by William Benzon

Notice that I said, “discovered,” not “created.” The Metaverse has always been there, you just have to know how to look for it. Mark Zuckerberg is just one in a long line of supplicants in search of the Metaverse. Whether or not he’ll find it, who knows? Neil Stephenson named it in his first novel, Snow Crash. He ran an interesting variation on it in The Diamond Age, where it appears as the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. But that primer is only imaginary. The one I created, with the help of my friends, was real.

Here’s the story.

Bérubé’s American Air Space

It all started back in 2006 at Bérubé’s joint. That’s Dr. Michael Bérubé, professor of English Literature at Penn State and proprietor of American Air Space, a most distinguished blog, now, alas, defunct. There was then, and there is now, no space like American Air Space. Once a day, five days a week – weekends off – Prof. Bérubé would post something. Sometime it was politics, lots of politics. That was back in the days when we had real politics, not this FAKE MAGA and post-MAGA politics. Sometimes it was about his son Jamie, who has Downs Syndrome and who loves the Beatles, golf, enumerating state capitols, and drawing, among other things. For a while Michael had a regular series, “Theory Tuesdays,” on which he would write succinct disquisitions on literary theory and criticism. Sometimes it was sports, hockey, always with the hockey. And then there were those Arbitrary, But Fun, contests on Fridays.

One day Michael got inspired. He decided to found the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party, aka WAAGNFNP. There’s a story about that, a true story, but this is not the time and place for that, but you can find part of the story here. Any worthwhile political party needs and party apparatus, so Oaktown Girl agreed to be Ministress of Truth, Justice, and the WAAGNFNP Way. As her first official act Oaktown Girl decided that the WAAGNFNP need to have a Show Trial to show that It Means Business. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

It is difficult to discuss politics openly and intensively with my Chinese friends, but I have some general idea of their political views and how to differentiate their politics. For example, Justin Lin, with a Chicago doctorate, seems to have slowly moved from conservative or mainstream economics to be in recent decades an advocate of interventionist industrial policy tinged with Chinese economic nationalism. Yingyi Qian is more of a liberal economist, and is wary of Chinese ultra-nationalism which is rampant now. Another bright liberal economist in the same vein is Chengaang Xu, whom I have known since his London School of Economics days and later in University of Hong Kong. Discussing with, and reading, Yingyi and Chengaang I have come to appreciate the unique combination that China has accomplished between political centralization and economic decentralization. Another economist with whom I have profitably discussed the Chinese economic and political system is Yang Yao, currently the Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University. On the basis of these discussions and further thinking on governance issues in China I gave a lecture at Renmin University in Beijing in 2018. Xiaobo Zhang, the editor of the international journal China Economic Review was in the audience; he persuaded me to write it up and he published the article there in 2020.

Some years back Yingyi had introduced me to the veteran economist Wu Jinglian, one of the major architects of market reforms in China; he presented me with his book Chinese Economic Reform and told me (this was around 2010) that he thought the Chinese case was turning into one of crony capitalism. His sharply expressed opinions have often landed him in trouble. During the Cultural Revolution he was persecuted (including being beaten up, his mother’s home ransacked and half of his wife’s head shaven by Red Guards). Again in recent years hardliners have tried to discredit him as a US spy in state-controlled public media for his pro-market stand. “I have two enemies,” he said in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, “The crony capitalists and the Maoists. They will use any means to attack me.” Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

On Friday before sunrise, I walked across campus with our dog, Lola. Summers in Oklahoma are unpleasantly hot. If you can manage, it is best to be out early. Besides, Lola is an early riser. It is hard to stay in bed when you can hear the pacing of impatient paws.

While crossing campus I stopped to enjoy the view of Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and Saturn sprinkled in a line across the eastern sky. A conjunction of thoughts joined together in my mind. I had a 3QD essay due this weekend, it was Friday the 13th, and it is surprising but true that the 13th of the month is more likely to be on a Friday than any other day.

My former colleague Ralf Schmidt was the one who first told me this startling fact and why it’s true. I thought it would be a pleasant diversion in these turbulent times to talk about something which matters not at all. Why is it that the 13th more often lands on a Friday?

As far as I know, this curiosity was first observed by B. H. Brown at Dartmouth College in the 1930s. In any case, he was the one to pose this as a problem in the American Mathematical Monthly in 1933. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Lanchester’s square law was formulated during World War I and has been taught in the military ever since. It is marginally relevant to the war in Ukraine, particularly the balance between the quantity and quality of the two armies’ weapon systems.

Although more accurately expressed in terms of differential equations, Lanchester’s square law can be roughly paraphrased as follows: “The strength of a military unit – planes, artillery, tanks, or just soldiers with rifles – is proportional not to the size of the unit, but to the square of its size.”

Let me illustrate this with a schematic conflict between two armies, one denoted QN (for numerical or quantitative) and the other QT (for technological or qualitative), each of which has 500 pieces of artillery. (The exposition is abstract, the numbers used are arbitrary, and QN and QT are not to be understood as Russia and Ukraine.)

Further assume that the two armies’ artilleries are more or less equivalent in effectiveness and are capable of destroying each other at a rate of, say, 9% per month. This assumption suggests that after one month each side will have 91% of what it had the month before. Neither side has an advantage, but let’s alter the balance of power in a way similar to an example put forward by Derrick Niederman and David Boyum in their book, What the Numbers Say.

Specifically, let’s see what happens if we assume that army QN can increase its artillery to 1,500 pieces, 3 times as many as army QT has? Read more »

“Gas stations at night can sometimes be weird places.”
…………………………………………………. —Ruchira Paul, 5/7/22

Gas Stations Can Sometimes Be Weird at Night: Circa 1958

While in HS I pumped gas at a station in town
owned by an amiable, but besotted old Italian guy
who sat in his desk-chair next to the register,
feet crossed upon a case of oil,
supine as the chair would allow,
head back, gazing at the ceiling’s tin tiles
through smoke of intermittent puffs
from the butt of a Chesterfield
daintily held between finger and thumb,
elbow on armrest, forearm plumb as a column,
smoke circling his bald head,
ears tuned to radio: opera
cranked up

Louie, lead tenor, belting bourbon-tinged arias
at full volume between drags,
warbling Puccini for all he was worth,
swathed in perfumes of grease and oil
in splendor on the stage of the Met,
gazing in glory at a full house
while I pumped gas, checked oil,
and ran squeegees across windshields
waiting for the night’s curtain to drop
to a chorus of imagined bravos
bellowed from the street
amongst deafening applause

…Yes, gas stations at night
can be weird sometimes—
and beautiful

…Me? I liked rock and roll
and sang with Elvis
in my car

…Louie and I?
We got along just fine

Jim Culleny
5/7/22

by Tim Sommers

In “Shower of Gold” by Donald Barthelme, Peterson, a sculptor who welds radiators together, applies to be on a TV show called Who Am I? – strictly for the money. In the ensuing interview, he asks the interviewer, Miss Arbor, what the show is about.

“‘Let me answer your question with another question,’ Miss Arbor said. ‘Mr. Peterson, are you absurd…’

“’I beg your pardon?’

“‘Do you encounter your existence as gratuitous? Do you feel de trop? Is there nausea?’

‘‘’I have enlarged liver,’ Peterson offered.’

“‘That’s excellent!’…Who Am I? tries, Mr. Peterson, to discover what people really are…Why have we been thrown here, and abandoned? …alone in a featureless, anonymous landscape, in fear and trembling and sickness unto death. God is dead. Nothingness everywhere. Dread. Estrangement. Finitude. Who Am I? approaches these problems in a root radical way.’”

“‘On television?’”

“Most people feel on occasion that life is absurd, and some feel it vividly and continually,” writes Thomas Nagel.

What does “absurd” mean? Various dictionaries say, unreasonable, inappropriate, incongruous, laughable; from the Latin “absurdus”, which literally means “out of tune”. Nagel says the absurd involves “a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.” “This is what you want. This is what you get,” as the song goes (“The Order of Death,” Public Image Ltd).

Here are Nagel’s examples of absurd events. “Someone gives a complicated speech in support of a motion that has already been passed; a notorious criminal is made president of a major philanthropic foundation [or the United States]; …as you are being knighted, your pants fall down.”

But it’s one thing to say that particular events in our lives are absurd, it’s another to say, as Nagel and Camus (among others) do, that life on the whole, life overall, is absurd. Read more »

by Nicola Sayers

I regret not having children younger. Like, much younger. I was thirty-six when my first child, now four, was born; thirty-eight when my second was born. I wish I had done it when I was in my early twenties. This is an unpopular perspective. I know this because when I’ve raised this feeling with friends, many of whom had children similarly late in life, I’ve been met with a strong resistance. It’s not just that they don’t share my feelings, that their experience of having children later in life is different to mine, it’s that they somehow mind me feeling the way that I do. They think that I am wrong – mistaken – to feel this way. It upsets them. 

But just think of all the life experiences you’ve been able to have, they say. But you weren’t with Jarad yet, they say. But you wouldn’t have been ready, they say. 

There are, I think, several different beliefs, values, lending force to their pushback. The first is the notion that your own enjoyment, but also personal development, is paramount. Related is the presumption that you need to have many years to pursue that development with a singular focus, and, indeed, that having multiple long term relationships is an important part of that development – without which you might not be the relationship expert that those of us with that backlog of experience presumably are.  Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

The dandelion is thousands of miles from home. It has been in America learning about the world beyond and perhaps it wants to return. It has lived thousands of sad lives. Finally after 300 years, a seed clings to an old man’s jacket as he boards a plane, and happens to land in a small patch of dirt right by the Charles de Gaulle airport; the dandelion is welcomed home graciously, and they share the stories of what has happened in its absence. They notice little differences to him. He has mutated slightly; the increased sun in America has made his petals more yellow; the lawn mowers have made him shorter; the pesticides have made him stronger. They don’t talk to him about the sun or the lawn mowers or the pesticides, though. They talk about their shared home in France. 

Tu me manques. The French have a different construction to mean “I miss you,” which more directly translates to “you are missing from me.” it’s weaker in the sense that the I is doing nothing but feeling unfulfilled in the person’s absence. English implies an active agony; French implies a passive fractured self. I think before coming abroad that I would’ve said English is more accurate to the idea of missing someone. But now I’ve lived in Paris while the man I love lived in Tel Aviv and my family lived in Chicago and Denver and LA and I find the truth is somewhere in the middle, closer to the French side. I miss /you/ are missing from me. Day to day, it’s not active. Missing lies dormant in your body and makes the day a little darker, a little colder. It makes you feel guilty for letting the pain be so tiny, so unnoticeable. But it also rushes in and drowns you some days and you feel a longing for melodrama, which is never satisfied with a text or a phone call. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David Oates

Halfway through a pilgrimage, it’s a good thing to remember why you’re on it – where you hope it’s taking you. I’m following a plan to consider the strangely numerous churches of this little Portland neighborhood, just a half-mile square but crowded with varieties of religiosity.

And what is it I want? To walk towards more light. If I speak honestly, without pretended coolness . . . to breathe better, to see people more charitably. And see myself that way too. An essay is a privacy working itself into visibility. So is a walk in the neighborhood.

And so is churchgoing, where you see people in the embarrassing posture of spiritual aspiration. As if one day a week the bones of reality might show through, and prove to be something about love and justice. And possibly beauty.

Meanwhile Russians are blowing up Ukrainians on their shared Orthodox Easter. I can’t reason my way through it – it’s the human condition. So I walk and I observe, feeling for a pathway. Read more »

View through the diaphanous curtains in the bar at the Stafler Hotel in the village of Mauls, in South Tyrol.

by Pranab Bardhan

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

In the last two decades I have been to China many times, mostly for lectures and conferences primarily in Beijing and Shanghai. Of course, compared to what I saw in my first visit in 1989, China has undergone a dramatic economic transformation. The most dazzling of commonly visible changes are in infrastructure, highways, skyscrapers, bullet trains, airports, etc. There are parts of Shanghai now, say the eye-catchingly rich Pudong district, where once coming out of my hotel for a moment I was confused if I was really anywhere near the Shanghai city I had seen before. My academic colleagues tell me that the pay scales in top universities are now almost the same as in America, in order to attract top talent back to China. Chinese airports and high-speed trains are certainly more advanced than the ones you see in most American cities. My Chinese students in Berkeley have often told me that in application of digital technology in daily life (particularly in retail trade and local transportation and communication) they are struck by how backward the US is compared to China.

I remember going to a conference in Beijing at the turn of this century, along with several other international economists which included Thomas Piketty (now of rock star-like fame for his work on inequality). We arrived at Peking University the day before. In the afternoon Thomas and his then wife, Nancy, went out for a walk in the streets holding between them the hands of their 3 little daughters. All the Chinese pedestrians stopped and were gawking at the extremely unusual sight of a family with 3 children in a country then with one-child policy. Read more »

by Charlie Huenemann

Liberalism has been so successful in promoting a wide range of different ideas that its own name has gotten pretty murky. Many people think it means supporting a welfare state, championing the voices of people usually pushed to the side, and generally showing sympathy for anyone or anything that can’t defend itself. Other people think it means being a stupid hippie crybaby. Still others lump liberalism together with belonging to a specific political party, and others argue it’s just another word for capitalism. But the classic meaning is that a liberal tries to establish a social order that gives people the freedom to live however they think best without getting in each other’s way. Fundamentally, it is the defense of pluralism, or the broad toleration of different visions of what’s good. It’s this sense of liberalism that I think we shouldn’t give up on just yet.

A recent blogpost by philosopher Liam Kofi Bright explains why he isn’t a liberal. (And a similarly forceful critique is offered by Christopher Horner here on 3QD.) Bright argues that humans just can’t maintain a sharp distinction between what’s private and what’s public: our own visions of the good life inevitably will pollute our politics (and so pluralism is unstable). Second, and relatedly, he argues the very idea is incoherent, and a governing institution necessarily shutters some visions of a human life as no longer open for business. He also argues that liberalism historically has been the vision advanced by white plutocrats, and it carries their worldview in its DNA, particularly under the banners of private property and rapacious capitalism.  Read more »

by David J. Lobina

What I really mean, of course, is what The Language of Thought (LoT, postea) is like; after all, in previous entries of this series on the relationship between language and thought, I have stated what the LoT is supposed to be, and thus, that can hardly still be an issue this late in the day – if anything, the question now is not what the LoT is, but what’s in it. In order to approach the latter question, we can do with a reminder on the former.

Starting from two reasonable, but by no account, universally accepted, assumptions about human cognition – namely, that much of cognition involves mental representations (possibly symbolic representations) as well as computational operations over these representations (in philosophy, these two assumptions are known as the representational and computational theories of mind, respectively) – one of the most striking features of the kind of thinking we conduct on a daily basis is how flexible it is. What I have in mind by this is the ability to combine information from different modalities (aural, visual, etc.) into a single representation, the result a thought, a decision, or what have you.

Such cognitive flexibility has often been taken as suggesting that the merging of different kinds of information must take place in a representational system that is in fact amodal – that is, a common code composed of, not words, pictures, or sounds, but abstract concepts, the mental particulars I have claimed in this series subsume most of cognition. And just like the words of a natural language, mental concepts can combine with each other into ever more complex representations (sometimes called conceptions), thereby explaining the richness of human thought – and, in turn, accounting for the “language” in the language of thought. Read more »

.
“I read the news today, oh boy!”
..

The Protocols of Cause

Grotesques are at the door
we cook in our own juices thinking
we’re immune from fire and ice
thinking we still have time to burn
we can’t imagine we’ll be stewed in our own vices
because we have
excuses

But the protocols of Cause are not things
bought-off by tepid promises
or rueful tears, or sloths’ intent,
or measures we serially apply in thinnest
slices

Now the time has come,
come and brought Effect in jackboots
with spit and spurs and winds
as merciless as God Capital and
ISIS.
..
Jim Culleny
4/30/22

by Mary Hrovat

Twitter is toxic, suggests autocomplete; Twitter is an echo chamber, or at best a waste of time. Twitter is a hotbed of political factionalism. Twitter can be a frightening place for people who are harassed or threatened, and it may become more so when a recently announced takeover is complete. The bullying and misinformation and political threat are all real, and they’ve been central to recent discussions about the takeover. But Twitter is a big place, and some of us are there mainly for things we love. Birds, for example, and poems.

I joined Twitter mainly because I wanted to meet other writers and promote my writing. I thought it might allow me to network in a relatively painless way, by asynchronous remote contact, the perfect method for an introvert. I followed other writers and also editors that I thought I might want to pitch or submit my work to someday. I also thought of Twitter as a way to keep up with what’s going on in the world, opinion as well as hard news, so I followed political news outlets and various pundits. I followed news sources on topics I wrote about. I followed with an eye to utility. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Commuter Composition, Boston, 2022.

Digital Photograph.