting comforted but felt even worse for Shouka who was all excited to hang out with us upstairs and was re-banished to the yard.

Shouka didn’t last with us very long. He was accompanying my father and his friends on a hunting trip in the mountains outside Tehran, according to the story we were told, and he disappeared. My dad said Shouka was so beautiful that probably a commercial truck driver must have stopped and offered him a piece of meat or other treat and there went this disloyal dog. Maybe he preferred being a dog that lives in a truck and gets to travel around, without the pressures of finding whatever poor bird my dad and his friends had shot. Maybe being in a family of too many females and only one male was too much pressure on him; I will never know because he never came back to us. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

Russian Formalist theorist Victor Shklovsky argued in his 1917 Art as Technique that verse “makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new.” Central to the interpretive vision of Shklovsky and his compatriots was that poetic language, which is figurative and consciously literary language, in opposition to prose and the literal, must engage in some form of defamiliarization. That is to say that poetry transforms the prosaic into the profound, but in the process, it draws attention to itself as artifice, as language itself. Prose, intended to convey information, whether it’s factual or fictional, largely eschews being about itself, but in some sense the Russian Formalists claimed that all poetry is about poetry. Verse toggles between the abstract and the concrete, gesturing towards the strange function of poetry itself, making clear that what’s being communicated is somehow both more and less than what it seems.

Such defamiliarization need not only be transforming clouds and trees into things which are strange, for as dramatic an event as a presidential assassination is converted into uncanniness by the Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong in his poem “Of Thee I Sing” in his 2016 collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Written in an ekphrastic idiom, the poem depicts one of the most totemistic moments of the twentieth-century, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza while traveling by motorcade while campaigning in 1963, so that Vuong makes this horrific and already deeply analyzed event into something even more ethereal, otherworldly, strange, even while in that poem the narrator, Jacqueline Kennedy, disturbingly “pretend[s] nothing is wrong” in the seconds after her husband has been shot in the head (whether because she won’t or can’t is left unsaid).

Common sense would dictate that the social, cultural, and political ruptures of an assassination are anything but normal; while the sheer violence of Kennedey’s assassination, as emblazoned into the collective consciousness of Americans through the wide-spread viewing of the infamous Zapruder Film, means that the murder is already an event that is defamiliarized. The opposite is actually the case, for regardless of the (thankfully) relative rareness of presidential assassinations, Kennedy’s death has been so parsed, examined, interpreted, and analyzed that “Of Thee I Sing” reminds us of the singularity of the event and of its broader metaphysical implications (which are not necessarily limited to the event itself).

Read in the context of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, as well as the broader poetic interests of Vuong which often focus on American military involvement in the nation of his birth, a lyrical intimation of JFK’s death makes innate sense. Read more »

Some friends gave me a “sauce dispenser gun” and I am dispensing sauce.

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by Nils Peterson

I used to tell my creative writing classes the artistic form that came the closest to depicting the lives we lead was the soap opera – because, as in the soap opera, we all have many stories going on at the same time. Some are short, some are like lyrics in tone and length, some go on and on, drop into the background, and are revived later when some necessity draws them forth – Uncle Ned goes off to explore the Amazon Jungle and comes back three years later just in time to make the wedding legal. This story of mine is long in years, short in hours.

Small Kentucky college. 25th Reunion. I gave a reading of poems and stories about love. Peterson Pontificates on Love trumpeted the college paper. Many old friends came and came up on to the stage afterwards. So, up comes this beautiful woman, catches my eye, says “Hi.” I say, “Hi.” She says, “Hi . Do you remember me?” and in the silence – “Do you remember me? I’m Patsy.” Indeed it was. I said “Hi,” kissed her on the cheek, turned to cut off my other conversations so we could really talk, turn back, and she’s gone. “Patsy,” I holler into the cavernous auditorium, “Patsy,” but she really is gone. To myself I say, “Peterson, you’ve done it again.”

I got her phone number from the alumni office and called and called, even at 5:30 in the morning, but she was never in. I finally did connect and she explained that she was off fox hunting the morning I called so early. We made a date for that night to meet for dinner and went to a restaurant where her son was a waiter (she had had two sons from a marriage that didn’t last). He raised an eyebrow as he shook my hand. We went back to her place and talked for a long time. Here’s from a poem I wrote about the experience,

What the young offer each other 
is the marvelous future, all that can happen, 
all that will be. Older, suspicious of promises, 
we learn to offer what we have lived. 
It is a smaller, harder gift, yet beautiful like fact.

We wrote back and forth and then lost touch again, but 10 years later I went back to my 35th reunion and we reconnected, the talk as easy and as good as it had been the decade before. It was convenient for me to spend the night at her house, but I had to get up early. She was going fox hunting again. So, October dark, five in the morning, she in her hunting outfit and a dungareed helper got her horse into its trailer and set off. I followed in my rental car. Read more »

by X. Muller

Lyon, France, Croix Rousse University Hospital, 1 AM, February 10, 2023. *

Three hours into the surgery, I placed the surgical clamp on the upper part of the vena cava, the large vein carrying the deoxygenated blood from the lower body to the right atrium of the heart. This was the last mandatory step before the veins of the liver could be safely divided just above the clamp in order to remove the diseased organ from the abdominal cavity of the patient. The role of the clamp was to firmly close the large hole left in the vena cava after the liver was removed, hereby preventing the occurrence of a fatal bleeding. This allowed to move on to the implantation of the liver graft, which had been procured from a deceased organ donor several hours ago. The implantation is the final phase of a liver transplantation where the three major blood vessels and the bile duct of the graft are reconnected to those of the recipient by manual sutures.

Liver transplantation has come a long way since the first successful procedure in 1963.¹ From a technical point of view, the procedure is now well standardized and offers patients with end-stage liver disease the only live saving treatment.² In addition, recent scientific advances have allowed more patients to gain access to liver transplantation, for example the use of immunotherapy for advanced liver tumors. Technically and scientifically speaking, liver transplantation, it always occurred to me, has been a success story, and the procedure on that given day in February was part of that story.

Until the clamp on the vena cava slipped! Read more »