by Philip Graham

Margot Livesey’s The Boy in the Field is a mystery novel in the broadest sense of that literary term. Yes, the novel begins with the discovery of a crime, and the perpetrator remains at large for most of the narrative. Yet the “what happened next” of a standard mystery novel concentrates on the three siblings who came upon the victim lying in a field, the reverberations of that event on their young lives, and of the family they are a part of. “Mystery” can reside within all of us, to locate or evade, and that is the deeper reveal that Livesey hunts for in this wise and haunting book.

Philip Graham: In your novel, The Boy in the Field, Duncan makes an observation about his family: “During his brief period as a Boy Scout, he had learned that the compass has thirty-two points. Now he could say with confidence that each person in his family was heading toward a different one.” This insight of Duncan’s seems to be the basso ostinado of your novel’s structure: how do members of a family find their individual paths while still remaining a unit called a family?

Margot Livesey: What a great phrase: phrase basso ostinato. Years ago, I read a quotation by Katherine Mansfield, (from her diary, I think) musing about her great story “Prelude.” Even in the happiest of families, she claimed, every member is striving desperately to get free. In The Boy in the Field I hoped to show what is, in many respects, a happy family but one in which, as Duncan remarks, everyone is heading in a different direction. How far can they go, on their separate quests, without threatening the family? The father’s affair threatens it in one way; Duncan’s search for his birth mother in another. Matthew’s and Zoe’s quests are less immediately threatening but also carry them away from the family. Perhaps that’s why they all need Lily, Duncan’s almost perfect dog. Read more »

Florine Demosthene. Before The Decline, 2019. Collage on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by R. Passov

By the time my father left to do some time, everything of any value had been pawned. What remained were a few stale cigars which led to a serious vomiting fit, and an old Craftsman tool box. If anything entered our small flat, and if it wasn’t a cat or a dog, I’d drag that tool box out from the bottom of a closet.

Not long after my father went away, my paternal grandmother talked the manager of a gas station into giving me a job. For a dollar a day, every now and then I was sent for a tool. Once, a mechanic let me watch as he adjusted the valves on a running engine. The pushrods, he explained, sat on the lifters, one each for intake and exhaust valve. The rocker arms sat on the pushrods. With a valve cover off, the inner workings were exposed: Eight rocker arms, running in a precise rhythm, moving so fast they looked still. 

From experience I learned an engine, if you treat it well, gives rise to a faith your care will be rewarded. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

Fatherhood and motherhood are always a compromise between a form of Nazi eugenics and a compulsion for repetition. —Paul B. Preciado

If it were up to certain contemporary authors, the title of arch-villain—or rather, Worst Person Ever—might go collectively to a particular category of human normally held up as a model of nurturance and care: viz, to anyone who has willingly and consciously engaged in the act of procreation, whether by “traditional” means, or with scientific assistance. Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh have written very different, equally angry indictments of parents, while those who appear in the works of Jenny Erpenbeck and Deborah Feldman give the Grimm Brothers a run for their money. And Paul B. Preciado, the gender theorist of my epigraph, is joined in his radically downbeat appraisal of human reproduction by Junot Diaz, who has accused dating apps like Tinder of propagating a species of selective racist breeding.

The convention of decrying rather than celebrating parenthood, of course, did not first arise with the Millennials, or even Generation X. In 1818, Mary Shelley chose as the epigraph to Frankenstein Adam’s surly question to God in Paradise Lost (1667):

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me man? Did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

—a complaint that places culpability for the travails of life squarely on the shoulders of progenitors, who carelessly indulge their arbitrary, self-centered whims (or allow free rein to their rampant libidos) at the expense of hapless future generations. Read more »

by Danielle Spencer

As we look toward wending our way out of the COVID-19 global health crisis, what tools can we use to make sense of what we are experiencing? For if there is anything self-evident in our current predicament, it is that any given field—medicine, sociology, political science, psychology—are insufficient in isolation. “Pandemic,” from the Greek πάνδημος, means of or belonging to all the people; and the challenges of this pandemic compel us to take a pan-disciplinary approach.

As it happens, the need for an inclusive and transdisciplinary approach to healthcare is one which has been expressed with regularity. In the U.S., for example, there have been a series of movements in the last 50 years or so; from the biopsychosocial model to patient-centered care, these reforms seek various ways of enacting Francis Peabody’s dictum that “the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient.” “Patient-centered care” should be a redundancy—like food-centered eating, or text-centered reading, or air-centered breathing—but it’s an important corrective to the reductive proclivities of western biomedicine. In a similar spirit, the field of bioethics, arising in response to terrible abuses in research practices, is an intentionally interdisciplinary tent, inviting ethicists, clinicians, epidemiologists, researchers, and everyone with a stake in what happens to our bodies to join the dialogue. Just how inclusive and effective these efforts have proven to be is of course another matter entirely.

In more recent years my own home field of narrative medicine has emerged to join the effort. In part nourished by the late-20^th-century “narrative turn” in many humanities and social sciences disciplines (some might be surprised that we were ever estranged from narrative—but some of us certainly were) the field centers the importance of narrative competence in training clinicians and empowering all persons to engage with the narrative complexities of healthcare, striving for greater equity and justice. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

It is time to go home. You can pull down the window shade for some relief; then it’s only 100 degrees. An Air Burkina Fokker F28 has sidled up to join us on the tarmac in Bamako, Mali. Not quite home yet.

“Pull the strops around your west,” explains the flight attendant.

We’re leaving now though, en route to Dakar, rumbling along a bumpy, corrugated taxiway. We pull up to wait, curious about the glint of the other jet coming in. Turns out it’s full of whoever comes to Bamako on Royal Air Maroc.

Mali is scrub. It’s brush. It’s Sahel, hot as hell. We lumber into the air around eleven o’clock and we have spent one hour and seventeen minutes in Mali. Look down on Gambia and what do you see? Gambia the river glinting below the wing, Gambia the country a pelt of land on either side, itself gobbled up by Senegal, except where the river debouches to the sea. Read more »

Reflections in a shop window in Bozen, South Tyrol, this past Saturday.

by Bill Benzon

The purpose of a book review, I suppose,  is to tell the reader enough about the book to decide whether or not they would find it worthwhile.

What do you think would be in a book entitled Spacecraft? A catalogue of spacecraft, both real (e.g. Sputnik, Voyager, Apollo) and imaginary (the Enterprise, the Altair IV, the various ships in the recent Expanse novels and TV series)? A history maybe? Perhaps a focused discussion of, say, a dozen carefully chosen craft? Each of those implies criteria of judgment. Is the catalogue well-organized? Is the history coherent and easy to follow? Are the dozen examples well chosen, with each representing an important type?

Timothy Morton’s book, Spacecraft (Bloomsbury 2021), is none of those, though it contains aspects of all of them. What, then, is it?

The book might well be called Some Meditations on the Millennium Falcon. But how does one summarize and assess someone’s meditations?

What, by the way, IS a meditation? When I type “meditation” into a search engine, the return list includes, “meditations marcus aurelius,” “meditations in an emergency,” “meditations on first philosophy,” “meditations on the tarot,” “meditations book,” “meditations for anxiety”, and several others. If we combine emergency, first philosophy, tarot, and anxiety, with a discothèque and, I don’t know, Miss Piggy, and a fire cracker, we’ll be headed in the right direction. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

I was there when they first went up. From my south-facing bedroom on Morton Street in the village, I watched them grow, floor by floor, to a height unimaginable for that time. When they were finished, I began to measure their height against their distance from my bedroom. If they fell over, would they reach me? Not only was I ignorant of structural engineering, I never gave a thought to what would happen to the people inside if they did fall over. Years later I would learn that they didn’t fall over, they fell down. This time my thoughts were with those people inside.

The twin towers were not a pretty sight: In-your-face architecture for a nation with a chip on its shoulder, they served as metaphors for America’s perpetual declaration of might and size.

Their incongruous ground-floor gothic arches brought to mind to Joseph Campbell’s asserti0n that the height of buildings reflects a society’s priorities. For centuries, churches were the tallest buildings in a city. WTC and other 20th century skyscrapers exemplified the shift in a world gone secular and commercial. How appropriate that those arches, inadvertent homages to bygone beliefs, were the only things left standing after 9/11, looking eerily like the remains of a bombed out cathedral.

WTC-bashing was a perennial pastime in the early days. At Windows on the World, a restaurant on the top floor of one of the towers, I understood immediately why Frank Lloyd Wright considered the Harkness Tower in New Haven as the ideal place to live while he was teaching at Yale, because it was the only place in town where he wouldn’t have to see it.

Inside those towers, you didn’t feel grand and powerful, you felt small and insignificant, like one of the masses on those multi-storied cruise ships that have abandoned nautical elegance in favor of container ship utilitarianism.

After years away from New York, I landed in Newark late on a sunny Saturday afternoon, the 8th of September 2001. From the taxi into the city, I marveled at how those towers reflected the setting sun, their monolithic dullness transformed by light. One week later, I landed again in Newark and took another taxi into the city. The sun was setting, just as it had a week earlier. This time there was nothing left to catch the light. Then I wept.

by Pranab Bardhan

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

Sachin Chaudhuri, who lived in Bombay, came to know, I think from Binod Chaudhuri, about my teenage forays into writing political pieces, and he asked me to share them with him, and sent back detailed (handwritten) comments on them. A little later he started encouraging me to write for EW (copies of which he sent me every week). But I was too diffident; I was a neophyte Economics student, and I knew of EW’s sky-high reputation (Prime Minister Nehru had a standing instruction to his assistants that as soon as the weekly comes out it should immediately be at his desk). Many years later in my MIT days when I met Paul Samuelson, the great American economist, he once told me that he thought EW was a unique magazine, having topical columns on every week’s events and at the same time publishing specialized analytical articles, some quite technical. I found out that he, like many stalwart economists and other social scientists in the world at that time, had himself written for EW—this was partly a tribute to the magnetic personality of Sachin Chaudhuri which attracted some of the finest minds and created a rich intellectual aura around the magazine.

Finally I yielded, and my first EW article (it was a review article on a book by the Chicago economist Bert Hoselitz, the founding editor of the journal Economic Development and Cultural Change) came out while I was still at Presidency College. Since then over many decades I have lost count of the number of pieces I have contributed to EW and its successor EPW, some articles on quantitative analysis, some others straightforward opinion pieces. (Every time I have felt like paying a small part of my debt to Sachin Chaudhuri). Read more »

by S. Abbas Raza

I just looked over at my digital clock and it happens to be 9:59 am.

At 9:59 am on September 11, exactly 20 years ago, I watched the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapse live on TV sitting in my living room only a few miles away and first realized that life was about to change in a big way, that we were living a pivotal moment of history. And I knew I would still be speaking of what was happening in that moment decades later. And I am.

And then the second tower fell. I didn’t know it at the time, but in that very moment my friend Ehtesham had died.

So it has been 20 years. Sitting outside at a cafe on Broadway in Manhattan that afternoon, fear and the smell of smoke in the air, government agents on street corners with submachine guns, military aircraft in the sky, I was naive enough to think that perhaps we would learn some valuable lessons from the events of that morning, that we might change some of the policies which led to such disasters. How foolish that thought seems in retrospect; how much the opposite of what actually followed.

Here’s something I wrote five years after that day as part of a series of reflections we published on the 5th anniversary of the attacks at 3QD.

And you can see other articles from that series here.

Finally, this is what I wrote about Ehtesham when Osama Bin Laden was killed.

And here Ehtesham and I are sitting in the same place in my Manhattan living room from which I later would watch the collapse of the tower in which he died.

RIP Ehtesham U. Raja

by Tim Sommers

I had a weird reaction to Charlie Huenemann’s recent 3 Quarks Daily essay on knowledge. I mean I disagreed with him that knowledge is a “policy to live by” (as I’ll explain later), but that wasn’t weird (and, of course, I could just be wrong). No, the weird reaction that I had was to his aiming at a nontechnical account of knowledge shorn of all the philosophical jargon (if that is what he was doing, I took it that way). Anyway, it immediately made me want to defend the jargon and wonky bits of epistemology.

Epistemology, by the way, is what philosophers call the study of knowledge.

See, here is the thing. In the end, either all the jargon and moving parts of epistemology are not really necessary to explain knowledge. In which case, epistemologists should just knock it off and talk like the rest of us. Or that jargon, and that kind of analysis, is what you need to really get at what knowledge is. In which case, cutting all that is a genuine loss.

I say loss. The best way I can think of to defend that claim is to defend a supertechnical, up to the minute, jargon crazy epistemologist’s definition of knowledge. I believe you will understand me. Let’s give it a try.

Knowledge is (1) Gettier-proofed (2) justified (3) true (4) (propositional) belief (5) with no undefeated defeaters.

One thing first. I totally agree with Huenemann about the complete uselessness of using capital letters or “really” to qualify any philosophical account of any x. Philosopher’s don’t study “Knowledge”, with a capital “K”, as opposed to knowledge (Thanks a lot for that one, Rorty. You started it.) Philosophers capitalize words (or don’t) according to the same rules of grammar that apply to everyone and, like most people on the internet, philosophers find gratuitous capitalizing a red flag. Furthermore, the only time it adds anything to ask what we really know, as opposed to what we just know, is when we are robbing a bank. In that case, we might say, ‘Do you really know the silent alarm didn’t go off?’ But then “really” is just a way of asking how sure you are. What we really know is really just whatever we know and vice versa. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

In these dying days of summer, as I steel myself for the onslaught of an uncertain term ahead, I’ve been reading J. A. Mensah’s Castles from Cobwebs (Saraband, 2021). By way of a disclaimer I must note that J. A. – Juliana – is my colleague. However, she took up her creative writing lectureship during the pandemic, so we’ve never actually met. As preparation for getting to know each other properly I wanted to read this, her prize-winning debut novel. Castles from Cobwebs did not disappoint. I found myself devouring the book twice in quick succession, noticing different flavours with each consumption. 

Castles from Cobwebs is set in three locations – northern England, Ghana, and the United States of America. Similarly, the novel’s tripartite structure to some extent reflects the three corners of the triangular trade. Indeed, characters discuss this vicious trade as they visit a ‘castle’ in Ghana, the site in fact having been used as a fort for the imprisonment of slaves. Not only that, but the blood-soaked contours of the Black Atlantic continue to shape the lives of Mensah’s contemporary characters. 

The novel’s first part, ‘Sunsum’ (loosely translated as ‘spirit’), is set in northern England. Mensah’s is a saltspray-soaked, sodden vision of Northumbria. While reading the whole novel, I regularly felt immersed in water. Seas, rivers, floods, and storms abound, probably because the triangulated locations are positioned on assorted coastlines. From first-person present tense focalization by protagonist Imani, whom we watch grow from a six-year-old girl into a young woman, we learn that one of her ways of self-identifying is as a strong swimmer. What is more, Imani has a fascination with local heroine Grace Darling. This lighthouse keeper’s daughter had saved shipwrecked people near the Farne Islands in the early nineteenth century.  Read more »

Too Thin to Spawn an Echo

from here the atmosphere is space so vast
its depth’s enough to spawn an echo, but

seen from the moon imagine
a somewhat fat elastic band
stretched round a blue ball,
or slim mist of sweat evaporating
from the crown of a head still
clear enough to spawn an echo,

imagine an aura of oxygen
held by gauze of gravity but
with weave so slight so ephemeral yet
substantial enough to spawn an echo,

try to envision something absolutely
essential but, in perfect condition, invisible,
containing the essence of life, but

now see it thick with carbon,
a saturated scarf girdling a globe
at equatorial noon muffling billions
of small voices crying, Now we see! but
too late too weak too spent too thin
to spawn even an echo

Jim Culleny
9/4/21

by Adele A Wilby

The Italian author Sandro Veronesi’s latest novel, his ninth, The Hummingbird, is a clever book that offers the reader both literary pleasure and serious thought. The novel is essentially a family saga, and like all family histories and stories it has a complexity of interpersonal relationships and human emotions all woven into the story. It sounds so typical of life and the reader might begin to think that the novel is a family saga that could be tedious, but that is far from the truth. Veronesi has skilfully used structure to fracture any complacency or perception of the characters and the story, and his novel is a superb piece of skilled writing with unexpected twists and turns.

From the outset, the reader gets a real sense that this is a very modern novel. Veronesi introduces his characters in such a way that the reader is not bogged down in trying to fathom who is who as the story unfolds. The time frame spans the decades from the 1960s and projects into the 2030s. But it is Veronesi’s use of different documents: telephone calls, emails, social media, epigrams, poetry, and other language devices to dip in and out of time that all work together to create a constant unfolding of freshness: just as the story hints at the mundane, Veronesi intervenes and changes direction and takes the reader on a surprising path.

In this ‘tale of many’ the central character around which all these emotions and experience revolve is Marco Carrera, an ophthalmologist. He is married to Marina, an unfaithful wife with mental health issues. He too is an unfaithful husband with Luisa, the two caught up in ‘an impossible love story’ and delude themselves of their faithfulness to their partners by taking a ‘vow of chastity’. Marco falls out with his brother Giacomo. The reasons for the estrangement we learn later in the novel, when it is all too late.  Marco’s older sister Irene is of a different calibre; a sensitive young woman she brings grief to the family. And of course, a family saga would not be complete without the parents in an incompatible marriage. Read more »

Andrea Chung. From the series Vex, 2020.

Collage on paper.

More here, here, and here.