by Eli Rarey

A poetry reading I recently attended at Clio’s Books in Oakland began with the poets and the audience all sitting in silence together for three minutes. Three minutes is a long time. None of the poems we heard took as long as three minutes to read. It was, you could say, the epic poem of the evening. Sitting in silence, known to many as “meditation,” is one of the foundational spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism. This literary event, called The Poetry of Zen, The Zen of Poetry, included poet Norman Fischer, who is also a Soto Zen Buddhist priest, as well as three other poets whom he had recently also ordained as Zen priests: Stefany Anne Golberg, Denise Newman, and Pearl Kan. A poetry reading with Zen priests who also happen to be poets.

At a poetry reading, we intend to listen to poets read poems. Silence is negative space. But at a Zen poetry reading, this relationship becomes unstable. Even the relationship between “poet” and “audience” becomes uncertain. Sitting in silence, there is no audience. If that silence is part of the reading, then the poetry of the silence is one of which we are all the author. As Pearl Kan said in response to a question about Zen and poetry, “I don’t think poetry is particularly Zen.” Poetry is about wanting to express yourself, wanting to make something. Zen is about releasing attachment to self-expression or definitions. Embracing doubt. That suggests that these poets’ work emerges from an expansive space of not-poetry, a field of silence from which they speak. Yet at this reading poetry and not-poetry were highly indistinct. Even this supposed opposition between Zen and poetry is itself in doubt. And doesn’t all poetry emerge from not-poetry? And isn’t that supposed opposition always in doubt? We imagine a poet as someone for whom the experience of their lives is somehow inherently poetic, in the same way we imagine a Zen priest as someone for whom the experience of their lives is inherently Zen. The poetry reading at Clio’s, appropriately, was not just a reading but also a kind of panel discussion about Zen, even a kind of absurdist performance art happening.

After we sit in meditation for three minutes, Stefany Anne Golberg calls out to the audience, “Question number one!” Someone responds immediately, calling back: “What is Zen?” This response comes from Susan Moon, co-author with Fischer of a book called What Is Zen. So Fischer’s answer to the question is to reference the book. Thus, the answer to “What is Zen?” is What Is Zen. Zen is difficult to define because Zen itself encourages us to doubt definitions and disrupt distinctions. As Fischer says, “The only thing that is not in doubt is that we doubt.” A poem follows, and then “Question number two!” Someone from the audience asks, “What is poetry?” In the same way that Fischer’s answer to “What is Zen?” is very Zen, the poets’ answers to “What is poetry?” are very poetic.

The poet/priests also offer canonical Zen koans for the others to respond to. This Zen practice I had not been exposed to before. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Charles Siegel

As I am writing this, the World Cup is into the quarterfinals. All in all, it’s been a great tournament so far. There have been many exciting, close matches. There was the brain-melting final 15 minutes of Argentina’s victory over Egypt. There have been several elimination matches decided in stoppage time, or extra time, or on penalties. There have been standout performances from the players you’d expect — Messi, Mbappé, Haaland and Kane — and also from lesser-known figures who have made themselves into new international stars, such as Denis Undav of Germany and Azzedine Ounahi of Morocco.

Most endearingly, there have been terrific performances from underdogs. The most surprising of all such stories, of course, is that of Cape Verde. As everyone now knows, this small island nation, population 530,000 or so, qualified for the World Cup for the first time — the third smallest country ever to do so. And they didn’t come just to make up the numbers. They progressed, incredibly, to the knockout stage, holding mighty Spain to a 0-0 draw, and drawing with two-time champions Uruguay and Saudi Arabia as well. In the round of 32, they lost to Argentina in extra time, on an own goal, but essentially they won. As one wag paraphrased the famous old headline in the Harvard Crimson, “Cape Verde beats Argentina 2-3.” Cape Verde’s goalkeeper, Vozinha, became an instant folk hero.

Spirits have been high all around. Away from the matches themselves, there have been endless stories about foreign fans and their wide-eyed, exuberant embrace of all things American. Lots of emphasis on food, especially. There have been stories about foreigners’ amazement at Mexican restaurants serving chips and salsa whether you ask for them or not, and not charging you for them, and bringing endless refills. (Although some of these stories are fake, as seems inevitable these days.) Here in Dallas, visitors have marveled at the barbecue, and the prehistoric size of beef ribs.

Beyond the food, foreigners are apparently surprised to find Americans so friendly and welcoming. There have been many reports about how visitors come here with preconceived images of our country, its truculence and xenophobia. But then they’re surprised to find that actual Americans aren’t like that at all. These stories are very pleasing to us, of course. They reassure us, make us feel we’re really not that bad. That we welcome strangers here! That our country is the big, capacious, friendly, magnanimous country we have all grown up thinking it is.

All true! But here is another truth: we are also cruelly, heartlessly unwelcoming. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

I first learnt of Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission, which delivered its draft report on June 26, from a post in Hemant Mehta’s Friendly Atheist, where he describes it as a clown show and as “a blueprint to end church-state separation.” Mehta is far too optimistic. The commission’s report is much more than that. The final report, we are promised, “will equip all Americans with the knowledge and support needed to defend their Constitutional rights.” The draft shows us what these words really mean. It contains recommendations that would greatly aid the Administration in its campaigns against independence of thought, suppress discussion of Palestinian rights, encourage proselytizing in the workplace, and grant protected status to conspiracy theories put forward in the name of religion.

There’s worse.

The very first recommendation reads

Instruct the Department of Justice to issue guidance clarifying the proper understanding of the Establishment Clause and separation of church and state.

There is so much wrong with this, that one hardly knows where to start. The Department of Justice is part of the Administration, and has no business issuing guidance on the “proper understanding” of any part of the Constitution, let alone the complex subject of church-state relations. The fact that the Commissioners, who include in their number influential scholars, prelates, and opinion shapers, were willing to put their name to this recommendation shows, more clearly than any other single recent event, that the United States as a Constitutional Republic is all but dead.

The strategy involved is obviously far beyond the mental capacity of the man who sits in the Oval Office, but fully in accord with the thinking of his entourage, and in particular of Russell Vought, whose 2022 article, Renewing American’s Purpose referred to the United States as “post-constitutional,” complained as an example about the role of career officials (remember that this includes all the scientists) in the Centers for Disease Control, and demanded that governmental activities be brought under strict centralized supervision.

The specific recommendations are very much as would be expected, given the choice of Commissioners, and lay out the plan to hold the MAGA coalition together in the approaching post-Trump era. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Chilly Morning, Boston, 2020.

Digital photograph.

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by Michael Liss

[M]en by their constitutions are naturally divided into two parties. 1. those who fear and distrust the people, and wish to draw all powers from them into the hands of the higher classes. 2dly those who identify themselves with the people, have confidence in them cherish and consider them as the most honest & safe, altho’ not the most wise depository of the public interests. —Thomas Jefferson to Henry Lee, August 10, 1824

In the end, they were, like so many other citizens of this exasperating if often great and good land, men of impulse, of passion, of ambition and of regrets. Washington himself, a demigod in his lifetime, still left office soured by the partisan sniping, some of which was directed at him. Franklin, the twinkle-eyed inventor, patriot, diplomat, and elder statesman, one of the great figures of the 18th century, felt aggrieved over some attitude of Congress that he felt did not appreciate his point of view. John Adams, unceremoniously shown the door by the electorate in 1800, remained an outsider for the rest of his long life, periodically railing at the uncouth, the undemocratic, the unmeritocratic, and the uneducated. James Madison watched the beautiful Swiss-watch-like mechanism of his Constitution challenged by the reality of it being used by men who very often had little more than personal and tribal advancement in mind. And, of course, there’s Jefferson.

In Gordon S. Wood’s telling in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1993 book, The Radicalism Of the American Revolution, this result was entirely rational. “A new generation of democratic Americans was no longer interested in the revolutionaries’ dream of building a classical republic of elitist virtue out of the inherited materials of the old world.”

Professor Wood died last month at 92, but left a legacy of scholarship (and honors) that few can match. Like probably every other history/political-science junkie in America, I had read Radicalism. I still had a copy, tucked carefully into the third space from the right on the bottom of the second shelf of the first big bookcase on your left as you walked into my study (in case you needed directions). Unearthed, it showed it had become a tad yellowed and a bit frail. It also looked like it needed to be re-read. Read more »

“In every myth something human speaks,

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by Christopher Hall

How far does Trump’s bad taste go towards explaining his presidency? A long way, thinks Paul Krugman:

…is it any surprise that Trump is turning the White House into Mar-a-Lago North?

This is all deeply alien to American tradition. Washington DC is a city full of grand monuments and impressive public buildings. Yet the style of these monuments and public buildings is generally one of restrained neoclassicism meant to evoke the Roman Republic – an ideal of a republic of equals reflected in law and norms as well as architecture. Anything approximating the Louis XIV style of Trump would have been considered monarchical and autocratic by the Founding Fathers.

So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.

Are we still convinced that “restrained neoclassicism” and “American tradition” are closely aligned? The neoclassicism of the 18^th century which informed the design of Washington DC most certainly advocated for refinement and restraint – or, more commonly, noted their absence. The “Timon’s Villa” episode of Pope’s Epistle of Burlington is a dissection of taste gone wrong, even as it is deployed by an aristocrat:

At Timon’s villa let us pass a day,
Where all cry out, “What sums are thrown away!”
So proud, so grand of that stupendous air,
Soft and agreeable come never there.
Greatness, with Timon, dwells in such a draught
As brings all Brobdingnag before your thought.
To compass this, his building is a town,
His pond an ocean, his parterre a down:
Who but must laugh, the master when he sees,
A puny insect, shiv’ring at a breeze!
Lo, what huge heaps of littleness around!
The whole, a labour’d quarry above ground.

Bigness, of course, is at the centre of the Trump aesthetic, but such measurements are a matter of perspective. Big and small, high and low; whatever categories are manipulated or inverted were never firm in the first place. Fintan O’Toole has recently written about this matter of perspective in Trump’s America, using Gulliver’s Travels by Pope’s friend Swift as a jumping-off point:

…we return to a neurotic form of politics in which, like Gulliver, citizens are made to hover between the poles of massive aggrandizement and utter mortification. These opposites come as a package; they must be experienced together. The great leader costs the people imaginatively down into the pit of abjection so that he (and only he) can lift them up into hyperinflated greatness. He does so because he has nothing to offer in between: no betterment, no dignity, no equality.

Trump elevates the degraded and degrades elevation; the point is not to bring the values of “the people” into the regions of decorous authority, but to dismantle the very idea of authority itself. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Ever heard of Heraclitus? I bet you’ve heard of his river. It’s on a million posters.

I’m not one to judge, but I would go so far as to say this quote is bandied about pretty thoughtlessly.

For example, this is the ocean and not a river. Not to mention not a great spot for stepping in.

But at least the ocean has water in it. This is just a random field.

And this guy seems to be trying to avoid stepping in – he’s in a boat after all, but from the looks of that yaw, he’s going in eventually.

Alice Walker wrote a book called:

In fact, there are at least eight books with that title. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

1. This is what they told me in Montana.

“If you encounter a bear, walk, don’t run, away. Move slowly – don’t make eye contact – If the bear charges – stand your ground. If the grizzly continues to come at you, lie face flat on the ground, hands clapped around the back of your neck, and play dead. The bear will likely leave you alone or paw you inflicting only minor injuries.”

Well, that puts a lot of hope in likely.

So. let’s think of grief as a bear.

If you encounter a grief, you might well want to walk or run away and not make eye contact. But it’s better to stand your ground. If it keeps coming, lie face flat on the ground. Let it paw you. Its injuries won’t be minor, will hurt. But when they scar over, I won’t say heal, you’ll be different. Grief also will be different, likely even companionable.

Well, that too puts a lot of hope in likely.

After I wrote the above, I realized that grief isn’t always bearish. It has other, more subtle ways of being – the quality of being there always though you don’t notice until some small thing calls its presence forth, a word, a phrase, a look, a sudden awareness of absence, a shadow.

I thought “like a shadow” and remembered the old Robert Louis Stevenson poem, “My Shadow.” Here’s the second stanza,

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

Well, much like grief. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Do universities need to foster more intellectual diversity among professors? Should there be affirmative action for conservative thinkers in disciplines such as sociology and social work? Asked less often, but just as relevant: Should business schools and economics departments hire a few socialists?

This long-running debate intensified in Trump’s second term, as MAGA forces ramped up attacks on any challenge to right-wing populist politics. Unfortunately, a principled question about the appropriate mix of ideologies in a faculty has been twisted to advance political goals.

Rather than offer policy recommendations for institutions coping with this mess (because I don’t have any), I want to speak in favor of intellectual diversity for individuals (because we all need to remember to keep an open mind). In my three decades in academia, I saw too many professors hang on too tightly to the conventional wisdom of their intellectual gang rather than entertain new ways of thinking.

My teaching career provides several examples of the dangers of dogma, on all sides.

For seven years I was a Faculty Fellow in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, which was the DEI unit (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) of the University of Texas at Austin until a state law eliminated it in 2024. “Faculty Fellow” just meant that on top of my day job (teaching in the School of Journalism), I received a bit of funding for local projects, primarily to help launch a community center.

I enjoyed the community work but found that lots of people assumed, incorrectly, that they could predict my political positions from my association with the division. But I never fit comfortably on either side in the culture wars in higher education, a status not unique to me. I’m not suggesting I was a model professor but rather that reactions to my work show the dangers of dogma. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

John Conway invented the Game of Life in 1970, and it remains an active area of research and play fifty-six years later.

John Conway was a deeply original mathematician who made important contributions to multiple areas of mathematics. Indeed, when Dr. Conway passed away in 2020, I wrote an entire 3QD essay about his work and, as interesting as it is, the Game of Life (or GoL) didn’t make the cut.

The rules of GoL are deceptively simple. It is a zero-player game. This means that once the game starts, it runs on its own with no further player intervention. It is played on a very, very large grid of one-by-one squares that we will call “cells”[1]. Each cell can be “alive” or “dead”. In each turn of the game, an alive cell can remain alive, or die, and a dead cell can remain dead, or spring to life. In each turn of the game, whether a cell lives or dies depends solely on the state of its eight neighbors:

• a living cell with 2 or 3 living neighbors remains alive, and otherwise it dies [2];
• a dead cell with exactly 3 living neighbors springs to life, and otherwise it remains dead [3].

That’s it.

To play the game, in the zeroth turn you, as the creator deity, decide which cells are alive and which are dead. Thereafter, the game plays itself, turn-by-turn, and you watch your universe unfold:

Conway discussed the origins of GoL in an interview with the Numberphile folks. He described how he was originally motivated by John von Neumann’s work on self-replicating machines. However, von Neumann’s machines had 19 different possible states. No doubt with the aphorism “Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler” in mind, Conway spent months tinkering with the GoL rules until he was down to two states and two rules.  Despite the simplicity, the game remained interesting.

By “interesting”, Conway meant unpredictable. This was Conway’s deep philosophical insight: saying GoL is unpredictable is to say that it is capable of anything, and if GoL is capable of anything, then it should be capable of everything [5]. That is, despite its simple algorithmic rules, GoL should be capable of arbitrary complexity. And indeed, in 1982, Conway proved that GoL is Turing-complete. Something is Turing-complete if it can simulate any Turing machine and, hence, can simulate any computer and perform any computation. Read more »

A vehicle drove by while dripping something just before I happened to be crossing the road. That is all.

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by Jim Hanas

Almost thirty years ago, in what would now be called a quarter-life crisis, I felt called to Greenville, Mississippi. It’s not too far from Memphis, beyond the casinos, which were new then and also called to me from time to time. I had been introduced to Walker Percy at the used bookstore where I worked. The Moviegoer, with its moody twenty-nine-year-old protagonist, hit me at the right time in life and set me on the Southern Route of mid-century male ennui. (As opposed to the Northern Route through Roth, Bellow, and Updike, of whom I remain woefully innocent, despite living in New York for more than twenty-five years.) I devoured all of Percy’s works. Like Binx—the protagonist of The Moviegoer—I realized a search was possible, the first step of which was a pilgrimage to Greenville, where Percy grew up. “The search,” as Binx tells us early in the novel, “is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.”

According to Percy’s taxonomy of “existential modes”—borrowed liberally from Kierkegaard and articulated in his 1956 essay “The Man on the Train”—I had moved from alienation to rotation, from the immersive grayness of modern life (what Kierkegaard would call despair) to the pursuit of the new. Through friends, introductions were made. I wrote a letter to Shelby Foote—who grew up with Percy in Greenville—and he left me a voicemail, telling me (in that drawl Ken Burns made famous) that “the whole town had whittled away to nothing and the young people don’t have much fun anymore.”

I had breakfast with Percy’s nephew, who was pleasant but as confused as I was about what I was after. I also saw the aftermath of a fatal car crash and nearly fell in love with my local guide, a twice-divorced mother of two with thick ankles and a sweet singing voice. (Actually, depending on how familiar he was with his uncle’s work, his nephew—who was probably the age I am now—might have understood what I was after better than I did.) 

This all now seems incredibly apt as I move on to Percy’s third “mode,” repetition, three decades later. You can’t go home again, but you will inevitably try, just to sneak up on the strangeness of life. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

There is a ghost in Bo Wang’s 2023 short film An Asian Ghost Story 九龍東往事.[1] “It was a strange time,” the narrator laments, “with strange things and strange people.”

She is the spirit of a Japanese woman who died in northern China; after her death, her hair was cut and sold, woven into a wig, and carried westward through the trade networks of Cold War Hong Kong. She drifts through Kowloon City, through factory floors, karaoke bars, the thoroughfares of a city built to mediate other people’s transactions, and narrates her displacement: “Commodities are always transformed to conceal their past. But the past never dissipates.”

The commodity in question was embargoed by the US Treasury in 1965 under the category “Asiatic hair.” The ban targeted Communist China specifically, part of a wider embargo enacted under the 1917 Trading with the Enemy Act, since Chinese hair exports were funding a government the United States refused to trade with. Hong Kong itself was not the target, but its wig industry ran almost entirely on Chinese raw hair, and customs officials, unable to distinguish communist from non-communist Asian hair by sight, cut off the supply regardless. It was a decision that restructured the global wig industry without consulting the women whose bodies had supplied it.[2]

*

The film was originally commissioned as a single-channel video installation by the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (CHAT) in Hong Kong before entering the festival circuit. At 37 minutes, it operates as hybrid docufiction, combining archival newsreel footage, acted sequences, and oral histories, including factory testimonies, a therapy session, and karaoke performances. It also introduces a pseudo-scientific apparatus called the EVPL (Electronic Voice Phenomena with Linguistics),[3] a device invented for the film that purports to decode communications from the dead through severed hair. The lo-fi VHS aesthetic and 4:3 frame lend it the appearance of the news footage it incorporates, while the image and voice-over often deliberately refuse to correspond, a formal choice that gives the narration a haunting quality. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Marianne Janack

Visiting a grocery store forces you to face irrationality.  Should I buy the Jax, which I love?  Or should I refrain?  The store doesn’t carry my cat’s favorite brand of food anymore.  Should I buy something that’s sort of like it?  Go to another store a short drive away that carries it?   Why do I torture myself with these questions?

Benjamin Libet, a neuroscientist, ran a series of experiments in the early 1980s in which he tried to determine whether the decision to perform an action preceded the brain activity that signified decision. This brain activity is called “readiness potential”.  Libet measured readiness potential by recording electrical charges on the scalp, which are triggered by brain activity that precedes voluntary motions, like raising your arm, reaching for your keys, or buying things at the grocery store.

Libet asked volunteers to flex their wrists; they could do this any time they wanted to. They were told to report the clock position at which they decided to flex their wrist, and their reports were correlated with both the electrical charge readings indicating readiness potential and with the muscle movement that was involved in the subjects’ wrist flexions. In general, readiness potential preceded the reported will to act, even when the subjects claimed that they had acted spontaneously. From this, Libet concluded that the brain initiates voluntary action unconsciously: our conscious sense that we have decided to act is actually the result of this brain activity.

If we had free will, and were in control of our decisions, Libet argues, the conscious will to act would be reported prior to the electrical charge that signals readiness-potential. In Libet’s words: “the initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!” Jax or no Jax?  That decision was made by my brain before I was conscious of making it. Or maybe not. Read more »

by Carlota Figueroa

Very recently, on June 10th of this year, Eva Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan H. MacDonald were awarded the 2026 Kavli Prize in the category of Nanoscience for their foundational work establishing the field of Twistronics. I know that sounds like something straight out of a sci-fi movie, but it is one of the most pivotal (and real) discoveries that is transforming Materials Science as we know it. Let this column serve as a short (and very qualitative, as the intention is that the article is readable and enjoyable, not dense and technical) introduction to the world of quantum 2D materials. I hope that by the time you finish reading, you are as excited about the potential of this field as I am – even if this is your first time ever hearing about bilayer graphene.

Let us start at the beginning: we must first understand what a crystalline solid is. Many of our day-to-day solids are crystalline structures: table salt, sugar, diamond and copper, just to name a few. What this means is that the atoms that make up these structures are arranged in a highly ordered microscopic structure. Imagine you could zoom into a grain of salt until you see each individual sodium and chlorine atom: you’d see they are very neatly organised in a periodic manner, so that no matter what part you zoom into, you’d see the exact same repeating pattern of sodium and chlorine atoms over and over. This periodicity and order is what characterises crystalline solids. These structures can be one-dimensional (meaning you have a chain of atoms that extends in just one dimension of space, like the x-axis), two-dimensional (so you have a sheet of atoms that extends throughout two dimensions of space, like the x- and y- axes) or three-dimensional (which is what many of us think of when we imagine a solid: some arrangement of atoms that extends along the x- y- and z- axes). We will focus on the second type: 2D crystalline structures – or solids made up of a single layer of atoms. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Waking Up In Butaro, November 2023.

Digital photograph.

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