Captive of the Narrative

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Story Time Tuesday Fun - DC Public LibraryThe wealthy and powerful have always used the narrative to their advantage. The narrative defines them as superior in some way, and thus deserving of their power and wealth. In ancient times, they might be descended from the Gods, or at least favored by them or otherwise connected to them, perhaps through special communicative powers that granted them insights into the will of the Gods or God. In modern capitalist societies, that narrative promotes a fantasy of merit. You are rich and/or powerful because you are better. You are more civilized, better educated, more intelligent, or blessed with an exceptional work ethic. These narratives cast wealth and/or power as not only justifiable, but deserved.

The poor and exploited have always had the narrative used against them. The narrative defines them as inferior in some way, and thus deserving of their poverty and exploitation. In ancient times, they were conscripted by the Gods to serve the will of the Gods’ descendant, favored, and prophets. The poor serving the wealthy and/or powerful was the will of the Gods or God, and could extend into the afterlife. In modern capitalist societies, the narrative promotes a fantasy of the non-meritorious. You are poor and/or exploited because you are inferior. You are uncivilized, uneducated, stupid, or lazy. These narratives cast poverty and/or exploitation as not only justifiable, but deserved.

The middle class cannot use the narrative to their advantage to the degree that the wealthy and powerful do. The middle class can only use the narrative to modestly justify its modest advantages. The narrative does not demonize the middle class the way it does the poor and exploited. It does not cast them as savages, morons, or parasites. Instead, it frames the middle class as the laudable backbone of the nation, casting a moral sheen over them. This is consolation for the narrative subjecting the middle class to a volatile message of fear and hope. If you work really hard, and get a little lucky, maybe you’ll become wealthy. But never forget: while things are good enough for now, they are not great, and if you fuck up, you will be punished. For the middle class, the narrative is not just carrots and not just sticks. It is both, carrots and sticks. With a demon authoring half the pages, and an angel authoring the rest, the narrative is a see-saw that repeatedly raises them with promises of a bright future and drops them down to the edge of the precipice, while slathering them with a thin coating of goodness. Read more »

Garden of Earthly Delights: And Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

1.

Standing before Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights in the Prado is an act of surrender. Eyes are consumed by details: naked bodies cavorting in crystalline ponds, human-sized strawberries and a multitude of dripping cherries. There are birds devouring humans, whilst cities are collapsing into flames at the far edge of vision. Each figure is rendered with miniature precision, yet together they overwhelm, producing an excess that resists containment.

Bosch offers no single story; the painting’s power lies in its refusal to be reduced. It is “too much”—and therein lies its meaning. I was not surprised, therefore, to find details from the painting on the cover of Becca Rothfeld’s 2024 book All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. I had heard so much about this book before finally picking up a copy. Offering a strong critique of our contemporary aesthetics of minimalism, I thought it was a perfect book to pack for my summer of writing. First, working on a novel manuscript at two writers’ residencies, one in Vermont and the next in Virginia, I then made my way to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and then to Bread Loaf. It was two-and-a-half months living out of a small suitcase with that one book along for the ride– in hardcover, of course.

From Marie Kondo’s call for us to “take out the trash” –where trash is defined as anything we are not currently using and enjoying– to the multi-million-dollar mindfulness industry, which similarly sells ways for us to de-clutter, Rothfeld’s book asks us to consider that less is not always more.

Sure, sometimes it is.

Especially for Americans whose lives do so often seem to be spinning out of control, not least of all because of all the stuff we endlessly buy and throw away, by all the choices we have, and how these endless choices seem to define who we are. Maybe for people constantly loading up at Costco and traveling overseas several times a year, with households with so many moving parts, a car per person, Kondo’s style of clean consumerism can feel like a relief, of sorts. I get it. Read more »

Some Hybrid Remarks on Man-Machine Collaboration

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

When ChatGPT was released late in November of 2022 my immediate response was, “meh.” But then I decided that I needed to check it out, if only out of curiosity. Within an hour or so my reaction went from “meh” to “hot damn!” I put it through its paces in various small ways before deciding to give it a whirl on a task I understood well, interpreting a text. In this case I chose a film, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I published the result here in 3QD: Conversing with ChatGPT about Jaws, Mimetic Desire, and Sacrifice (Dec. 5, 2022).

I then dove in with both feet. For about a year or so I was mostly interested in observing ChatGPT’s behavior. In time I began using it as an assistant in my own work, even as a collaborator. I started working with Anthropic’s Claude in November of 2024. Starting in December I did a series of posts in which I had Claude discuss photos I uploaded. At the same time integrating it into my general intellectual workflow along with ChaGPT.

In March of this year I began working on a somewhat speculative book on the long-term prospects of AI. Current working title: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. I have been making extensive use of both Claude and ChatGPT in developing the book. I’ve used them for general research, for summarizing some of my scholarly research and evaluating it for use in the book, for working on the overall structure of the book, and more generally for things and stuff. The purpose of this article is to give you a glimpse into that work.

First comes three sections of preliminary materials. The fourth section is a short essay that ChatGPT wrote: Beyond the Human/AI Divide. I conclude with some questions about just who or what wrote that essay.

Read more »

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Between An Artist And GPT

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

Avital Meshi, a performance artist who uses AI in her work, stands with herright arm raised to show an electronic device strapped on her right forearm. She has her head slightly cocked, her long blonde hair falling over her right shoulder. She is not smiling as she looks straight into the camera. The background is black, so her upper body is clearly outlined.
Avital Meshi wearing the small computer and phone device that she uses to communicate with “GPT.” Photo courtesy of Avital Meshi.

Avital Meshi says, “I don’t want to use it, I want to be it” “It” is generative AI, and Meshi is a performance artist and a PhD student at the University of California, Davis. In today’s fraught and conflicted world of artificial intelligence with its loud corporate hype and much anxious skepticism among onlookers, she’s a sojourner whose dived deeply and personally into the mess of generative AI. She’s attached ChatGPT to her arm and lets it speak through the Airpod in her left ear. She admits that she’s a “cyborg.”

Meshi visited Duke University in early September to perform “GPT-Me.” I took part in one of her performances and had dinner with her and a handful of faculty members from departments in art and engineering. Two performances made very long days for her—the one I attended was scheduled from noon to 8:00 pm. Participants came and went as they wished; I stayed about an hour. For the performances, which she has done several times, Meshi invites participants to talk with her “self” sans GPT or with her GPT-connected “self”; participants can choose to talk about anything they wish. When she adopts her GPT-Me self, she gives voice to the AI. “In essence, I speak GPT,” she said. “Rather than speaking what spontaneously comes to my mind, I say what GPT whispers to me. I become GPT’s body, and my intelligence becomes artificial.”

In effect, Meshi serves as a medium, and the performance itself resembles a séance—a likeness that she particularly emphasized in a “durational performance” at CURRENTS 2025 Art & Technology Festival in Santa Fe earlier this year. Read more »

Abnegation of Powers – Part 3

Posted on by Charles Siegel

by Charles Siegel

In the first part of this depressing column, I looked at Congress’ spineless surrender of its power to Trump’s turbocharged executive. In the second part, I tried to set out how that same executive has waged war on the judicial branch, and has rapidly transformed the Department of Justice into its private law firm. Perhaps most disheartening in this sorry saga, however, is how obliging the Supreme Court has been in the steady weakening of the “third branch.” Our highest court — the ultimate symbol of the judicial branch and the temple of its authority — seems perfectly content to let Trump steadily erode its power. In some ways, the Court is actively complicit in Trump’s war.

It is hard to comprehend that we are less than eight months into this administration, such has been the sheer ferocity and speed of Trump’s actions. Blizzards of executive orders, arbitrary firings, wholesale liquidations of entire agencies, mass deportations, ICE abductions, the military in our streets. All of this has resulted in hundreds of lawsuits, many of which (perhaps even most) are seeking relief on an emergency basis. The lower courts have done their level best to deal with the onslaught. But when cases have come to SCOTUS, as inevitably some would, the Court has acted in singularly unhelpful ways.

The Court has sided with Trump and his Department of Justice — and yes, that’s the only way DOJ can be described these days – in the vast majority of cases. The only issue of any importance on which Trump has lost has been the due process rights of persons detained under the Alien Enemies Act, who are about to be deported. There, the Court ruled that they are entitled to “notice …within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief.” Even then, this decision was enormously helpful to Trump’s agenda, as discussed below.  Beyond that, the Court has largely deferred to the executive. Read more »

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Hard to Know

Posted on by Sherman Clark

by Sherman J. Clark

In a recent essay, Don’t Be Cruel, I argued that looking away from cruelty—mass incarceration was my example—comes at a cost. The blindness and mental blurriness we cultivate to avoid discomfort also stunts us. Avoidance may feel like self-protection, but it leaves us less able to flourish. It is hard to find our way in the world when we are self-blinded. Facing hard truths, including cruelties in which we are indirectly complicit, can be a form of ethical weight training—bringing not just sight and insight but ethical strength.

But facing the truth is easier said than done. Because the truth is that our world is rife with horrors: war, injustice, exploitation, racism, rape. Not to mention the corruption, cruelty, and would-be fascism looming in our national life. To confront all this at once would crush us. We recoil not because we are heartless but because we know that knowing more will hurt. Psychologists describe what happens when we don’t avert our eyes. Studies of “compassion fatigue” show how repeated exposure to others’ pain can leave us depleted, even disoriented. Healthcare workers, legal advocates, teachers—those who must confront suffering daily—describe the exhaustion that follows. The problem is not lack of care but its weight: to feel too much, too often, wears down our capacity to respond. We simply cannot see all of it all the time.

Yet this necessity does not remove the cost. The very act of triage—choosing what to attend to and what to ignore—shapes us. We become people who can bear certain kinds of truth and not others. Sometimes that protective instinct is wise; no one can survive without rest. But sometimes it dulls into habit, and habit into incapacity. We find ourselves avoiding not just unbearable horrors but also discomforts we might well endure—and from which we might grow. We are caught in a bind. On one side: cultivated ignorance that seems to let us glide through life but costs us our growth. On the other: overload, the crushing weight of truths too terrible to bear. How do we remain open to what we must know without being undone by what we see?

The difficulty is not only volume. Certain kinds of knowing carry their own dangers. True knowing requires not just information but empathy. Facing cruelty in a way that conduces to ethical growth means not just memorizing incarceration statistics but recognizing human suffering. And that kind of knowing destabilizes us in subtle ways.

To enter another’s world is to blur the edges of our own. Psychologists call this “self-other overlap”: the merging of boundaries when we take another’s perspective seriously. Sometimes this deepens connection; but it can leave us disoriented. Empathy can also distort. We feel more readily for those who are near, familiar, or attractive. One vivid case moves us more than anonymous thousands. This is not a flaw in our compassion so much as a feature of it—but it means empathy, untethered, can mislead. We may confuse emotional resonance with clarity, or feel righteous for “feeling the pain” without addressing its source.

So the problem is not just quantity but quality. Some ways of knowing, even in small doses, can unsettle us or send us astray. Empathy is indispensable to our humanity, but it is also risky. We need not only courage to face what is hard to know, but discernment about how we face it. Read more »

How Much of Science is Secret?

Posted on by David Kordahl

Secrecy has long been understood as a danger to democracy—and as antithetical to science. But how much of scientific knowledge is already hidden?

by David Kordahl

Melencolia I (Albrecht Dürer, 1514)

“Our society is sequestering knowledge more extensively, rapidly, and thoroughly than any before it in history,” writes physics Nobelist Robert Laughlin in his opinionated 2008 tract The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind. “Indeed, the Information Age should probably be called the Age of Amnesia because it has meant, in practice, a steep decline in public accessibility of important information.”

Before reading Laughlin’s book, I had not been aware of Howard Morland, whose 1979 article “The H-Bomb Secret” provides a dramatic case in point. The article begins directly: “What you are about to learn is a secret—a secret that the United States and four other nations, the makers of hydrogen weapons, have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect.” The next sentence reveals why the U.S. government sought an injunction to halt publication. “The secret is in the coupling mechanism that enables an ordinary fission bomb—the kind that destroyed Hiroshima—to trigger the far deadlier energy of hydrogen fusion.”

“The H-Bomb Secret” can be easily accessed on the Internet. It contains information about the Teller-Ulam design that remains classified to this day, and was written as an explicit challenge to the regime ushered in by the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which decreed nuclear knowledge to be “born secret,” automatically restricted by virtue of its subject matter. Morland’s article presented an edge case, since its sources were public, ranging from encyclopedias to government press releases. United States vs. Progressive, Inc., the suit to stop its publication, was eventually dropped. In pretrial hearings, government lawyers accidentally revealed additional details about the bomb. In a comedy of errors, other activists were drawn to the cause, which ultimately led government litigators to dismiss their own case.

United States vs. Progressive, Inc. is celebrated as a test of the limits of the First Amendment, but it also serves as a parable about scientific secrecy. Howard Morland was not himself a scientist (his science training consisted of five undergraduate elective courses), but his article contains more concrete information about how H-bombs work than anything I learned while getting a doctorate in physics (and, yes, I did once take a nuclear physics course).

The larger question in play here is that of how much scientific knowledge is freely available, vs. how much powerful actors have been able to deliberately obscure. Read more »

Not Selves, but Not Nothing

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re living at a time when the glorification of independence and individualism is harming the world and others in it, as well as leading to an epidemic of loneliness. According to Jay Garfield, the root of suffering is in our self-alienation, and one symptom of our alienation is clinging to the notion that we are selves. “We are wired to misunderstand our own mode of existence,” he writes in his brief yet substantial 2022 book, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self.  

Garfield traces arguments against the existence of a self primarily through 7th century Indian Buddhist scholar Candrakīrti and 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, and explores where many other philosophers hit or miss the mark along the way. The book is a surprisingly accessible read about a complex topic with perhaps the exception of a couple more in-depth chapters that develop  arguments to further his conclusion: you don’t have a self, and that’s a good thing. 

Garfield starts with the idea of self from ancient India: the ātman is at the core of being. A distinct self feels necessary to understand our continuity of consciousness over time (diachronic identity) and our sense of identity at a single time (synchronic identity). A self gives us a way to explain our memory and allows for a sense of just retribution when we’re wronged. We feel a unity of self to the extent that it’s hard to imagine it’s not so. 

However, Garfield argues that feeling of having some manner of core self is an illusory cognitive construction. Hume claimed the idea isn’t merely false but gibberish, and Garfield calls it a “pernicious and incoherent delusion.” We cannot infer from a sense of self that there is a reality of self. Garfield asserts that, “We are nothing more than bundles of psychophysical processes–changing from moment to moment–who imagine ourselves to be more than that.” We are similar to the person we were yesterday and a decade ago because we’re causally related yet distinct. We share enough properties and social roles with ourselves to feel as if we’re the same over the years. That causal connectedness enables the memory of the past and anticipation of the future.  Read more »

Tuesday, September 9, 2025

Psychoanalysis 2.0

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

I began my psychiatric training in 1990, the year that marked the start of a program called the “Decade of the Brain.” This was a well-funded, high-profile initiative to promote neuroscience research, and it succeeded spectacularly. New imaging techniques, molecular insights, and psychopharmacological discoveries transformed psychiatry into a vibrant biomedical science. The program brought thousands of careers, including my own, into the neurosciences.

Despite its progress, the Decade of the Brain also widened an existing rift. This was the large gap between the psychoanalytic tradition and the biological sciences. The divide wasn’t new. Freud started with neurology but shifted to psychoanalysis when the brain sciences of his time couldn’t fully explain the complexities of the mind. For the first half of the 20th century, psychoanalysis was the main way to understand mental illness. Then, in the 1950s, new psychiatric drugs appeared: chlorpromazine for psychosis, lithium for mood disorders, and antidepressants for depression. For the first time, it seemed possible to treat mental illness by directly targeting the brain, rather than long-term therapy or institutional care.

By the time I was a resident, these diverging traditions had opened into a chasm. On one side was biological psychiatry, focused on neurotransmitters, neuroimaging, and cognitive-behavioral treatments, with outcomes that could be measured and tested. On the other side were psychoanalysis and its branches: attachment theory, object relations, and the investigation of unconscious conflicts through language, narrative, and symbolism. They had become separate languages, spoken within distinct professional communities, each wary of the other. There were occasional efforts at rapprochement, but little sustainable progress. By the end of the Decade of the Brain, reconciliation seemed almost impossible. I was fortunate to be in a training program that had a research track, allowing me to work in a lab, but I also had mentors who were distinguished analysts. It was like being in two different residencies.

Both have proven valuable over the years, but I never expected them to converge. However, today, circumstances appear to be shifting. A merging of neurobiology, computational neuroscience, and neuroimaging has created a new paradigm: active inference. For the first time, we can start to identify strong links between analytic models of the mind and biological models of the brain. Read more »

Jungle Music

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by David Winner

Kakum National Park, Ghana. Photo taken by author, no music.

The election of a black president in 2008 invoked a groundswell of rage among white American racists that led to Donald Trump’s first victory in 2016.

The rage was so intense, the MAGA storyline so compelling, that many white folks (along with increasing numbers of non-white folks) believed Trump’s false story that the election was stolen. Then January 6, and January 6 denialism joined Biden’s stolen election among the many false stories being told across the nation.

More and more of them started to circulate as the 2024 election approached. The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio was accused of barbecuing cats by J.D. Vance, Donald Trump and others. A blurry video from something called Red States News depicted black people (not necessarily Haitian), barbecuing, and cats with zero inference or evidence of any connection between these things.

Which brings me back to what seems like a more innocent time and a more innocent racist urban folk legend, variations of which appeared to be moving up the eastern seaboard during the early days of covid.

Spring 2020

I’m in Virginia in an Air B&B near my elderly father’s house waiting to test negative for covid in order to move in with him. After the test, I walk over to the house in which I grew up and ring the bell. I’ll talk to him from outside. My eyes tear. This is the longest I’ve gone without seeing him since my mother got really sick from Parkinson’s over a decade before.

He wants me to come inside, but I tell him that I can’t. But he is upset. He has hurt his foot and wants me to look at it. He just wants care, and I don’t have it in me to refuse him. Holding my breath to avoid breathing on him through my mask, I inspect his foot. We sit on the front porch, a locus of pre-dinner cocktails in the seventies and eighties that has fallen into disuse. Read more »

Monday, September 8, 2025

Confronting The Golem

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Reproduction of the Prague Golem.

In 16th century Prague, so the legend goes, the sage Rabbi Judah Loew, Talmudist, philosopher, mystic, mathematician, and astronomer, searching desperately for a way to protect his community from violence, took a figure made of soil or clay, and, through sacred words, animated him. The product of his efforts, a Golem, served as an unflagging, inexhaustible bodyguard until, soulless and untethered as he was, he grew so powerful that he menaced the people he was charged to protect, and the Rabbi was forced to de-animate him.

The ancient Greeks had a similar myth, of Talos, a living statue made of bronze, either the last of a race of bronze men, or newly forged by the divine smith Hephaestus. When Zeus delivered Europa to Crete, he gave her Talos as a sentinel and defender. Three times a day, Talos would circle the island, throwing rocks at pirates or other intruders. Talos too perished when enchanted by the sorceress Madea, who tricked him into loosening a bolt on his ankle, thereby giving up his life’s blood.

In more modern times, the story of life from inanimate material is echoed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where her Creature has great strength, but suffers grievous emotional pain when in contact with humans and ultimately kills his creator’s family. It’s altogether possible that the next Creature, Talos, or Golem will be AI, as we humans are not good at satisfying our curiosity, nor in moderating our urge to control and dominate. For these (guilty) pleasures we often risk far more than we thought we would, and are left with the collateral damage.

So it is with the Trump Golem. He was animated for a purpose (a discontent with the status quo is a gross oversimplification, but will do) and is currently rampaging in a way that many did not anticipate. Trump I was gaudy and messy, but until January 6th (soon to be a major motion picture with a semi-fictional Horst Wessel figure) didn’t seem to be life-altering. Trump II, well, “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

That “war” has many fronts and many tools, but, for this essay, we are going to have to talk about money. Read more »

Shopping

Posted on by Richard Passov

by R. Passov

I went into a store the other day. An old man helped me pick out a pair of running shoes and, while doing so, thanked his friend for stopping by to ask how his health issue was coming along. The friend asked in such a way as to let it be known that the issue was something both fatal and not in a place that you would ever point to in public.

The old man who helped me to find the right running shoe, though infirm, had a doggedness about him. It wasn’t enough for me to say a pair fit comfortably. I had to demonstrate which meant jogging on a tired strip of astroturf set off against a far wall. I’m 67 years of age and not accustomed to running in front of an audience. And yet, I ran.

I ran in a store that had been frustrating to find. On a long street in a neighborhood that, once filled with small enterprises providing footholds to working class families dreaming of their next generation’s college graduations, looks like a stretched rubber band of mostly empty store fronts. Somewhere in that bland row of cheap, merchant glass is a hard-to-find half door under an awning shared with some other business not anywhere near retail running shoes.

You run on your toes, the old man said, as though it were the equivalent of saying that I’m not really a runner. And you pronate and the shoes you’re asking for are not the right shoes and your size is not an eleven but instead an 11.5. I ran in different pairs of shoes until he was satisfied.

As I was running, I felt a hard sadness that comes from knowing that shoe store will go the way of the old man, will be another loss in a long line and the old man knows this. He knows just as he’s dying of cancer, his brand of commerce is being strangled by Amazon. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Boy in an Apple Tree

Sun through leaves throws
shadows on his face as if
a dappled stallion,
alone in time, a tick,
a heartbeat, far out in time
elliptical and long as the
orbit of Uranus—
eighty-four of this boy’s
life-to-be in years to come

Heartbeat sustains him in a
capsule with companions in a
click of recall which contains him in a
thread of something through the raptures
of the changes of dominions that remains him
.
Nearby in our sky a star holds feet to fire
a blistering gold medallion in a system
that contains him
.

Jim Culleny
5/26/12; edited 8/30/25

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Sunday, September 7, 2025

Writing Is Not Thinking

Posted on by Kyle Munkittrick

by Kyle Munkittrick

What is this emoji doing? Is it writing?

There is an anti-AI meme going around claiming that “Writing is Thinking.”

Counterpoint: No, it’s not.

Before you accuse me of straw-manning, I want to be clear: “Writing is thinking” is not my phrasing. It is the headline for several articles and posts and is reinforced by those who repost it.

Paul Graham says Leslie Lamport stated it best:

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”

This is the one of two conclusions that follow from taking the statement “Writing is thinking” as metaphysically true. The other is the opposite. Thus:

  1. If you’re not writing, then you’re not thinking
  2. If you are writing, then you are thinking

Both of these seem obviously false. It’s possible to think without writing, otherwise Socrates was incapable of thought. It’s possible to write without thinking, as we have all witnessed far too often. Some of you may think that second scenario is being demonstrated by me right now.

Or are you not able to think that until you’ve written it?

There are all sorts of other weird conclusions this leads to. For example, it means no one is thinking when listening to a debate or during a seminar discussion or listening to a podcast. Strangely, it means you’re not thinking when you’re reading. Does anyone believe that? Does Paul Graham actually think that his Conversation With Tyler episode didn’t involve the act of thinking on his part, Tyler’s, or the audience?

Don’t be absurd, you say. Of course he doesn’t think that. Read more »

Heraclitus in the Glass: Why the Most Interesting Wines are Unruly

Posted on by Dwight Furrow

by Dwight Furrow

Wine tasting is a great seducer for those with an analytic cast of mind. No other beverage has attracted such elaborate taxonomies: geographical classifications, wine variety classifications, quality classifications, aroma wheels, mouthfeel wheels, and numerical scores. To taste wine, in this dominant model, is to decode—to fix a varietal essence, to pin down terroir as if it were a stable identity, to judge typicity (i.e. its conformity to a norm) as though it were the highest aesthetic ideal. The rhetoric of mastery in wine culture depends on this illusion of stability: Cabernet must show cassis and graphite, Riesling must taste of petrol and lime, terroir speaks in a singular tongue waiting to be translated.

But I think this way of representing wine is misleading. Wine is not a stable object to be deciphered but a field of shifting relations into which the taster steps (like Heraclitus’s river.) What if its aesthetic force lies not in measuring a wine against its ideal type but in staging tensions, oscillations, and fleeting harmonies that refuse to hold still?

The claim I will develop is that wine is not a fixed bundle of flavors but a dynamic system, always in motion, whose meaning arises through modulation—the way its elements shift and inflect one another; through differential relations—the contrasts that give each element its character; and through synthetic experience—the way these relations come together as a whole unfolding across time. To taste wine well is not to solve a puzzle, but to follow its movement as it reveals itself. Read more »

Friday, September 5, 2025

Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest

Posted on by Nils Peterson

by Nils Peterson

I thought to myself that one day I’ll have to write an essay entitled “Goodbye Dorothy Parker, Apologies Edgar Guest.” It would have as its epigraph a quotation from Flaubert in a letter to Louise Colet, “But wit is of little use in the arts. To inhibit enthusiasm and to discredit genius, that is about all. What a paltry occupation, being a critic…. Music, music, music is what we want! Turning to the rhythm, swaying to the syntax, descending further into the cellars of the heart.” Yes, “swaying to the syntax,” poetry and music swaying in a dance – lovers really. This morning I thought this might be the day.

Poetry used to be popular. People read it all the time. Many newspapers had a daily poem. My mother wrote poems in both Swedish and English that appeared in a Swedish-American newspaper. Edgar Guest’s 1916 collection “A Heap o’ Livin” sold more than a million copies. But then in 1922 came the catastrophe of “The Wasteland,” and “real” poetry became the possession of the elite. Consequently, it gradually disappeared from newspapers and other general publications.

The title of Guest’s book came from a line in the title poem – “it takes a heap o’ livin’/ To make a house a home.” Some wit wrote “It takes a heap o’ heaping to make a heap a heap.” Well yes, funny. Dorothy Parker wrote “I’d rather flunk my Wasserman test/Than read a poem by Edgar Guest.” Witty, yes. Funny, no. Think how that attitude wants to separate those of us who love “The Wasteland” from the rest of the world who love a different kind of poetry.

A friend told me this story about his father: “My dad [at] a discussion in the big room at the Minnesota Men’s Conference.… (Once my brother and I coaxed our dad to come up for three days….) Robert Bly was asked about the meaning of a line in one of his poems… as he frequently was. In this instance… My dad leaned forward to listen… And Robert said ‘I have no idea what that means.’ That sealed the deal for my dad. He would much rather read Edgar Guest than some poet that doesn’t know what he means.”

Yes, sometimes it really is hard to say what a line means. Sometimes you don’t quite know yourself. Sometimes it would take too long to explain. Sometimes the place is not the right place for explanation. So, I sympathize with Robert, but I sympathize with my friend’s dad too. Read more »

If We Finish Games, Can We Win Novels?

Posted on by Christopher Hall

by Christopher Hall

2007’s Bioshock stands as a touchstone for many on the by-now perennial, and admittedly somewhat tiresome, question of whether video games are or could be art. I remember the game for what one remembers most first-person-shooters for – the joy of slaughtering successive waves of digital monsters – but there is one moment in the game that stands out in a different way. (Spoilers ahead.)

As is typical in these sorts of games, you are given tasks, usually by a non-player character (NPC) of some sort, which you must complete in order to progress the game. The NPC – Altas – prefaces all of his requests to the player character (PC) – Jack – with the phrase “Would you kindly.” It turns out that Jack has been conditioned to do whatever he is told when a request is so phrased. In a distinctly postmodern-ish moment, the player is called upon to think of themselves in relation to the PC. They are not compelled in the same way Jack is, but absent quitting the game entirely, they have no other option but to continue. You can either do what you are assigned to do or abandon the system entirely (food for thought there). Add to this the overall setting of Bioshock: a dystopia initially created by an industrialist operating under a libertarian ideology recognisably derived from Ayn Rand. So the ultimate quest for social and economic freedom conceals instead brutal coercion. I am not silly enough to attempt a definition of aesthetic sensation, but the frisson this caused was enough to qualify in my mind.

Is Bioshock art? Could it be art? It is 20 years since Aaron Smuts asked “Are Video Games Art?” in Contemporary Aesthetics (responding to a 2000 article from Jack Kroll who firmly answered “no”), and 16 years since John Lanchester asked roughly a similar question (“Is It Art?”) in the London Review of Books. Smuts noted that there is already a tenuous distinction between art and sports:

Although we may say that a baseball pitcher has a beautiful arm or that a boxer is graceful, when judging sports like baseball, hockey, soccer, football, basketball and boxing, the competitors are not formally evaluated on aesthetic grounds. However, sports such as gymnastics, diving and ice skating are evaluated in large part by aesthetic criteria. One may manage to perform all the moves in a complicated gymnastics routine, but if it is accomplished in a feeble manner one will not get a perfect score….One might argue that such sports are so close to dance that they are plausible candidates to be called art forms.

Even if video games are essentially competitive, Smuts notes, just because that is the case does not render them “inimical” to art. If one enters a poem in a poetry contest and wins, one’s poem does not cease to be art. Read more »