by Tim Sommers

Do you have a right to own a microwave oven? To be clear, ideally in a free society, absent a clear showing of harm to others, there’s a presumption that you can do whatever you want and own whatever you can make or buy. So, you do have a basic right to own things – to acquire property, as political philosophers like to say. But it’s consistent with that right for there to be a lot of rules and regulations around what you can own – and even prohibitions on owning certain kinds of things.

Microwave ovens are complicated physical objects, tools or machines, that require pretty advanced technology and technical know-how to make and that almost no one can make all on their own. It would be odd to think of a microwave as the sort of thing you could have a right to. Before they were invented did people have a fundamental, but unexercisable right to own them? They also contain dangerous chemicals and heavy metals and are not entirely safe to discard or recycle. If new information revealed them to be even less safe than we think now, or if changing standards raised the safety bar on all appliances, microwaves could be banned. It’s hard to picture anyone arguing that microwaves couldn’t be banned because we have a fundamental right to own them.

What about cars? They kill a lot of people. But in many places, they are essential, or nearly essential, to mobility and mobility is essential to equality of fair opportunity – and some part of mobility should probably even be counted as a fundamental liberty. Still, we don’t have a fundamental right to own or drive a car – must less an unregulated, unlicensed right to own or drive one. Microwave ovens and cars and guns are just metaphysically the wrong kinds of things to be the object of basic rights, liberties, or political freedoms.

Let’s talk about guns. Read more »

Sughra Raza. After The Last Trees. January, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Varun Gauri

An autocratic president, whom the opposition blames for thousands of deaths, faces a referendum on his rule. The majority rejects him in the election, but around 45% vote for him to remain in office. The would-be permanent dictator begrudgingly departs, yet he retains a fanatically loyal following, especially among the religious right, some business leaders, the security establishment, and voters scared of socialism. Conservative politicians and radical rightists fear his influence, permitting him and his acolytes to remain powerful voices in national politics for many years. That hold on the political right, alongside structural impediments in the national constitution, the opinions of the judges he appointed, and the continuity in office of his regime functionaries make it is impossible for the country to address social and economic inequality and consolidate democratic reform.

A forecast of the United States post-Trump? Perhaps.

A description of Chile post-Pinochet? Definitely.

This year, thirty-one years after Pinochet left office, fifteen years after he died, Chile will hold elections for a constitutional convention to replace the military Constitution of 1980, even though the government is led by a president whose rightist party once supported Pinochet. Following the latest in a series of student-led protests, the country may at last have moved on from “moving on,” now aiming to redress inequality and entrench democracy more deeply in its political institutions.

What took so long? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Adele A Wilby

The presence of covid-19 running amok amongst us has momentarily disrupted the perimeters of our lives. That two, three, or possibly four generations are not always able to gather together under one roof has given rise to greater appreciation of the family.

Those four generations that meet or live together frequently span the scope of living memory; anything beyond is found in fading photos, objects that have become family heirlooms, or indeed the tradition of oral family history. But while the existence of three generations gathered under one roof might seem normal today, it is however an extremely limited understanding of the ‘family’ when we consider the generations that have made up the existence of related hominins on the planet; they literally amount to thousands. Learning about these past generations of kindred has been for me therefore, a refreshing read over the holiday period. Rebecca Wragg Sykes has to be applauded for realising one of the purposes of writing her book Kindred, Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art which she says, is for ‘those who’ve heard of Neanderthals or not…’

As a curious amateur eager to learn more about out kindred and indeed the work of archaeologists, any hesitation that jargon and too much information might be overwhelming and a turn off as I read the book, was quickly dispelled. Her obvious literary talent manifests so patently in the opening paragraph of the book. ‘Time is devious’, she tells us, ‘…as we exist in a continuously flowing stream of “now”’ How right she is, and so is her view that ‘comprehending the scale of time on an evolutionary, planetary, cosmic level remains almost impossible…’ Despite the profound complexity of the human brain, it would seem at this period in human history, or human evolution, its potential remains limited. Indeed, for Sykes  ‘comprehending the gobsmacking hugeness of deep archaeological time…’ is equally as challenging. Nevertheless, her opening paragraph highlights our ‘now’ within the grand scheme of the existence of hominins on the planet and such a prospect is not only exciting but generates in the reader an appetite for what lies ahead in the pages to come, and for me she delivers a fascinating account about other hominins who came before us: the Neanderthals. Read more »

by Sabyn Javeri Jillani

In April 2020, Arundhati Roy wrote in the Financial Times, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine the world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

Her words reminded me of the state of Barzakh, the transitory stage between this world and the next. Separating the living from the hereafter, it’s often described as a veil or a bridge between death and resurrection. The Sufi philosopher Al Ghazali described it as a place where souls are suspended in time, neither in hell nor heaven, resembling the Catholic theological state of limbo. It is a similar state that I find myself in as I write this, despite the fact that the new year started off on a hopeful note.

But can a change of date really shake off the turmoil and confusion of last year? 2020 was an year of loss for so many of us. The world events around me seemed to reflect my inner state as I too experienced a deep sense of personal loss. There was a kind of implausible horror that encircled most of us as streets became empty and touch disappeared from our vocabulary. The withdrawal of the world reflected the inertia we felt inside as life came to a grinding halt. I mourned with the rest of the world, the loss of an era. Although the optimists amongst us reminded us that, ‘endings are new beginnings’, it was hard not to think of the pandemic as the ‘beginning of the end’. Read more »

Text by David Oates
Artwork by Alex Hirsch

1. “A more perfect union.” The Founders expressed a breezy confidence, didn’t they? As if such a thing were possible – the distant states cohered into a nation; the various occupants working it all out. Loyal. Collaborative. Taking part in the common welfare. While remaining, of course, individual and autonomous and free, free, free. (Certain restrictions applied.)

I’m a child of the sixties but have kept a wary distance from virtually all forms of organized groupiness, togetherness, or even (alas) belonging. I’m a curious observer, though.

2. Planetary Ecology. The modern environmental movement based itself on the analogy of the organism: we were really one big animal. “We” meaning all of nature (Gaia), or an ecosystem, or a human community. It worked on various levels! Lewis Thomas, one of our gurus, held up the example of a critter that was disunified cells, squiggling around individualistically (“voting straight Republican” he quipped). . . until something signalled them and they joined together as one, “solid as a trout”! That this exemplary organism was slime mold did not strike us, in the sixties, as funny. Decades later, our sliminess seems way less promising.

Now our planetary health teeters on a terrifying brink and the message of connectedness seems more compelling than ever. Biologically, we are interwoven in increasingly obvious ways we still can’t seem to accept. Read more »

Photo taken from a train window going from Brixen to Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol in January of 2020, back when the prospect of traveling by rail did not make one nervous.

by Claire Chambers

I recently edited an anthology about food from Muslim South Asia. Published by Pan Macmillan in India as Desi Delicacies, the book’s first half is made up of life writing essays, while the second half comprises short stories. To give a taste of the volume, it opens with Bina Shah’s virtuosic Foreword: Appetizer. In it, the author of Before She Sleeps reflects on food’s alchemical ability ‘to prolong life and […] turn base materials into noble ones’. This book, as Shah intimates, abounds with orphans, widows, and divorcees, and memories of the departed make particular repasts taste all the sweeter.

My own love for South Asian Muslim culture, literature, and food was ignited by my year off before university. This is something I touch on in my Introduction: Food in the Time of Corona, which started life as a 3QD blog post. I spent that year in the mid-1990s teaching in Mardan and Peshawar, in the northwestern Pakistani region of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. I celebrated my eighteenth birthday there, and it genuinely was a coming of age. The year set me on a course of reading and writing on the topic of South Asian Muslim literature which I have pursued with hardly any interruptions ever since. Along the way, I’ve been lucky enough to get to know some astounding authors, many of whom were gracious enough to contribute to this anthology.

The first piece in Part One: Essays is The Homesick Restaurant, an autobiographical fragment by Nadeem Aslam, one of the best-known Pakistani writers. The piece features a kachnar flower and a long-lost relative, and packs the punch of deggi mirch chilli powder in fewer than a thousand words. Really, it just has to be savoured. Read more »

by Muneeza Shamsie

This year, 26 January marks the fifth death anniversary, of Sahabzada M. Yaqub-Khan (1920-2016), my uncle. To me it seems as if it was yesterday. He was my mother’s youngest brother and her only sibling in Pakistan. The bond between them was so close that I cannot remember a time, when he was not integral to my family life. To my younger sister, Naushaba (now Naushaba Hasnain) and me, he was always ‘Mamou’. I have no idea when Mamou and I first met. He was a prisoner-of-war at the time I was born in Lahore. As I grew up I was told by my parents never to ask him about his POW years because it was such a dreadful experience.  I learnt in time, that he had been captured in Egypt (at Bir Hachim after the Battle of Tobruk) and he escaped in Italy with two fellow officers – the future Commander in Chiefs of the Pakistan and Indian armies respectively, Generals Yahya Khan and Kumaramangalam – but they had been recaptured. Mamou was then moved to a concentration camp in Germany. He had utilized those years to learn languages: French, German, Italian and Russian. Afterwards he was sent to England to convalesce. There he was often mistaken for his second cousin, the Nawab of Pataudi, the famous cricketer.  The resemblance was so uncanny that two generations later, my daughter Kamila chanced upon a photograph in a book on cricket history. She did a double take and thought ‘What is Yaqub Nana doing here?’

My first conscious memory of Mamou revolves around the unsolved mystery of Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten, my favourite book. This had big pictures of kitten in a lovely soft, velvety material. Possibly Mamou used to read it to me. One day the book disappeared.  For some reason I thought that he was responsible. He would often tease me – and ask with a big grin – until I was quite grown up. “Who took Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten?”  I would point to him. He would go into peals of laughter. And I still don’t know what happened to Fuzzy Wuzzy Kitten. Read more »

Sydney Cain. Refutations (Tricksters In Pools), 2020.

Graphite, charcoal and pigment on paper.

More here, here, and here.

by Joan Harvey 

I always knew that we couldn’t Make America Great Again without Sarah Palin. So when she retreated to Alaska to be with John Galt and all the others who shrugged because they were tired of holding up the Lib-tards and their socialist laziness, I figured we were on the path to becoming Venezuela. Sure, Donald Trump, the greatest president since Abe Lincoln and probably tied with George Washington for second, was in office, but he couldn’t do it alone. This country has so many Lib-tards and blue-state welfare queens that without someone like Sarah Palin, our country was due for collapse.

So I took things into my own hands. Have you read The Secret? You have to read it! It’s about using the energy of the universe to get what you really, truly, deeply want to make your life AWESOME! The book says to make a vision board with some magazines and glitter and rubber cement, because the universe needs pictures to help it know what you want. Well, I knew I couldn’t make a vision board (you know I don’t mess with that girly shit) so I got my old lady Darla to make one. Right in the middle of that vision board, Darla pasted Sarah Palin. And then she surrounded her with the other Palins: Todd, and Trig, and Track, and Sailor, and Bristol, and Plumber. And then we pasted on the text of the Second Amendment, and pictures of some friends totally armed to protect ourselves from Antifa and BLM. Guys that could keep America Great and Free! And we waited, and we prayed, and we let ourselves be open to the universe.

And that’s when Lauren Boebert walked into our life as if she had walked right off our vision board! Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Charlie Huenemann

I think it is fair to say that we usually see science and magic as opposed to one another. In science we make bold hypotheses, subject them to rigorous testing against experience, and tentatively accept whatever survives the testing as true – pending future revisions and challenges, of course. But in magic we just believe what we want to be true, and then we demonstrate irrational exuberance when our beliefs are borne out by experience, and in other cases we explain away the falsifications in one way or another. Science means letting what nature does shape what we believe, while magic means framing our interpretations of experience so that we can keep on believing what feels groovy.

But this belief – that we can clearly distinguish between magic and science – turns out itself to be an instance of framing our interpretations so as to allow us to keep on believing something that makes us feel good. In other words, the relation between magic and science is far more complicated, and magic is not so easily brushed aside.

“Science”, as we use the term, is a relative newcomer on the scene. “Scientia”, meaning expert knowledge, is Latin, but using it or its cognates to refer to a special method of acquiring knowledge – especially one that involves microscopes, telescopes, and test tubes – is a much later innovation. What has always been around, ever since we started jabbering, has been an interest in understanding how nature works, usually conjoined with our practical interest in prediction and control. Call that interest “natural knowledge”. Read more »