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

by Brooks Riley

Looking back at the year gone by is the tedious task of news editors who aim to make sense of the senseless, find connections where none exist, and leave us with a neat package of nostalgia to file away in our collective memory. I’ve never been partial to such wrap-ups, with their facile interpretations of events, their mining for relevance where none exists.

Another thing that makes such year-end assessments so difficult, is the necessary conjunction of events of varying levels of gravitas: Imagine talking about Twitter king Elon Musk in the same breath as Vladimir Putin, mentally blending images of a digital town meeting with a security council meeting at the Kremlin. One shudders at the juxtaposition of wounded infants in Ukraine with the trivial issue of buccal fat surgery. After a while, all newsworthy events in a given year begin to appear surreal, existing side by side inside separate vacuums that bump into each other like bumper cars at an amusement park.

Part of me doesn’t care much for the immediate past. Part of me wants to get on with it, whatever ‘it’ is. Slowly but surely, I’ve evolved from being a participant in life to being an observer of it. From my modest command center I gaze out at the world through a digital lens and try to understand what’s going on. It’s becoming much harder to do that.

As an observer now, I am less tolerant of the rampant vanities let loose on social media. I find many more public figures ridiculous, and many viral trends simply absurd. (Is it me, or is it them?) My inner curmudgeon stretches its limbs like a newborn, even as it is forced to coexist with my inner teenager who, for some reason, is still alive and kicking. Read more »

Jupiter rising above a mountain in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Ethan Seavey

It’s halfway through the month of December and New York is filled with pine boughs and small yellow bells and horse-drawn carriages and scarves. We are seated on the edge of the fountain in Washington Square Park, though this time of year the water has been shut off. A group of five skateboarders are practicing jumps in the large basin. We just bought a pre-rolled joint from one of the stands in the park, of which there are many. But we only buy from one of them. Weed is legal in the city now, but it’s not legally sold, so it can be questionable, and you never want “questionable” when you’re prone to paranoia. We trust the woman who runs this stand, though, because we know where she buys it and she has a rainbow flag on the front of her table. 

So we sit queerly on the edge of a queer fountain smoking some queer weed. We talk about something, I don’t know, maybe how Halloween is a gay holiday but Christmas is a straight one and we have fatigue. A New York Christmas is not one of comfort or much joy. Starting in November, there’s a pressure in the air that pushes you to believe you need to do a long checklist of items. You need to see Rockefeller Center, you need to go to this small pop-up and that department store extravaganza. You need to go to the holiday markets at Union Square, where people shuffle by long lines of other people waiting to shop at little stands, and the ones at Bryant Park, which you never see because Union Square was such a nightmare. A New York Christmas is hearing tinny bells played on speakers for weeks and drunk Santas racing from bar to bar. A New York Christmas is one where you can only find silence and darkness when you’re tucked away into your tiny apartment. 

Certainly there is magic in the season as well and I am rarely as gleeful as when I have a quiet Christmas moment with friends. But it is finals week and I can’t see past a devastating head cold.  Read more »

by Eric Bies

There I sat (or stood (or, who knows, hovered )), trying to read Osip Mandelstam…

(…not, to be sure, the early Stone poems; not the later Poems poems; not the Egyptian Stamp, not even the essay on Dante, but his final literary effort: cobbled together from the vantage of that characteristically Soviet brand of exile-cum-vacation, about 500 klicks south of Moscow), in this case, the Andrew Davis translation of the Voronezh Notebooks.

As I sat, etc., and perused the table of contents, I noticed that the book contained—in addition to its eighty-nine numbered poems and introduction—an index of first lines.

I remembered the first time I’d noticed such an index. The memory of the encounter was fresh enough—not quite far enough back to not resound so readily with the powerful shame of my nervousness in the company of poems. I remembered how, once, attempting to temper this skittishness, I’d picked out a couple of battered volumes of Auden and Coleridge, friendly clothbound entries into the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets Series that are with me still. Now as then they remain neat, tidy, approachable: they were, for a reader who’d made the frosty acquaintance of Eliot and Pound, poetry on training wheels. And instrumentally, at the back of them, one could and still can make alphabetical reference to each poem by the words with which it starts. So, too, I remember noticing this then: that that Auden began with “A cloudless night like this” and ended up “Wrapped in a yielding air, beside.”

Later, but not too much later, I took notice (if not any interest in the real utility) of similar indices appended as yet more backmatter to yet other editions of bound selections, collections, and completions of the poetry that continued to unman me. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Numerology can easily result from free association and, given its assertions, it certainly seems like it has been. In any case, I thought I’d try my hand at it.

In particular, the date 9-11 and the destruction of the WTC twin towers have together given rise to all sorts of numerological claims. Here are a few more.

The twin towers were destroyed, so to the numerologist this might suggest the number 11, since 11 has twin digits and looks like the twin towers. The Pentagon was also damaged, suggesting the number 111.

Combining the omens implicit in the date of the attack and the three buildings involved yields 9111, which can be viewed as suggesting the product 91 x 11.

But the number 91 x 11 itself has a twinning property. What do I mean? Well, take any 3 digit number and multiply it by 91 x 11 and note that 643 x 91 x 11 = 643,643 and 819 x 91 x 11 = 819,819, and 547 x 91 x 11 = 547,547, and so on.

Moreover, 91 = 7 x 13, and 13 is widely considered to be a most unlucky number, easily outweighing the good luck that 7 often indicates.

Conclusion: 9111, the exact date of the destruction of the twin towers and the damaging of the Pentagon were numerologically foretold. After all, what is the probability that a 4-digit number would become so relevant to these tragic circumstances? It would seem the chances are a minuscule 1 in 10,000. Read more »

I learn to reap without violence
listen without taking; I yield —Lauren Turner, Poet

Learning How to Write a Poem

A time ago I thought, and
something said, Get out of the way, Jim
you’re occluding the sun
you make a mess of things
with your insistence
how do you expect a poem to come?
how do you expect a song to come?
how do you expect anything good to come?
how do you expect anything to breach
the dikes of yourself, to spin the hinges
of your gates, to split the mortar joints
you’ve pointed up so assiduously
laying brick upon brick year upon year?
Are you waiting for something else to come and
shatter or clean the panes of your casements
crusted with dust?

You stand there, a dumb dolomite, still
in a stream of love & pain which merely
splits itself, surging round, moving on
as if to say, you fool, come along,
this is the only stream there is with all its
joys and bereavements,

the only one there is—

come, learn, wait,
then speak

©Jim Culleny, 11/17/22

by Charlie Huenemann

Vasco da Gama was the first person we can name who successfully commandeered a voyage around Africa’s southernmost point, the Cape of Good Hope. It is a treacherous passage, where warm currents from the southern part of the Indian Ocean clash against the icy currents of the south Atlantic, leading to dangerous waves that have swallowed many ships. (Indeed, at the time it was known as “the Cape of Storms”.) Da Gama gave the cape wide berth, sailing far the sight of land, before turning northward and poking his way along the eastern coast of Africa, where many hijinks ensued.

This was in 1497, and Europeans were keen to find some route to Indian spices that didn’t involve crossing lands controlled by some sultan or other. Da Gama showed everyone the way, and the Dutch and the English rushed through and established colonies along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. Da Gama’s fellow Portuguese established colonies as well, of course, but not with equal success. Part of the reason was that Portuguese sailors as a whole were not very interested in following da Gama’s Cape Route because they knew damned well there was a monster down there that ate ships like snacks.

Sailors spend their lives and meet their deaths in the middle of huge and violent systems they don’t understand and can’t control (well now, who doesn’t?) and so they make up stories to pretend to make sense of them. Unsurprisingly, many of these stories feature ill-tempered monsters with gaping mouths. The nautical disasters clustered around the Cape of Good Hope was pretty clear evidence of some beastly demon, and in 1572 the great Portuguese epic poet Luís de Camões gave the dreadful beast a name: Adamastor. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mary Hrovat

In 1995, I made two Christmas mixtapes that I labeled A Very Mary Christmas. I had recently gone through a period of wondering whether it made sense to go on celebrating Christmas, given that I’d stopped believing in the Christian story years earlier. In particular, I’d thought about whether I wanted to go on listening to Christmas music—especially the old traditional carols I love, many of which have explicitly religious lyrics. In the end, I decided that there were other good reasons to celebrate the time around the winter solstice. I made the mixtapes in a spirit of enjoying winter and celebrating both the darkness and the light to be found in family and friends. I kept some of the traditional carols (some only in instrumental versions) and religious music—Handel’s Messiah, for example. In addition, I included music that’s not traditionally considered Christmas music or even winter music; hence the now mildly embarrassing substitution of Mary for Merry.

I put together four 45-minute playlists that covered two 90-minutes cassettes. The first playlist was essentially my very own greatest hits for December. I opened with Jethro Tull’s “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” and followed that up with Canzona per sonare No. 2 by Giovanni Gabrieli, which has always seemed particularly jubilant to me. This playlist included my favorite songs from two albums I remembered from my childhood: one of the Robert Shaw Chorale singing traditional carols a cappella, and a 1963 album called The Spirit of Christmas with the Living Strings. I’m not sure I’d like that one if I heard it for the first time now, but musical taste doesn’t have much to do with it. That album calls up my childhood Christmases as no other music does—a mixed blessing, but it’s too deeply embedded in my memories to ignore. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

Why should history be a part of our core curriculum in high schools and colleges? A variety of arguments have been put forth to support a historical education. Most notably is how history can inculcate a better understanding of the world. It can help us become more empathetic people, and better citizens, too. The kind of history we teach is also up for debate. A post-colonialist urges people to focus on more inclusive narratives that highlights the subaltern. A feminist lobbies for more women’s voices, while an anti-racist argues for the importance of racism in understanding the modern world. All this matters, but I’d also argue that understanding history as made by people, and as such complicated and contingent, can helps us to shape our future more effectively.

None of us can predict that future. However, a deep familiarity of history can give us a general idea of how change over time happens and how we can make better choices than those made in the past. But given that more and more, our educational system has become captured by corporations seeking to build a better employee and by individuals looking to indoctrinate rather than educate (see the anti-trans and anti-CRT bent of the MAGA movement), this is becoming increasingly difficult. Even some well-meaning progressives tend to focus on objectifying history and making it seem like something that happened, or at best, a celebration of “great men” rather than events that everyday people made happen. Our love of heroic stories of individuals and our distaste of subjectivity and complexity has blinded us to just how critical it is that we understand how we got here. But by ensuring that our students have a better understanding of how people make the arc of history bend, we can learn to chart a better, more humane path into that unknown future. Read more »