by Rebecca Baumgartner

There’s a pervasive idea that there must be works of art and culture that contain “people who look like me,” where “looking like” is usually scanned as race, ethnicity, sex, or gender expression. This clique-ish attitude masquerades as liberalism and can twist your head in knots if you let it: rather than encouraging and reveling in different perspectives, we want a coterie of authors, creators, and fictional characters that can fill out a census form in precisely the same way that we do. No one is so foolish as to come right out and say, “I only want to read about people who have lives similar to my own,” but this is the unstated purpose of wanting books with more people who “look like me.”

There are a couple of problems with this idea, right off the bat. First, and maybe simplest, is: Get over yourself. There are as many stories as there are people on Earth, and then some. We all contain multitudes. Even someone exactly like you on paper will have a different perspective and different story – quite possibly not one you would agree with or find palatable. Second, you must believe there is an immutable essence to being or looking a certain way, otherwise what would be the point of insisting on having more of it? Author Jia Tolentino, in her essay “Pure Heroines,” says: 

“…my white friends would be able to fantasy-cast their own biopic from an endless cereal aisle of nearly identical celebrities…while I would have no one to choose from except about three actresses who’d probably all had minor roles in some movie five years back. In most contemporary novels, women who looked like me would pop up only occasionally, as a piece of set decoration on the subway or at a dinner party, as a character whose Asian ethnicity would be noted by the white author as diligently as the whiteness of his or her unmarked protagonist was not.”

There’s a lot here to sort through, but my initial thought is about narcissism. Does someone need to share visible, tangible attributes with us before we can identify with them, sympathize with them, like them? What about their non-visible, non-tangible attributes? If a character shares our race but not our generation, how much do we really have in common? If they share our biological sex but come from a different social class, how far can we identify with them? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

In his (1930) essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes suggests that the stage has been set to alleviate the threat of material uncertainty for large portions of the world population. “The course of affairs will simply be,” Keynes writes, “that there will be ever larger and larger classes and groups of people from whom problems of economic necessity have been practically removed.”

The reasons Keynes cites for this blissful state are twofold: “the power of compound interest” and “technical improvements in manufacture and transport.” Keynes writes “Economic Possibilities” recognizing that his readers will likely see his prognostication of future material comforts for all (or most) as bordering on fantasy. For Keynes, however, the more bewildering fact seems not the explosion of growth that occurred beginning in the second half of the 19th century, but rather the LACK of growth that preceded that period.

“From the earliest times of which we have record,” Keynes notes, “back, say, to two thousand years before Christ – down to the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was no very great change in the standard of life of the average man living in the civilised centres of the earth. Ups and downs certainly. Visitations of plague, famine, and war. Golden intervals. But no progressive, violent change. Some periods perhaps. So 1 per cent better than others – at the utmost 1.00 per cent better – in the four thousand years which ended (say) in A. D. 1700.” Keynes continues with the observation that the “absence of important technical inventions between the prehistoric age and comparatively modern times is truly remarkable. Read more »

Just a cranberry-based hot sauce I made last week. I thought it was a pleasing color.

by Derek Neal

Friday, September 2, 3:24 pm

I’m in a white Toyota Camry, practically brand new, and I’ve passed a spotted deer grazing outside the airport and a billboard with a picture of a baby and the words, “God doesn’t make mistakes.” Wyoming, I think to myself. The GPS on my phone tells me I can drive 104 miles on the one lane highway before making a turn. Going west, I think to myself. I decide to try out the luxuries of the Toyota Camry; it has Sirius XM radio, and the breadth of stations is impressive. I put on “Studio 54” radio and immediately hear Luther Vandross singing for the group Change, a Chic-inspired disco band from the 80s. I listen for a few songs, but it’s all wrong: this is music for New York. I try to call up The War on Drugs on my phone, a fitting soundtrack for cutting through the plains, foot to the ground, blue skies above, but I don’t have service. Wyoming, I think again. Thank God the map is still working.

Going back to the radio, I see they have artist channels and one of them is Tom Petty radio. Now that’s music for driving west. The fist song is “Saving Grace.” Petty is singing:

And it’s hard to say

Who you are these days

But you run on anyways

I realize I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I’m seeing beyond the windshield. Words come to me: steppe, bluff, vista, brush, but they lack a specific referent outside of the vast expanse unfolding before me. The landscape is dry and undulating, with occasional growths of struggling vegetation. There are few trees, much rock. Everything is a baked yellowish color, cooking under the sun and meeting the light blue sky on the horizon. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In connection with our research and meetings in the MacArthur network we did a considerable amount of international travel. Let me now turn to a whole series of my travel-related stories, some in connection with this network but mostly outside it and in different periods of my itinerant life.

When I start thinking of my travels the first thing that comes to mind, as it does with many others from India, is a whole series of anecdotes relating to authorities in western countries trying to block or hinder our travel in various ways. Let me unburden here some of them. Many decades back, before I got the much-coveted ‘green card’ (it actually looks rather pink, not green) for permanent residency in the US, I was standing in the long line for American visa one early morning in New Delhi. The line started forming even before daylight, hours before the Embassy doors opened, and it soon snaked around the Embassy building, under the scorching sun. When I finally reached near the counter in the air-conditioned interior, in front of me there was one other person, a woman of probably 27 or 28 years of age. She had told me that she had been admitted in a graduate school in the US with a fellowship, and we discussed her prospective area of research. But when she reached the counter the surly visa officer looked at the file, examined all her documents, then for a minute or two looked at her, and suddenly closed the file with a thump, and said, “You don’t look like a student to me (he probably meant that she was a few years older than the usual graduate student), No Visa for you! …..Next!” Standing there she started silently weeping, and I was next. I reached the counter and said, “Is this how you decide on visa, by looks of people?” The man growled at me and said, “Do you want your visa or not?” Things may have improved since then but at least those days it entirely depended on the arbitrary decision of one visa officer, and there was hardly any scope for appeal. While in the line I had already overheard some students discussing that the visa officer at the American consulate in Chennai was rumored to be a bit kinder than officers on duty elsewhere in India at that time, and many Indian students were making a special trip to Chennai to try their luck there. Read more »

Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

by Frans de Waal

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Physical dominance is not the same as power and leadership.

Photograph: For over forty years, Mama was the alpha female of the large chimpanzee colony at Burgers’ Zoo. Portrait by Frans de Waal.

A century ago, the London Zoo put about one hundred hamadryas baboons together in the wrong sex ratio. Over 90% of the monkeys were male. They fought for years, and by the end the females had died as well as most of the males. The scientist in charge, Solly Zuckerman, who was quite prominent (Fellow of the Royal Society), popularized this unmitigated disaster. In the primates, he claimed, males rule brutally and supremely. Females have no say whatsoever. His observations hinted, he felt, at the origin of human society. Repeated over and over by others, this view became mainstream even though we, primatologists, wisely don’t mention Zuckerman much anymore. Too embarrassing!

The male supremacy view still holds in the public mind, though, such as in the 2002 book “King of the Mountain” by American psychiatrist Arnold Ludwig: “Most humans have been socially, psychologically, and biologically programmed with the need for a single dominant male figure to govern their communal lives. And this programming corresponds closely to how almost all anthropoid primate societies are run.”

This statement resembles Sigmund Freud’s reconstruction of the first human family as a “primal horde” around an overbearing father figure.

There is little support for the notion of the obligatory male overlord, however. Read more »

by Michael Liss

I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me. —JFK

September 12, 1960. Just eight weeks before the 1960 election, and the Democratic candidate for President, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, finds himself before a crowd of roughly 300 Protestant clerics at a meeting of the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He has been invited to explain his views on religion, more particularly, his religion.

To modern eyes, there is something surreal about this. Watch the clip in grainy black and white, read the speech, and you can’t help but be mesmerized. Why is he here? Kennedy was a war hero; he’d been a Congressman, a Senator, and a Pulitzer Prize winner. While it certainly could be argued that there might be better men for the job, surely JFK had achieved enough in his life to meet the qualifications for being a President.

Unless (and certainly many in the audience believed this) Kennedy could never be qualified. Unless, to use his own words on this day, he was just one of “40 million Americans [who] lost their chance of being president on the day they were baptized.”

Whatever his feelings, Kennedy and his team knew this moment, and moments like it, were inevitable. They had always known it, even before he entered the race. It was a reflection of what the journalist Theodore White called “the largest and most important division in American society, that between Protestants and Catholics.” Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

As forced migration in the wake of war and climate change continues, and various administrations attempt to additionally restrict the movement of people while further “freeing” the flow of capital, national borders, nativism, and a sense of cultural rootedness have re-emerged as acceptable topics in a globalized order that had until recently believed itself post-national. In the German-speaking world, where refugees have been met with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on their provenance, national pride, long taboo following the Second World War, at least in Germany, is enjoying a comeback. As the last generation of perpetrators and victims dies and a newly self-confident, unproblematically nationalist generation comes to consciousness, it is again becoming possible to use a romantic, symbolically charged term like Heimat.

The nuances of the word Heimat are difficult to capture economically in English: it suggests origin, community, group identity, and comforting familiarity, and is only narrowly conveyed by either the simple cognate “home”—which is somehow too particularly British, too private and individual—or by the compound “homeland,” with its unpleasant resonances of the cynical Apartheid-era term for what amounted to enforced reservations for black South Africans. Heimat connotes both birth family and wider ethnic belonging; it is both a distinct physical place and a sentimental, even ideological abstract; it conjures up both history and destiny.

October 14 this year will see the 150th birth anniversary of a German-Jewish philosopher in whose thought and life Heimat played a central role. Margarete Susman was born in 1872 in Germany and died in 1966 in Switzerland; a commemorative conference this month in both countries will mark the occasion of her sesquicentennial, and celebrate her multifaceted work, not yet as widely known as that of some of her illustrious contemporaries and colleagues, who included Georg Simmel, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, and Martin Buber. The conference is being held in two legs at consecutive locations: in Munich, where Susman studied and published, and in Zurich, where she spent her early years and much of her adult life, in exile from Nazi Germany, and where she is buried. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Don’t Step On The Jewels, 2014.

Digital photograph.

by Bill Benzon

As I am writing this (September 11, 2022) the Metaculus prediction site sets arrival of AGI – aka artificial general intelligence – as early as July 25, 2029, though a more rigorous setting of the question indicates that our incipient machine overlords won’t appear until May 26, 2042.[1] As people are interested in and excited by the technology, their imaginations run ahead of their reality-testing. Alas, a significant percentage of those people also believe that, once it emerges, AGI technology will somehow amplify itself into a superintelligence and proceed to eliminate the human race, either inadvertently – as a side effect of some other project, such as creating paper clips (a standard example), or deliberately.

This strikes me as being wildly implausible. The history of artificial intelligence dates back to the early 1950s, when the first chess program was created and work on machine translation began and is so irregular that I don’t see how any reasonable predictions can be made.[2] The future of AI is MOSTLY UNKNOWN.

I conclude, then, that belief in AI Doom is best thought of as a millennial cult. It may not have a charismatic leader like Jim Jones of the Peoples Temple, much less be located in an isolated jungle compound. But its belief system closes it off from the world. Its vision of AI is a fantasy that is useless as a guide to the future. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Marie Snyder

A student asked, “How many bad actions does a good person have to do before becoming a bad person?”

The notion of good and bad people raises the image of final judgment at the pearly gates. We have a scale somewhere with our actions added incrementally to one side or the other until there’s a tipping point, or sometimes there’s just that one unspeakable act that slams one pan to the ground requiring an inconceivable effort to budge it.

It’s possible that an infinite number of bad actions doesn’t make a person bad. I like to think that we’re all greater than the sum of our worst actions. We’re all just works in progress doing our best in this world, and it’s never too late to change our path. It sounds nice. But then I started to consider some real people who appear to have unlimited selfishness as well as a cold indifference to the suffering they cause to others. Can we call them bad people until we see some movement towards redemption? Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

About eight years ago, I was in downtown Manhattan and went into a Warby Parker store, an eyewear retailer. I didn’t post anything on social media about it, but I did have location services enabled on Facebook. Later that day, Facebook started showing me ads for eyewear (something it had never done before.) How and why it did that wasn’t a giant leap of understanding, and I immediately turned location services off for Facebook. But of course, this was sticking one thumb in the crumbling dam that is my data privacy. I own an Alexa, and I have an iPhone, an Apple watch, and an iPad. And that’s just for starters. I use Google all day long, subscribe to multiple online publications, use Amazon regularly, have used Instacart in the past, and the list goes on.

My husband, who doesn’t use any social media, tells himself the lie that he’s protecting his privacy. But he uses a Chinese Huawei phone, and I like to tease him that he prefers the Chinese government to know where he is and what he’s doing than the US one. He’s not off the grid; he has online subscriptions and credit cards and uses Google and Amazon. Maybe his data is marginally more private than mine, but if it is, it’s minimal.

This New York Times article says, “Reconciling the idea of privacy with our digital world demands embracing a profound cognitive dissonance. To exist in 2022 is to be surveilled, tracked, tagged and monitored — most often for profit. Short of going off the grid, there’s no way around it.” The article continues, “Step back, and what we’re looking at is a world where privacy simply doesn’t exist anymore. Instead of talking about old notions of privacy and how to defend or get back to that ideal state, we should start talking about what comes next.” Read more »

Cloud at sunset seen from my window a few days ago.

by Jim Britell

Wise words from 50 years of managing political and environmental campaigns, and doing staff work in all kinds of settings from a Cabinet secretary’s front office to local planning boards.

Work

Always bring doughnuts to important meetings, but never eat them.

Bosses never forget attacks on their self-image so never tell them what you think of them.

An experienced analyst only needs one point to spot a trend.

You can’t manage anything well if you hate it.

Never hire anyone until you check references back to their pediatrician.

The devil’s in the details because that’s where the real policy is.

To grasp email’s limitations, inflect sequentially the words; “Her, you should
marry?”

Between two job offers, take the one with the smartest boss. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

In the middle 1990’s my friend from the September Group, Sam Bowles, and I were invited by the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation to form an inter-disciplinary and international research network to study the effects of Economic Inequality, with the two of us as co-Directors. I have known Sam for nearly four decades now. He is one of the brightest economists I know, with a large vision and wide-ranging interests that are often lacking in many bright economists. His landmark 2013 book Cooperative Species with his frequent co-author Herb Gintis uses experimental data and evolutionary science to show how genetic and cultural evolution has produced a human species where large numbers make sacrifices to uphold cooperative social norms. He himself has been socially alert and active in public causes all through his life, starting from writing background papers for Martin Luther King’s 1968 Poor People’s March to most recently providing leadership in the revamping of undergraduate Economics curriculum to include upfront non-standard issues like inequality, the environment and reciprocity and altruism in human behavior, and making it available free online worldwide. He is also one of the most generous and genial people I know.

When his father was US Ambassador to India, his parents sent him to a local Indian school, which at that time did not even have a building, only a large tent. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, his father’s friend, once invited the family to tea in the garden at his home, and encouraged him and his siblings to explore the interior of the house. At that time he discovered in Nehru’s bedside table a framed passage from Robert Frost’s poem (“I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep”), which the 11-year old immediately recognized, as Frost was a fellow New Englander he knew about. He says he was pretty average in his Delhi school, and there were some Indian kids who were smarter, and yet, he asked his mother one day, why were most Indians so poor? (In his small Connecticut hometown where he had grown up there were only two people who were really poor, one was an alcoholic, the other had mental problems). The same question kept on bugging him when about a decade later, after his undergraduate education at Yale, he started teaching in a school in northern Nigeria. Read more »

Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More comments on these essays can also be seen at Frans de Waal’s Facebook page.

by Frans de Waal

This weekend, the New York Times had an opinion piece by Chelsea Conaboy arguing that the maternal instinct is a myth invented by men.

In a way it’s true, but not in the way the journalist intended.

It is true that we don’t use the term instinct much anymore, certainly not for humans, but also not for other animals. This is because the term suggests that a behavior is simple and automatically comes up in every member of the species, which is rarely true. This applies particularly to maternal care, which is complex behavior and requires example and training. A gorilla female at a zoo who is pregnant and has never watched other mothers care for babies is bound to fail with hers. She has missed opportunities to learn. Her baby is likely to die from starvation or mishandling.

Young female primates are extremely eager to learn, though, and far more attracted to babies and dolls than are males.

They actively seek the maternity training they need. As soon as a mother primate arrives with a newborn she will be surrounded by young females, not males, who all want to hold and cuddle the infant. When these young females grow older, they will turn into babysitters. And when they are adult, they will know what to do with a baby and how to bring it close to their nipples.

The immense female attraction to infants extends to dolls. When experimenters have introduced toys to monkey groups, the movable objects (like balls, cars) ended up with the young males, the plush toys, such as dolls and teddy bears, with the young females. In the wild, young female chimpanzees pick up wooden logs to carry them on their back or belly like an infant. They make their own dolls. Our children are similar. When experimenters have left them alone in a room with an infant, girls show a lot more interest and care than boys. Read more »