by David J. Lobina

You are waiting for Helen, and as she comes out of the underground, she blurts out, before saying hello or embracing you, as is her custom, the following sentence:

I decided to write to him on a boat

Yes, good idea, you say, followed by wait, what? what do you mean? and are you sure?! You are not being flippant, and you know full well who Helen is intending to write to, though you may be uncertain about what she might write; it is just that you find the sentence unclear. Or as a linguist would put it, the sentence is ambiguous, for it can mean two different things, depending on the intended meaning.

Helen may have taken the decision to write to the mysterious man while she was on a boat (perhaps she has just been on a boat trip) or she may have decided that she will do the writing while she’s on a boat (perhaps she’s planning a boat trip).

The ambiguity is syntactic in nature, as it is a matter of whether the phrase on the boat modifies the verb to decide or the verb to write – that is, it depends on the way in which these words and phrases relate to each other within the sentence. Linguists often use so-called syntactic trees to explicitly outline the structure of sentences, but we can make do with brackets here, as shown below (I’ll let you work out which intended meaning is which; I may or may not have changed the order in which I have described the possible meanings in order to confuse, though).

I decided to [write to him [on a boat]]

I [decided to write to him [on a boat]]

This phenomenon is rarely if ever noticed in conversation – no-one but a linguist would ever say to an interlocutor such a thing as I’m sorry, but that sentence you have just uttered is syntactically ambiguous, what do you mean exactly? This is because the overall context in which conversations take place usually helps hearers (and indeed readers) work out what the speaker/writer actually meant. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Kaamdani, Approaching Santiago, Chile, 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Brooks Riley

A view of Helsinki, Finland from an aircraft just before landing at the airport there. Photo taken on February 3, 2022.

by Tamuira Reid

The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies. In fact, in New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. If you’re white, you go right to the back of the line. —Donald Trump, January 2022

*In Memory of Neema J. (1945- 2020)

One
Neema could sing. Really sing. Thick songs with smooth edges, full of blood memory and knowing. I pressed my ear against the floorboards of our new apartment, the one we would shelter in during the height of a pandemic we didn’t know was coming. In-between moving boxes and piles of books, I lay listening, pressing my palms flat to the ground. The steam pipes rattling alive with each husky note.

Neema was also crazy, people in the building would tell me, in hushed, apologetic tones. “Not right in the head.” “Not all there.” “Gone.”

“Dementia,” the Super said flatly, after I called him in the middle of the night, called about the smell of something burning beneath me, one floor down. The smell of a slow burn, a deep burn. A castiron skillet left unattended for hours burn. Neema’s mind had become a slippery slope where important details often fell to the wayside.

Singing never left her, even as her mind closed shop. Songs took root like trees in her belly.

I learned if I turned the lights off, I could hear her better. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

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

From the gatherings at Ashis Nandy’s home, and particularly from my numerous discussions with him I learned to think a bit more carefully about three major social concerns in India.

One was that whenever we economists faced a socio-economic problem that the standard processes of the private market forces did not resolve justly or efficiently, our immediate recourse was the state. We, of course, knew how inept or corrupt the state machinery often was. But the Gandhian in Ashis pointed to many problems where even the best-intentioned or efficient state is inherently incapable of solving. Take the shameful dowry problem in Indian marriage markets. The Indian state tried to solve it by the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961. But the problem is rampant to this day. One needs social movements and community-level reforms in norms and behavior, more than state legislation, to make a dent in this enormous social problem. In such debates I have, however, argued that while the state is not sufficient, isn’t it often necessary for social change? A law enacted by the state after a process of public deliberation can act as a guiding or catalytic or coordinating force for dispersed social movements. In the US the civil rights movement acted in unison with some landmark federal laws (Civil Rights Acts) in bringing about major (as yet unfinished) social changes.

Second, I always knew that caste was important in Indian society and polity, but I used to think that in leftist areas like Bengal class had significantly overshadowed caste. Talking to the sociologists in the group (including André Beteille, a consummate Bengali with a French father) I realized how limited this perception about Bengal was. Over time I came to understand that the cultural dominance of upper castes in Bengal is so totally hegemonic that it creates the illusion that caste is less important there. Read more »

by Emrys Westacott

The philosopher Theodore Adorno, probably with activities such as reading serious literature and listening to classical music in mind, famously said about himself:

I have no hobby. Not that I am the kind of workaholic who is incapable of doing anything with his free time but applying himself industriously to the required task. But as far as my activities beyond the bounds of my recognized profession are concerned, I take them all, without exception, very seriously.

Adorno in fact describes hobbies as preoccupations that one has “become mindlessly infatuated with in order to kill time.” Many people who engage in some pursuit avidly yet non-professionally might not share Adorno’s condescending attitude towards hobbies, but they often view what they do with something like the same seriousness. Hence they are more likely to describe themselves as “amateur” rather than “recreational” astronomers, geologists, ornithologists, musicians, arists, runners, swimmers, etc.. Mere recreations aim at little more than enjoyment. The very word suggests that the activity is not too demanding and the attitude towards it is fairly relaxed. But the serious amateur seeks or hopes for something more: to win prizes, gain glory, make a contribution to some field, or at least achieve a significant level of accomplishment. Read more »

“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
                    –Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman

Jazzman Said

I don’t think
I ever was a child

Was I a child?
I don’t think—

If I ever was a child
I’d know.  …..I don’t.

I don’t even know, jazzman said,
if a child ever was

Child, jazzman said,
I don’t just think,
I play jazz, man.

by Dick Edelstein

Namwali Serpell’s article in the New York Review of Books about the life of Sun Ra was aggregated here in 3 Quarks Daily in July 2020. It was a real treat to read it, and it led me to a chain of memories about Sun Ra and his Solar Arkestra. In the early 1970s, on a visit to Seattle, where I had gone to high school and lived during my early adult years, a spacey hippie girl I barely knew stopped me on the street and presented me with a copy of The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, saying that I was just the person who would appreciate it. She was right. I was thrilled to make the acquaintance of Sun Ra and his Arkestra and of ESP Records, the small, cultish record company that had produced the LP. Later, in the mid-1970s, I crossed the Bay Bridge from Oakland to see Sun Ra’s band live at Minnie’s, a small San Francisco club on Fillmore Street, where the bandleader managed to pack in his entire Arkestra along with five or six dancers.

Sun Ra was a bandleader, composer, arranger and keyboard player who led an ensemble of crack musicians called the Solar Arkestra that played avant-garde jazz with great verve and precision. Their performances often featured dancers, chants and movement, and hip arrangements of jazz standards as well as theatrical pieces by Sun Ra based on his own philosophy, which was weird. He claimed that he had had a visionary experience which had a major quasi-religious influence on him and led to a lot of mumbo-jumbo about outer space.

You never knew what the Sun Ra Arkestra were going to play from their extensive and highly varied repertoire. They were masters of several entirely different styles, any of which might appear at any time. Even though I had been a fan of electronic music from an early age and had experimented with the early Buchla and other synthesizers, and even though Sun Ra was adept at synthesizer keyboard work, playing in his own highly original style, I listened patiently to his spacey keyboard numbers while eagerly anticipating the excitement I would feel when he regaled us with one of his ultra-hip arrangements of jazz standards that the band played with taut precision, usually in a post-bop style. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

This was supposed to be a fun and light-hearted post, filled with reflections on nature and shared spaces that had occurred to me while blissfully snowshoeing in an idyllic Canadian winter. Then a convoy of Brownshirts invaded my country’s capital and entrenched themselves in a lawless occupation, demanding the dissolution of our democratically elected government and the repeal of necessary public health measures. I tried to swear off writing about contemporary American politics last year, to safeguard my own happiness and mental health. But now that those American politics have, like the effluvia of an overfull septic tank, seeped and swelled up to my doorstep, I have to write about them again. I am not happy about this.

A primer for those who don’t follow Canadian politics (which is to say, almost everyone): a convoy of truckers and hangers-on (figuratively; hanging on to a truck crossing the Canadian prairies in January requires more commitment than any movement can muster) headed out from Alberta last week, aiming to install themselves in front of Parliament in Ottawa, in order to protest vaccination mandates for truckers entering Canada and the United States. 90% of Canadian truckers are already vaccinated, and most do not support this movement. Even if Canada lifted its vaccine mandate, unvaccinated truckers would still be barred from entering the US. It gets stupider. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Bey Unvaan. Anza-Borrego Desert Park, Calfornia, 2017.

Digital photograph.

by Joseph Shieber

One of the most famous philosophical arguments is Pascal’s Wager, an attempt by the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal to provide ammunition for religious believers in their struggles against nonbelief.

The Wager works like this. First, there are two possible states of affairs that you’re to consider: either God exists or God doesn’t exist. Second, there are two possible attitudes you could adopt with respect to God’s existence: either you believe that God exists or you don’t believe that God exists (you either actively believe that God doesn’t exist or you withhold belief in God’s existence.

This gives us the following possible combinations, with their resultant outcomes:

1. You believe & God exists: eternal bliss in heaven
2. You believe & God doesn’t exist: one false belief
3. You don’t believe & God doesn’t exist: one true belief (at best)
4. You don’t believe & God exists: eternal torment in hell

This way of setting out the case for belief vs. nonbelief does not do the nonbeliever any favors. 

If you don’t believe, the optimal result would be that God doesn’t exist. Then you would have one more true belief than the rubes who falsely believe (assuming of course that you actively disbelieve, rather than merely withholding belief in God’s existence). The other possibility for non-believers, however, is truly horrible. If you don’t believe and God DOES exist, then you are damned to an eternity of suffering in hell.

Contrast this with the situation for believers. The worst case for them is that they believe, but God doesn’t exist. Still not so bad! Just one additional false belief! If, however, God DOES exist, then the believer can look forward to a reward of eternal life in heaven.

Now, there are a variety of ways to object to the set-up of the Wager. Read more »

by Brooks Riley