by Jeroen Bouterse

Unfortunately, it is always worth your time to read a book in praise of the humanities. Given the unenviable position of the humanities in public education and in contemporary cultural and (especially) political discourse about valuable expertise, any author that comes to their defense has to find a strategy to shift the narrative, and will thereby almost invariably do something interesting.

They move our focus from economic value to democracy and citizenship, for example. Or they argue that there is not actually a mismatch between the skills provided by a well-balanced liberal arts curriculum and the demands of technocapitalism, or that the humanities themselves produce the same kinds of intellectual goods as the natural sciences with which they tend to be contrasted.

These apologies are intellectually creative, though with luck some of them may grow to be new clichés. In their diversity, they also have something in common, which is that they project a rather straightforward view of the knowledge that the humanities and (other) sciences produce. One point on Martha Nussbaum’s agenda in Not For Profit, for instance, is to “teach real and true things about other groups”.

I feel slightly uneasy about this. Maybe this kind of book is not the place to get all difficult about the words “real and true”, but whenever elevator words like those are used with such confidence, part of me is inclined to get difficult about them – to look for the social and cultural interests that put them there, for instance. What is more, the place where I learned to ask those questions was during my history major; they seem to me to point to something that is particular about the humanities, something that gets lost in these defenses. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Former Finnish President and Nobel laureate Martti Ahtisaari once gave a talk in our town and we went to see him. The distinguished gentleman who introduced him at Atlanta’s distinguished Piedmont Driving Club listed among Ahtisaari’s achievements “helping to achieve independence for Nambia.”

We visited Nambia a few years back, and found that the locals actually call it “Namibia.” Its European colonizers called it Southwest Africa. Call it what you like, it’s one of the world’s really remarkable places. Unusual things happen in Namibia.

Most places, rivers flow to the sea. The thousand-mile long Okavango River flows into desert, beginning in the highlands of Angola where it’s called the Cubango. The Cubango becomes the Kavango as it marks the Angola/Namibia border. There it hits a fault line and spills into the Kalahari Desert in Botswana, where it is finally known as the Okavango.

It’s hard to visualize an inland delta, so consider its scientific definition; geographers call it an alluvial fan, depositing some two million tons of sand and silt every year and draining summer rain from a catchment area something like the size of Nepal or Tunisia.

This labyrinth of channels, islands and plains brings forth papyrus swamps, forests and savannah, providing habitats for elephant, lion, crocodile, hyena, leopard, zebra, cheetah, porcupine, monkey, serval, baboon, wild dog, hippo, giraffes, buffalo, wildebeest, kudu, warthog, impala, tsessebe and countless more. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I just spent two months living on the Caribbean island of Grenada. It’s a wonderful place with a somewhat antiquated healthcare system. To visit Grenada, I had to have a negative PCR test within 72 hours of flying. I was planning to go to a clinic and wait in line, which I’d done for a previous PCR test. I’d waited in line in the freezing cold for almost 3 hours. But a couple of weeks before my flight in January, Jet Blue let me know that Grenada was accepting PCR tests through a company called Vault who would mail me an at-home test. I signed up, they sent me the test, and three days before my flight, I logged onto a Zoom call with Vault from the comfort of my own living room. My test kit had a barcode and I had to show that to the technician on the Zoom. She then watched me spit into the vial with the barcode and instructed me how to package up the kit appropriately to send it back. I walked it over to UPS 30 minutes later, and within 48 hours, I received my results by email.

A couple of weeks ago, towards the end of my stay in Grenada, I started to get some awful shooting pains in my right leg. A few days later, I woke up to a horrible rash that was blistering. I went on WebMD and put in my symptoms. Looking at the possible diagnoses it suggested, I was reasonably sure that I had shingles. I was able to look at photos of a typical shingles rash that looked a lot like what was all over my thigh. I took a photo of my rash, went online to my health insurer, UnitedHealthcare, and requested a telehealth video call. Five minutes later, a doctor came online. I uploaded the photo of my rash, told her my symptoms, and said that I thought I had shingles. She immediately validated my WebMD diagnosis and prescribed a course of Valtrex, which I could get filled at a Grenadian pharmacy.  Read more »

Late afternoon one day last week as I was waiting for a train at the station in Bruneck, South Tyrol.

by Philip Graham

Whenever I discover a band that sports an accordion in the lineup, I’m ready to listen.

But this wasn’t always so.

It all goes back to the mid-1960s, those days of my mid-adolescence, when my father’s favorite cousin, who we called our “aunt” May, came to visit nearly every weekend. The year before, her hard-drinking brother’s liver had finally given up on him, and my father wanted to draw her closer to our family. Aunt May lived alone, unmarried and childless. As if this was a condition that needed explanation, our parents whispered to us a secret we were never to repeat aloud, that she once had a boyfriend, but he’d died in World War II and she never found another man like him.

After the ritual of a Saturday afternoon dinner, the time arrived for the ritual of settling in the living room to watch the latest installment of Aunt May’s favorite program, Lawrence Welk’s musical variety show. My younger brother and I were expected to keep her company. We, too, loved our kind and self-effacing aunt, but to my easily-affronted adolescent self, Lawrence Welk had invented his show to personally torment me. It was a kind of musical quicksand, Stepford Wives music, everything that rock and roll was trying to replace or destroy. Read more »

by David Oates

An empty space sits where I once sat. I miss it. I miss the strangers I shared it with, and a few regulars with whom I achieved a nodding relationship. A couple of baristas I might greet and chat up. Very briefly.

I miss the space itself – long and wide, its tall ceiling held up by industrial concrete pillars of old-fashioned ornateness reflecting its Model-T era use as a Ford manufactory. The space gave room to think and to be connected yet anonymous, with big tables for groups and – the star attraction for me – counter tables all along the windows where for years I have sat for my afternoon writing and reading. Getting lost in a poem or a book. Jotting a few words experimentally, or working on a chapter in progress. Gazing idly at someone at a sidewalk table (peeking at a book title if I can see it). Taking in the rush of cars and trucks, heading towards their 4:30 gridlock.

Strangers walk by with dogs, or with addictions, or with clothes nicer than I even know the words for. They all make me think. . . of what? Hard to say. How much I like a kind face, or a handsome one. Or an old one with lines.

What unknowabilities we all are.

But this space now sits plague-emptied, closed down apparently permanently. Here I wrote large pieces of my last book. And the one before it. I relied on this perfect one-mile walk from my home, an afternoon leg-stretch, a change of scenery, a change of mind. A way to feel connected to the humans. (But not too connected.)

This sociable, urbane space was a bit of what is called the “New Urbanism,” a thing for which Portland, Oregon had become renowned. But New Urbanism is shut down now. Public spaces empty. Restaurants shuttered. Transit deserted.

As if all that was left us was to revert to the 1950s and move back to the suburbs, isolated and safe, bourgie and dull. For the plague, we fear, may be killing cities as well as individuals. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

A striking aspect of math is its ability to stimulate both our minds and our humanity. We saw this already in our discussion of Francis Su’s book, the Mathematics of Human Flourishing. As he explains more eloquently than I ever could, mathematics belongs with music, poetry, art, and nature in its ability to lift us up from the everyday mundane. Rather recently I learned of a perfect example I thought the readers of 3QD would appreciate. It’s a story that involves both neat mathematics and beautiful humanity.

The topic of the paper is continued fractions. As everyone knows, even if they’ve forgotten, we usually use write numbers using sums. For example, 327 is really shorthand for 300 + 20 + 7. And 0.327 is really shorthand for 3/10 + 2/100 + 7/1000. Of course, to capture all the numbers we are interested in using, we have to allow for infinite sums, even if that is sometimes a dangerous thing to do. For example, when we write

√2 = 1.41421356237…,

this is really a shorthand for

√2 = 1 + 4/10 + 1/100 + 4/1000 + 2/10000 + 1/1000000 + ….

But there is nothing sacrosanct about using repeated sums. We can also use repeated divisions. Once again you need to allow for infinitely many divisions to capture all the numbers we’d like to consider [1]. For example,

Like with sums, we’ve devised a more compact way of writing such continued fractions. Since we can always arrange so that the number above the division bar is a one, we can save ourselves work by only recording the number in front of the addition sign that appear at each level of the fraction. In this case, we would write [1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, …] for √2. Read more »

Replacing the Gates

if I’d broken the laws of light—
if I’d been arrested by a black hole
and sent to prism,
would you still visit with spectral frequency
and split waves with me?
would you help cleave white
into colors and set them free
to carom off everything in sight
replacing the gates of hate
with rainbows?

Jim Culleny
5/8/18

Art installation by Hou De Sousa

From the exhibition “The Breath of Empty Space” at Mass MOCA now through May 2021.

More here and here.

by Brooks Riley

We are not where we were one year ago—or have we just returned?

This is the paradox of the pandemic: Lockdown has sent many of us on the wildest of journeys—not to a different place, but to a different self, even if such a destination is temporary.

What if a consequence of going nowhere and doing nothing for a year is finding out there’s a stranger living inside you? Unlike yourself these days, the stranger isn’t in isolation. It goes everywhere you can’t, especially down rabbit holes where the ‘you’  you think you know would never go. Uninvited, this stranger is no guest, it’s just been squatting in your brain until the time was right.

Don’t confuse the stranger with an inner voice. The stranger doesn’t chat or chatter. It’s not interested in your opinions, nor does it want to convince you of  something, or help you ‘harness’ an inner anything. Its agenda is to hold you hostage, no questions taken, no answers given.

I’m unclear as to the stranger’s gender. Is it a girl, a middle-aged man, a woman, an old lady, a boy? Does it matter now that the stranger lives in the part of yourself that once indulged in its own peregrinations?

When you weren’t looking, it pulled up a chair next to you and grabbed the mouse, that most direct instrument of intent, and began to map out a new itinerary. It’s become harder not to notice as it steers your ship of self away from its charted course and into unknown territory. An interloper in your command central, the stranger now begins to assert itself, to exert its will in appalling ways–mostly having to do with music. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Tim Sommers

A libertarian. Old joke. I mean, marijuana is not even illegal in a lot of states anymore. How about this one? A libertarian walks into a bear. Okay, that’s not really a joke. It’s the title of a recent book by Matthew Honogoltz-Hetling, subtitled “The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)”. It’s about a group of libertarians who move to a rural town with the express purpose of dismantling the local government and producing a libertarian utopia. The resulting problems with coordinating refuse disposal attract a lot of bears and the lack of a government makes it difficult to mount a response. Bears 1. Libertarians 0.

I have been thinking about libertarianism again since I read Thomas Wells’ smart 3 Quarks Daily article Libertarianism is Bankrupt arguing that libertarianism, “like Marxism or Flat-Earthism”, has “nothing to offer”. Which is kind of unfair to Marxism if you ask me. But a real-world example of how dead the libertarian horse is, is offered by the departure of many recovering libertarians from the Cato Institute recently, the bulk of them forming a new non-libertarian think tank (Nikensas). What lead most of these former Cato staffers to abandon libertarianism was the existence of a political problem that they felt libertarianism had no response to. I bet you can guess what it is. (I’ll tell you at the end, just in case.)

In the meantime, given the moribund state of libertarianism, rather than beat on it some more, I thought it would be fun to return to its glory days, to Robert Nozick and his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Nozick was arguably the most philosophically sophisticated libertarian ever. He was charismatic. He was purportedly widely read in the Reagan White House. And he was lauded as one of the Philosopher Kings of Harvard by Esquire Magazine in 1983 (including a full-page photospread in which he looked very thoughtful). (The other Philosopher-King, John Rawls, refused to be interviewed or photographed for the piece.) Read more »

Water flowing out of a small hole in a concrete wall and immediately freezing. Photo taken yesterday near Mittewald, South Tyrol.