Conversation

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by Philip Graham

Archipelago, the third novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, ranges among the Cycladic Islands of Greece, the coast of Croatia, and crosses the borders of various Balkan states until finally—temporarily?—settling in a small town in the Peloponesian peninsula. All this traveling echoes (and is echoed by) the inner journey of the unnamed (and yet named) narrator of Archipelago, a translator who, as the novel progresses, seems to allow her own self to be written, to be translated.

Archipelago is a heady read, deceptively quiet and yet rife with private risk-taking and minute transgressions. It’s a novel that sets its own pace and sets its own rules as the narrator, in the process of discovering herself, must also learn how to remember herself.

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Philip Graham: I have so much to say and ask about this beautifully-written house of mirrors that is Archipelago, your latest novel, that I don’t know where best to start. Perhaps the novel’s own beginning? The narrator, a translator of Greek literature on her way to a literary conference, has a brief but disturbing encounter with an aggressive man. A case of mistaken identity? She has no recollection of this man, but somehow she has become a character in his angry imagination. The possibility of being a “someone else,” seems to cling to her in different ways as the novel progresses.

Meanwhile, she decides to forego reading a novel—titled Occupation—before beginning to translate it, a new professional process for her. “I wanted to try translating something as I was coming to know it,” she says, in order to “tell a story before I knew its ending.” Her translating “blind” sets the stage for another thread in the novel, an acceptance of “unknowing” how her own story will move forward.

As she notes near the end of Archipelago, “the beginning is often many places at once.”

Natalie Bakopoulos: Thank you so much, Philip, for starting this conversation, and for these wonderful observations and connections. You’re absolutely right, I was indeed playing with the idea of “beginnings.” “Here in Greece,” the narrator says, “the rivers rarely have a single source: They spring from the mountains at several places.” I also wanted to think about the arbitrariness of origin and a way of thinking about belonging that wasn’t necessarily about “roots”—but instead rhizomes, as Edouard Glissant, and others, might say.

Joan Silber, in The Art of Time in Fiction, writes: “A story is already over before we hear it. That is how the teller knows what it means.” I really appreciate this sentiment, and I even echo it in the book, but I also think the actual telling of the story helps the teller to understand it, and that each telling, or translation, might privilege different things. I fact, I might say that in Archipelago, her narration is as much the story as any other elements of the work. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

In 2016, my then-wife and I took our one and three-year-old children from Los Angeles to Bali, Indonesia. It took 21 hours of flight time with one stop in Tokyo to refuel and another in Singapore to change planes – making for a roughly 26-hour journey with two kids in diapers. It is not the easiest way to begin a vacation.

My wife and I were seasoned travelers – both of us having lived abroad before meeting. Asia was no stranger to either of us, and in fact I had lived in both Bali and Singapore in my 20’s. There was a time in both our lives when the best flight was the cheapest one. When flying from Bangkok to Kathmandu for the first time with two buddies aboard Royal Nepal Airlines, we laughed about the used TV cart the flight attendants pushed through the aisle instead of the Boeing-issued ones – purposely included with the plane both for functionality and safety.

One British friend used to take Biman Airlines of Bangladesh back to London from Bangkok, sleeping on the floor of the Dhaka Airport in order to save the most money. Once on a budget flight from Bangkok to Udon Thani, there was so little leg room, I couldn’t sit forward and had to pivot to fit into the row.

It didn’t matter – it was part of the adventure and made for great stories.

Traveling with a one and three-year old across the world was an adventure in and of itself – and suddenly inconveniences were enemies and comforts our best friends. We needed any and every advantage we could get. It became clear to my wife and I that we had reached the age where reducing friction was worth a premium. We needed to rely on everything we couldn’t control going right.

After all, when something goes right, we often don’t notice or comment – but when it goes wrong, it becomes clear that “nothing” is really the hallmark of incredible accomplishment.

This is the bedrock success of Singapore Airlines. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

At the University of Toronto one winter term in the mid-1980s I took an undergraduate course on classical philology. The instructor was Hugh Mason, a British-born Marxist who once reproved me for wearing a white dress shirt to give a presentation, something he maintained “only a fascist” would have done in his day. (My own politico-sartorial instructions, meanwhile, were issued by The Clash, who cautioned strongly against a wardrobe featuring the colors blue and brown unless one were already “working for the clampdown”). The course was spent for the most part learning about celebrated pioneers of the study of Greek and Latin—among them Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, better known beyond the world of classical antiquity for his dispute with Nietzsche—; but there was also a unit on something called Proto-Indo-European.

PIE, as it is commonly abbreviated, is the hypothetical “mother” of the large, widespread family of tongues comprising Greek, Latin, English, French, and German, but also Russian, Farsi, Lithuanian, Albanian, and Hindi, among many others. Their linguistic ancestor can only be theorized, following the discoveries of British colonial philologists in 18th-century India who compared Sanskrit with Ancient Greek: because there are no written records of languages spoken longer ago than a few millennia.

A putative PIE vocabulary, we learned from Professor Mason, must thus be reconstructed by surveying the modern languages identified as cognate descendants of the earlier idiom for similarly sounding words with related meanings—such as, famously, μήτηρ/mater/mère/Mutter/mother—and using established laws of phonetic evolution to reverse-engineer as their forebear *méh₂tēr (the subscript stands for a particular quality of aspirate, while the asterisk indicates that the word is hypothetical). The PIE reconstruction I recall best from the course, however, and which had no doubt been chosen (or perhaps invented) to reflect the climatic conditions in which we were gathering, in Toronto in February, was *sneghweti: “It is snowing”.

The study of Proto-Indo-European has developed considerably over the past 40 years, since I was first introduced to the idea that winter day in Toronto, its evolution driven by significant technological advances, particularly in the fields of archeology and genetics. In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney gives an absorbing account of the latest attempts to identify and trace the speakers of Proto-Indo-European. Spinney, a science journalist, surveys archaeologists, geneticists, and linguists who are reconstructing not only the way those prehistoric peoples spoke, but also how they lived. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

The 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 »

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 »

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 »

At the Franz Josef Strauss International Airport in Munich.

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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 »

by Brooks Riley

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by David Winner

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 »

Uuriintuya Dagvasambuu (Mongolia). Woman in Ulaanbaatar: Dreams Carried by Wind, 2025.

Acrylic on canvas.

More here and  here.

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by Michael Liss

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 »