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.

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

The election of 2016 represented a new salvo in the American culture wars. Trump’s campaign began with an incendiary speech against immigration from Central and South America, intended to fire up the far-right wing of the GOP. His victory rested in part on a backlash against Secretary Hillary Rodham-Clinton, the center-right Democratic candidate. Trump spent his one term in office stoking the culture wars to new heights, spinning up his base at the expense of any sense of national unity across political lines. Even the still ongoing global pandemic became fodder for the supposedly existential struggle being waged by a “beleaguered” white evangelical Christian minority. Most people point to the Clinton era as the original source of these culture wars. Newt Gingrich and other far-right conservative politicians supported the Ken Starr investigation into President Bill Clinton’s personal history, eventually resulting in a time and money wasting impeachment. This was also the era of the rise of right-wing media, starting with toxic radio host Rush Limbaugh. Although the tone and themes of the modern culture war have some origins here, the concept goes back much further. Here I want to examine some of that history.

It seems obvious, but not everyone agrees on what we mean by culture. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to a definition of culture as laid down by Clifford Geertz. According to Nasurllah Mambrol, Geertz called culture a “construable sign” and a “context… within which [social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes] can be intelligibly… described.” In the modern world, the nation-state became a primary organizing principle for much of our cultural life. Read more »

Black vultures in the parking lot of the building next to my hotel in Houston, Texas, last week.

by Maniza Naqvi

I find Sue Hubbard’s writings to be an invitation to feel sorrowful. And therefore a beckoning towards a search for beauty, an attempt at forgiveness and redemption and reckoning; a belief in the possibility of joy.

Swimming to Albania, Sue Hubbard most recent and fourth collection of poem’s reveals once again, the poet’s third and internal eye, which searches and sifts through cold water and cinder to find the source and alchemy, the gift to distill it all into words which reach right into her own and perhaps the reader’s soul. Her gift is to reach through her poems to possibilities and safe shores—where the view collapses all three, past, present and future; to the point that hope, sorrow, grief and memory—-become one. Through this, past it and to it, it becomes deeply comforting. And this merging into one, is a balm as soothing as swimming, helping us to understand that we go on and on—in memory—and this then, this now is the future. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

June 4 early morning we took a taxi from Friendship Hotel to the Beijing airport, oblivious of the dreadful happenings in Tiananmen Square the previous night. I remember the taxi driver in his almost non-existent English tried to tell us that ‘something’ (he was not sure what) had happened in the night in the Square, traffic was not allowed to go in that direction. By the time we reached Shanghai, our hosts who came to receive us knew. Of course, they could not know it from radio or TV, as there was a news blackout. These were days before internet, but cross-country fax messages were still active. Beijing to Shanghai messages were blocked, but people in Beijing were sending fax messages to their friends and relatives in Los Angeles, and the latter were sending messages to Shanghai.

We were put up in the faculty guest house of Fudan University. It turned out that our living room in the guest house had the only short-wave radio in the whole campus. So for the next few days endless streams of students and young faculty came to our room to listen to the news on BBC or Voice of America. Even though we had to listen to the same grim news again and again, this gave me an opportunity to talk to many young people in the campus. Along with discussing the news, I also asked them about their life, their studies, their family backgrounds and so on. In response to my question about what they’d like to do after university, in general the ones who were more forthcoming or whose English was better would usually say that they’d like to work for a ‘joint venture’ (joint between a Chinese company and a foreign multi-national company). I noticed that these students had often adopted English first names like Max or Susan to introduce themselves, I presume just to make things easier for the foreigners–I think the same was probably true for Justin Lin in Beijing. (In recent years I have noticed a big change in the reverse direction: my friends in China who used to send me email earlier with their Chinese names in Romanized letters, now almost always use only Chinese characters. So when I receive an email from China it takes a bit of time for me to know who the email is from, without reading the text of the message which is mercifully still in English). Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The argument in brief:

1. Romantic love hijacks our desires and practical reasoning

2. If your desires and practical reasoning are hijacked your decisions aren’t authentically your own

3. If there were something that would prevent you from falling in love (a ‘vaccine’), it would prevent this hijacking

Therefore,
4. If there were a vaccine against romantic love, you should take it

I. The Case Against Romantic Love

First, I do not deny that being in romantic love feels great. But I do deny that this answers the question of whether being in love is a good thing. After all, heroin feels great, but that doesn’t make it good for us.

Romantic love – and note that I am talking throughout about the crazy euphoric kind of love here, not the boring companionable kind – is exactly like being on drugs because it is. It operates by hijacking our emotions, desires, and practical reasoning at the neurochemical level by manipulating our dopamine and endorphin systems (valuation and pleasure). Love is a cognitive distortion field that makes us gloss over particular people’s flaws and want to refocus our lives around them. The term ‘endorphin’ is short for endogenous morphine. It binds to the same opiate receptors as heroin. We suffer literal drug withdrawal symptoms when separated from the object of our love. Read more »