by Bill Murray

After three years of pandemic and a year of war, could things be about to get better? With the defeat of Jair Bolsanaro in Brazil, President Xi’s Covid problems in China and President Putin’s all-around debacle of destruction in Ukraine, could the worldwide wave of authoritarianism be breaking? 

If so, the incoming Republican House could be the rump of ugly populism and, for all that that’s fun to write, it could go out kicking up more trouble than anyone wants to see. This Congress will legislate the future of the country until a new president is elected. Hoo boy, how much could they undo in two years?

If last week gave us a preview of the next two years in the U.S. House, they promise to be sort of like watching a YouTube lecture at 2x speed, choppy and distracting. But as the House Republican caucus settles in to comb through the life of Hunter Biden, what might happen in the rest of the world? Undreamt of things, probably. All over the place.

We won’t have to wait too long to learn one thing: the true extent of China’s Covid problem. That should become clearer over the next several months. We know that as it is, untold numbers of rural Chinese people, surely millions, languish in a health care system with only the most basic resources. We also know that when the going gets tough, government controlled data gets scarce, and worryingly, that is precisely what we are seeing now. Read more »

by Michael Abraham

I wake with the dawn. It is January the sixth, and I have spent the last two days languishing in bed, oppressed by an inexplicable ennui that made it quite impossible to get up. So, today, I wake with the dawn. The sky is all blues and pinks, with tufts of cloud. The night has been wet, and I stand in bare feet on my porch and smoke my cigarette and drink my coffee, relishing strangely the damp chill that creeps into my toes. I go inside to write this—because the deadline to write this looms—and I pull up a song from a long time ago in my life: “The New Year” by Death Cab for Cutie. It isn’t a very good song to be terribly honest, but it drips with ire about the concept of the new year, and I have always liked Ben Gibbard’s distaste for the pomp and circumstance that attaches in our culture to January first. “So this is the new year / And I have no resolutions / For self assigned penance / For problems with easy solutions,” he sings. For years, I have been of this mind about the new year—that it is just another day and that it is, frankly, ridiculous to treat it as a magical aperture into the future one desires. It’s setting oneself up for disappointment, I’ve always believed, this whole business of resolutions and new beginnings. It is a mysticism of the calendar, and, like any mysticism, it is wont to fail in its enchantments by the harsh light of day.

But this year I feel differently. The year that has just ended has been the hardest of my twenty-seven years of life. If you’re a regular reader or a friend, you already know that—divorce, acute mental health crisis, the vicissitudes of love and sex, leaving my home of ten years, drugs, pain. An everyday ache that won’t subside. I feel quite unspooled as the new year begins, a bit of twine once neatly wrapped up upon itself in a whorl, now strung about the room and knotted up here and there. Approaching the concept of the new year in this state, in this state of unspooledness, means that I can muster little optimism for what lies ahead; indeed, I can hardly muster the optimism to get out of bed most days. But it is precisely there, in the brokenness of it all, in the lack of drive toward the world and all its promise, that I have found a strange and precious thing. I have found a little bit of hope. Read more »

by Terese Svoboda

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately. –Ben Franklin

Watching the Oathkeepers cry during the federal court trials under the charge of sedition, I considered the fate of seditious Loyalists during the Revolutionary War whom they most closely resemble in the topsy-turvy world of contemporary politics. The Revolutionary War was a civil war, combatants were united with a common language and heritage that made each side virtually indistinguishable. Even before hostilities were underway, spies were everywhere, and treason inevitable. Defining treason is the first step in delineating one country from another, and indeed, the five-member “Committee on Spies’ ‘ was organized before the Declaration of Independence was written.^[1]  But the records of the courts handling  treason during the Revolutionary War are handwritten and difficult to read, especially on microfilm, according to Bertrand Roehner, the historiographer I mentioned in my last column, who works at the Sorbonne.^[2]

Historiography is the study of how historical recording and interpretations shift with time as a result of many factors. Roehner helped me collect documentation available on violence in postwar Japan for my 2008 memoir, Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, sharing information from his research into Allied Occupation archives in Australia, Britain and New Zealand, and from Japanese and American newspapers. I was specifically looking for evidence of executions of Americans convicted by US forces, but I was also interested in the Japanese response to GIs in that period. What Roehner gleaned contradicted the premise of John W. Dowers’ Pulitzer-winning book Embracing Defeat, which frames the Japanese as meek losers, resigned to their status and reliant solely on Americans for their welfare. Dowers omits the huge demonstrations organized by the Japanese populace that took place periodically, the guerilla snipers and mysterious murders and rail sabotage – as well as the many acts of violence committed by the Americans – rape, automobile “accidents.” Dower had not reviewed or could not access Roehner’s sources, partly due to MacArthur’s policy of total censorship – even the mention of censorship was forbidden – that has only recently been lifted in Japan. While we would like to consider our side of the Revolutionary War terror- and violence-free, carried out by well-behaved Americans, the truth might be that we won the war because we were just as (or more) violent as our opponent — which would explain why 200,000 Loyalists left their homes and went into exile.^[3] Read more »

Poets Talk Time

poets talk time
to get a handle on it,
to hack a place to hold it
to turn it, to fold it
to climb it and mount it
to ride it, to flip it
to hide it, to turn it
to toy with and tip it
to wrench it, to rip it
apart to unlearn it
to kill it, to burn it
to track it in the innards of clocks
to tear it to shreds like a crow on a corpse
to drill it to dig it to bore it
and finally, ignore it

but poets would do well to pour time
like water, or blood & wine
and, savoring,
sip it

by Jim Culleny,
© 2/28/12
.

by Michael Liss

I’ve always liked this image. It’s quiet, it sneaks up on you, brings back old memories of pizza parlors, barbershop walls and drug-store soda fountains.

Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” had been inspired by FDR’s 1941 Annual Message, given at a time when Germany had swept through much of Europe, and democracy was in great peril. While the United States was not then yet at war, and isolationism was still strong, a growing number of Americans could see that our involvement might be inevitable. Roosevelt wanted to define the values that a post-war world would embrace. Drawing from the Constitution as well as from the lived experience of the Depression, FDR called for Freedom from Want, Freedom from Fear, Freedom of Worship and Freedom of Speech.

This one is Rockwell’s masterpiece. The composition was, according to him, inspired by a town meeting he had attended, where a young man took an unpopular position. Rockwell portrays him with shoulders thrown back a bit as he speaks, as if to project his unamplified voice through the hall. His hard, weathered hands hold the chair in front of him, a copy of a Town Report folded in his pocket. His face is roughened by the sun and wind, he’s flanked by two older men in white shirts and ties, and, on the face of one, there’s a small smile. No screaming, no doxing, and certainly no video captured on someone’s phone, uploaded, and seen by hundreds of thousands of partisans.

Rockwell’s painting gets to the essence of “Constitutional” free speech. However contrary this speaker’s opinion is, it is his right to voice it at a public hearing without fear of punishment. The First Amendment has very few content-based exceptions—the government can intervene only where obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, and speech integral to criminal conduct is involved. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

In 2022, I worked harder than before to keep my students’ tables free of smartphones. That this is a matter for negotiation at all, is because on the surface, the devices do so many things, and students often make a reasonable, possibly-good-faith case for using it for a specific purpose. I forgot my calculator; can I use my phone? No, thank you for asking, but you won’t be needing a calculator; just start with this exercise here, and don’t forget to simplify your fractions. Can I listen to music while I work? Yeah, uhm, no, I happen to be a big believer in collaborative work, I guess. Can I check my solutions online please? Ah, very good; but instead, use this printout that I bring to every one of your classes these days. I’m done, can I quickly look up my French homework? That’s a tough one, but no; it’s seven minutes to the bell anyway and I prepared a small Kahoot quiz on today’s topic. (So everyone please get your phones out.)

As a matter of classroom management, some of these questions are more of a judgment call than eating and drinking in class (not allowed, with some exceptions immediately after a PE lesson) but less complicated than bathroom visits (allowed in principle, but in need of limits that I may never be able to express algorithmically). In spite, however, of the superficial similarities between these phenomena – all subject to teacher- and class-specific settlements, informed and assisted by school-wide institutions such as regulations and phone bags – it feels as if more is at stake when it comes to smartphones. I sense more urgency, as if I’m laboring to stop a tide from coming in; as if what I am inclined to view as ‘complex’ and ‘multi-faceted’ and ‘also an interesting challenge, actually’ is actually one big thing only: an external force threatening to infiltrate my classroom and undo what I am trying to achieve there (which is called ‘education’ and which is therefore plainly also one big thing). I don’t feel this way about chewing gum.

To help me make up my mind, I decided to consult a writer who passed away before smartphones were ‘a thing’: media and educational philosopher Neil Postman, famous for his criticism of the role of television in modern culture and education. Though this choice of authority seems to be loading the dice rather heavily in one direction, I did briefly consider the counterintuitive case that Postman might have seen 21^st-century media technology as a step in the right direction. In the end, however, I think the more predictable reading – that, in Aubrey Nagle’s words, mobile media represent “Postman’s fear of TV on steroids” – is the more interesting one, allowing us to apply his broader cultural criticism to our time. Read more »

Lita Albuquerque. Southern Cross, 2014, from Stellar Axis: Antarctica, Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica, 2006.

More here, here, and here.

by Rafaël Newman

When we began, our gods were junior,
Their profits, and our problems, punier.
The deities who drilled at dawn
Paraded in a pantheon:
Born out of Chaos and castration,
Theirs was a piebald population.
They mingled with a breed of men
And women we’ll not see again,
Who shared those gods’ own groaning board,
Where things were rarely untoward—
Unless you count the odd abduction,
The semi-bestial seduction,
The anthropophagous pot-au-feu,
Or the Promethean pas-de-deux.

But more than this, our gods were many,
Though not, for all that, two-a-penny.
A deathless numen dwelt within
Whatever was, would be, had been,
And granted every abstract noun
Its aegis, buckler, crest, or crown;
Its anvil, lightning bolt, caduceus;
Its cuneiform, and its cartouches.
There was a holiness at large,
A broadly scattered, sacred charge.

But now? Our gods have been compress’d,
And we, in consequence, less bless’d:
From Twelve Olympians downgraded
To single Seigneur. We have traded
That polychrome diapason
For a grimly grayscale monotone.
At best, our world is Manichaean,
Though not as praised in Persian paean.
The tyrants twain who rule this globe
Are those that frame the Book of Job:
A sadist, distant from the Earth,
And Satan, who assays the worth,
In worship and obedience,
Of hominid ingredients. Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

A tree in the vicinity of Rumi’s tomb has me transfixed. It isn’t the tree, actually, it is the force of attraction between tree-branch and sun-ray that seems to lift the tree off the ground and swirl it in sunshine, casting filigreed shadows on the concrete tiles across the courtyard. The tree’s heavenward reach is so magnificent that not only does it seem to clasp the sun but it spreads a tranquil yet powerful energy far beyond itself. It is easy to forget that the tree is small. I consider this my first meeting with Shams.

Of average human-height, the tree is non-descript, other than how its heavenward reaching creates an embrace that enricles and enlarges everything around it, so that motion ripples out of stillness, light edges shadows. In a moment such as this, the senses deepen spirit; words fail, words fail. All that we know evaporates, we are left with spirit. Here is the limit of knowledge, the Sufis teach us; no amount of book learning alone can bring us closer to the Divine than the spirit engaged in making a wide embrace. The Divine is an experience, and knowledge is only a part of it. If there is one word that comes close to describing this, it is love. But of course, the word is insufficient. No single word in conventional language can contain love. Poetry, arguably, owes its existence to the impossibility of defining love in the dictionary. In Maulana Rumi’s case, it was Shams who brought this awakening, this great desire for the Divine beloved that colored every thought, action and word that was to come out of him in the future. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

I’m going to date myself in a significant way now: when I was in high school, we had to use books of trigonometric tables to look up sine and cosine values. I’m not so old that it wasn’t possible to get a calculator that could tell you the answer, but I’m assuming that the rationale at my school was that this was cheating in some way and that we needed to understand how actually to look things up. I know that sounds quaint now. I also remember when I used an actual book as a dictionary to look up how to spell words. Yes, youth of today, there were actual books that were dictionaries, and you had to find your word in there, which could be challenging if you didn’t know how to spell the word to begin with.

These days, if you have turned in a paper without putting it through basic digital spellcheck, you deserve to fail the class. And most editing tools have some at least rudimentary grammar checking. In addition to those built-in tools, I use Grammarly and have encouraged my college-age daughters to use it. It used to be the case, at least when I was in school and college, that you lost marks for bad spelling and grammar. There is no good reason a piece of writing today shouldn’t have mostly correct spelling and basic grammar. But spelling and grammar checking doesn’t make you a good writer, and a scientific calculator doesn’t make me a better mathematician. They’re just tools. By the way, I also used to get marks deducted for my bad handwriting. Bad handwriting isn’t an issue for anyone over ten or so (or maybe younger these days) when almost all communication is electronic. So does bad handwriting matter? I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything longer than a greeting card. These days, it’s far more important to be computer literate than to be able to write good cursive.

Which brings me to ChatGPT, a new AI chatbot created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence research company. Read more »

Went to the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan on New Year’s Day for the first time and found my friend Ehtesham Raja’s name among the many who died that day. The phone placed above his name shows a photo of him and me in my Manhattan apartment earlier in 2001.

by William Benzon

He liked being known as “SBF.” Why? It is kind of cool on its own terms. But I wonder it there might not be some mimetic desire lurking there. After all, there IS an enormously wealthy and well-known man who is known by his three initials, two of which are shared by SBF. I’m talking about MBS of course – Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud, Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Saudi Arabia. Does SBF want to be like MBS?

And there’s that luxurious Bahamian compound, a bit like Xanadu. As you know, Xanadu was the name of Charles Foster Kane’s mansion in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. It is also the nickname Bill Gate’s house. DJT (aka 45) has said that that’s his favorite film. Back in the mid-70s a group of developers made plans to build a hotel in Las Vegas to be called Xanadu. The project fell through, but not before considerable architectural work had been done, preliminary plans, renderings, models, etc. Donald Trump knew about this and was influenced by it in his Atlantic City Casino, which had a night club called Xanadu. All of this is online.

I discovered this some time ago when, on a whim, I did a web search on “Xanadu.” Why?  Because I have a long-term interest in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” with its famous opening couplet: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan/A stately pleasure dome decree.” Just like that – Make it so! – and there it was. What billionaire wouldn’t thrill to that?

I digress. Much to my surprise the web search turned up millions of hits. Why? Coleridge’s poem is well known, about as well-known as poems can be. I searched the Oxford English Dictionary for uses of the name, and found a few. I also searched the archives of the New York Times and found, for example, mention of a Xanadu yacht in the 1930s. It became clear, however, that it was Citizen Kane that put “Xanadu” on the socio-cultural map, leading to what I have called a sybaritic cluster of associations, which is about wealth and luxury. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Despite what you might have heard, it almost certainly wasn’t Yogi Berra or Samuel Goldwyn who said it. It may be an old Danish Proverb. But it is probably a remark made by someone in the Danish Parliament between 1937-1938, recorded without attribution in the voluminous autobiography of one Karl Kristian Steincke. It being:

“It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”

This is one reason you should probably be much less concerned with the end of the world than longtermists like Sam Bankman-Fried, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and William MacAskill are – or claim to be.

Here’s a slightly more accurate, if more pretentious, way of putting it, this time unequivocally from Wittgenstein:

“When we think of the world’s future, we always mean the destination it will reach if it keeps going in the direction we can see it going in now; it does not occur to us that its path is not a straight line but a curve, constantly changing direction.”

That’s the moral. Here’s the story.

It was not MacAskill, Hilary Greaves, or Nick Bostrom – much less Bankman-Fried – that came up with longtermism, perhaps the most controversial element of the most controversial and visible philosophical and moral movement of the twenty-first century, “effective altruism.” Longtermism, specifically, is the view that we owe the future a certain priority over the present, especially when it comes to existential risks, like nuclear war, pandemics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Recently some colleagues and I were out to lunch. It was our University’s “Dead Week.” This is the week before finals when students are in a last-minute rush to finish projects and study for exams, and faculty are planning how to wind up their courses and beginning to draft their final exams.

My colleagues and I joked that writing a final exam is basically an analog version of the Turing Test: You try to craft questions that can distinguish between the students who actually understand the material and those who “solve” problems by being skilled at pattern recognition and applying rote algorithms.

Coincidently, around the time of this lunch, OpenAI released ChatGPT. As 3QD readers no doubt have heard, ChatGPT is a large language model which was trained on a significant chunk of text in 2021. Using that text, it developed a model of which words and phrases most often follow one another. Using that model, ChatGPT then writes replies to prompts submitted by the user. The results are equally amazing and banal. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Cactus In My Window.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley