Editor’s Note: This essay once mentions a well-known racial slur. Indeed, much of the essay is about the usefulness of maintaining a distinction between using a word and merely mentioning it, and argues that mentions of even taboo words should be allowed, so it would be self-defeating to resort to euphemism in this case.

by Gerald Dworkin

For the past year or so there have been a considerable number of cases of teachers or authors or journalists who have been threatened with sanctions, had sanctions imposed, or lost their positions, because of articles they wrote or statements they made as part of their occupations. Many of these cases involved the appearance of the N-word in their speech or written work. Here are some of them.

1. In a course at the Rutgers Law School last Fall, a student was curious about why a defendant in a case was charged with conspiracy to murder, when he had not been directly involved in the shooting. So he looked up the case and found that the defendant had shouted that he was going to  return to the scene where the shots were fired, but first, “I’m going back to Trenton to get my niggers.”  This clarified for the student why the defendant might be charged with conspiracy to murder.

The professor of the course has asserted that she did not hear the word spoken during a videoconference session, which three students had attended after the criminal law class.

As the NY Times reported: “In early April, in response to the incident, a group of Black first-year students at Rutgers Law began circulating a petition calling for the creation of a policy on racial slurs and formal, public apologies from the student and the professor.”

At the height of a ‘racial reckoning,’ a responsible adult should know not to use a racial slur regardless of its use in a 1993 opinion,” states the petition, which was signed by law school students and campus organizations across the country.

“We vehemently condemn the use of the N-word by the student and the acquiescence to its usage,” the petition says.

To date the Professor has not apologized for her conduct and has not been sanctioned. Read more »

Please, See My Innocence

I am small and innocent
I’ve not yet had time to be
misshapen by adults,
but I know what they can do

so, at the sound of boots
I take refuge in this corner.
I hide my eyes believing
if I can’t see you, you can’t see me

but if you can, please, see also
my innocence

Jim Culleny
5/17/21

by Adele A Wilby

Marine biologist Helen Scales’ book, The Brilliant Abyss: True Tales of Exploring the Deep Sea, Discovering Hidden Life and Selling the Seabed is a triumph. The four major sections in the book, ‘Explore’, ‘Depend’, ‘Exploit’ and ‘Preserve’ are indicators of the breadth of issues addressed in the book: the variety of  life forms in the different levels of the oceans; the significance of the oceans to life on the planet; the various ways in which human activity exploits the oceans resources, and concludes with her ideas about how to prevent the ocean from becoming just another area of resources of the planet for exploitation by human beings.

Most of us would have, at some point, looked out across an ocean enthralled by the natural beauty that it projects. However, anybody who has travelled on the ocean would also be aware of the vagaries of the moods that the oceans are capable of and wondered at their awesome power and potential, making them worthy of respect and caution when entering their watery domains. But it is quite extra-ordinary to realise that the beautiful vista of a mirror glass reflection on an utterly calm ocean or the wild raging of it waters is only a fraction of the oceans’ breadth and depth.  As Scales tells us, the oceans take up seven tenths of the surface of the earth. The diverse topological structures and life on land are interesting enough, but the ‘expanses of the deep seabed, the abyssal plains and seamounts, canyons and trenches, plus all the water above them, constitute the single biggest living space on the planet’, a vast reserve of life being and waiting to be discovered and understood. Read more »

Sughra Raza. River Magic. May, 2021.

Digital photograph.

by David Oates

Small poetry presses are the gold dust of the publishing world, glittering yet easy to miss. And of enduring cumulative value.

Of course the Big Five publishers will pick up suitably salable, already-famous, sure-thing poets. Penguin Random House publishes Terrance Hayes, and that’s a damn good thing, a Black poet of subtlety and immediacy; and Amanda Gorman, poet of the recent presidential inauguration; and Mary Oliver, who straddles the line between “accessible” and serious with an uncanny ease and a following most working poets cannot even imagine.

Meanwhile, as my previous essay here at 3QD proposed, the small presses do the nearly-invisible work of finding and developing new poets, and giving mid-career poets their next book or two, and taking risks with weird and strange and occasionally awful poets too. They do this the way ants collect morsels in the woods: because it is their nature.

(Fans of mixed metaphors may ask: So, are these ants collecting gold dust?  And I reply: They are.)

In this essay, three books from contemporary poets whose work I admire. I read them to refresh my sense of the glorious possibilities of language. And to feel that while our public discourse may be as vicious as ever – perhaps even a little worse than the (miserable) average – yet in these small books from small presses, language may be transformative, life-giving, full of surprise and truth and therefore, hope. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

Grace Lindsay is a computational neuroscientist at University College London. She has just published a new book titled “Models of the Mind: How Physics, Engineering and Mathematics Have Shaped Our Understanding of the Brain“.

Most books about the brain take either a biological or philosophical approach, but Grace’s book is rather unique in exploring the brain through the physical sciences and really delving deeply into how well or poorly mathematical models of the brain can provide insights into its complex functions. The book is not only wide-ranging in its choice of topics but is also a lively journey through the history of these efforts and traces the lives of the eccentric and fascinating scientists who were instrumental in figuring out the brain’s working by using tools ranging from information theory and graph theory to Bayesian modeling and neural networks.

Below I chat with Grace about “Models of the Mind”, a clearly written and highly recommended journey through the intricacies of an organ that is the essence of what makes us human.

by Tim Sommers

The first part of the original trolley problem goes like this. A runaway trolley is careening towards five people tied to the tracks. There’s a lever in front of you that could divert it onto a second set of tracks. Unfortunately, there is also a person tied to those tracks. You can either do nothing and let five people die or throw the switch and kill one person – but save the five. What do you do?

The modern version of the trolley problem goes back to the 1960s, but there are variations that go back over 100 years. The trolley problem has been featured in video games, movies, tv shows, and has been a monster meme on the internet since at least 2016. MIT has a moral machine that does nothing all day and night but ask people questions based on the trolley problem – including variations suggested by users themselves. The trolley problem has been central to debates about how to program self-driving cars and “experimental” philosophers have spent a lot of time putting people in eMRI machines and asking them the trolley problem. But many other important trolley problems have not been fully explored. Here are just a few.

Sorites’ Trolley Problem

There’s no lever but the people tied to the tracks are pretty far away. Luckily, you have a wrench and can remove one piece of the trolley at a time. How many pieces do you have to remove for it to cease being a trolley? Which piece is the one piece that once removed will mean that the trolley is no longer a trolley?

Theseus’ Trolley Problem

Rather than simply removing pieces, you swap them out one at a time with brand-new, identical pieces. If you swapped them all out before the trolley hit anyone, would it still the same trolley? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Claire Chambers

Few twentieth-century books witnessed Silver Jubilee celebrations but, 25 years after the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), the monograph was commemorated in this way at his faculty in Columbia University, New York. Just a few months later, in September 2003, the Palestinian-American literary critic and theorist would die at 67 after protracted dealings with leukaemia. (This was the same group of cancers that had caused the quick and untimely death of one of his anticolonial forebears, Frantz Fanon, in 1961.) Said’s volume is routinely hailed in lists of the world’s most influential books. It also continues to shape the discipline of postcolonial studies which his work kickstarted. The Golden Jubilee in 2028 should be a grand affair.

Orientalism’s groundbreaking importance lies in the connections Said makes between culture and empire-building. He draws on Michel Foucault’s theories about the inextricable coexistence of power and knowledge, as well as Antonio Gramsci’s emphasis on the importance of culture in securing the consent of the dominated. In doing so, Said argues that colonization is not only about material acquisition. In addition to physically occupying other countries, colonizers seek to convey that their occupation is universally advantageous. It is absurd to watch the intellectual gymnastics they undertake in arguing that empire is good for both rulers and ruled. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

For many of us, reading and writing literature is a spiritual endeavor. What does that mean?

In his book A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders describes the benefits of reading and writing short stories using concepts familiar to Buddhists. In what follows, I list the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and explore their relationship to literature, leaning heavily on Saunders’ account. Whereas my previous piece explored the implications of Saunders’ book for public narratives, here I focus on personal spiritual journeys. I close by raising questions about the evidentiary basis for these arguments.

Dissatisfaction, or suffering, is a basic fact of life

Buddhists often enumerate three types of suffering in our lives:  the kind that comes from old age, sickness, physical pain, and death; the suffering that accompanies change, that sense that we can’t hold onto anything that we love, not permanently; and all-pervasive suffering, the background of fear and anxiety always with us, the sense that even our own existence is questionable, and that our relationships and personal lives will never live up to our hopes.

Saunders is especially interested in the last form of suffering — pervasive dissatisfaction. His account of the spiritual potential of literature focuses on its power to cause “an incremental change in the state of mind” in which, for a little while anyway, we become more alert to our lives and the presence of other beings —  and less existentially dissatisfied. For Saunders, a crucial cause of this third type of suffering is miscommunication: We are egocentric and constantly talk past each other; as a result, we feel lonely and misunderstood. Egocentrism has an evolutionary origin— we are primed, for personal survival, to think that everything that is good for us is also good for everyone else. Tragically, that survival mechanism contributes to isolation and suffering. Read more »

One can judge the depth of this otherwise very clear pond only by looking at the shadow of this bit of floating green algae. The upper part of the photo is also under water, there is just a reflection of a mountain there (rather than the reflection of bluish sky in the rest of the photo) so one sees the bottom even more clearly. Photo taken in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, last week.

by Charlie Huenemann

Talking about “The Enlightenment”, when understood as something like “an intellectual and philosophical movement that dominated the world of ideas in Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries” (thanks, Wikipedia), is like talking about Batman: do you mean classically heroic comic Batman? or the delightfully campy Adam West Batman? or the Batman of the movies, or of the gloomy Dark Knight era? The Batman one selects will determine what further questions need to be settled, and what scales of evaluation should be used. 

Similarly, the Enlightenment can be seen as a cluster of philosophical values (placed upon individual liberty, human equality, political and scientific progress, and independence from religion), or the ways in which those values helped to form economic institutions (slavery of various forms, global capitalism, and free markets), or as a stand-in term for whatever deep injustice people think has become dominant over the last three centuries (global economic inequalities, political states favoring the wealthy, and enduring white privilege). It is often thought that the Enlightenment is somehow a single thing behind all these things, in the way some of us think there can be a steady “Batman” character behind his various depths and flavors. 

These various flavors of “Enlightenment” are not wholly disconnected. For example, John Locke formulated a system of rights, contracts, and obligations that justified slavery on at least some occasions. The notion of actual human equality was interpreted by colonizers to mean potential human equality, which licensed the brutal process of more civilized nations forcing benighted savages into “more advanced conditions”. Scientific progress seemed to demand that we regard the natural world as a resource to be controlled and consumed, and soon our air became unbreathable. Freedom from religion came to mean that the only considerations that belong in the public sphere are measurements of material loss and gain; so “sin” and “virtue” need not apply.

And so, the criticism goes, the core ideals of Enlightenment lead to an alien and inhuman operating system that maximizes material well being for some, while annihilating any local traditions and values that are not readily uploaded into the system. Read more »

by Mike O’Brien

I recently booked an appointment to be vaccinated. The provincial government here in Québec has opened up vaccine eligibility to people under 45 in 5-year tranches. 40-to-44-year-olds were able to log in to the health ministry’s web portal and book an appointment in a few minutes. A few days later, 35-to-39-year-olds were eligible, and few days after that, 30-to-34-year-olds, and so on and so on (to quote Zizek). I didn’t do much thinking about this decision. Within minutes of the portal opening I received two messages from friends, alerting me to hop on and register. The only consideration, besides getting the earliest booking possible, was which vaccine would be provided at which venues, and even that was a minor point.

Absent from my thinking was any question of whether or not I would get vaccinated at all. There is a growing concern about vaccine “hesitancy”, but this is still thankfully low in Canada relative to our (conservatively) 30% insane neighbours to the south. I have enough background in basic science and medicine to sort out the usual innumerate nonsense that underlies most resistance to vaccination. And while I do believe that there are nefarious, power-hungry cabals of conspirators perverting the workings of government, industry and public discourse, I don’t think that their schemes include putting mind-control chips into syringes. Why go to all that bother just to control people’s minds? That’s what media monopolies are for.

In a few years, we may discover that the vaccines have worrying side-effects. Or they may unexpectedly result in whiter teeth and clearer skin. From the limited vantage of the present moment, however, vaccination is an undeniably better bet for continued good health on the individual level, and so obviously beneficial to collective health that many sober minds might countenance making it obligatory. (I am on the fence about this. For context, note that I am also ambivalent about dispersing anti-mask protests with grapeshot. Happy 200th, Monsieur Bonaparte).

The lack of equivocation and hesitation in this decision bears a curious contrast with how I think about other areas of my health. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled, April 2021.

Digital photograph.