by Michael Liss

We are not dead yet. Battered a little, yes. Frustrated, anxious, wondering about our jobs, our neighborhoods, our schools, absolutely. Definitely not dead. 

It doesn’t mean we aren’t wounded. Last week, an open letter from the Partnership for New York City called on Mayor Bill de Blasio, in very diplomatic but clear terms, to restore essential services, clean up the City, and get it back to work. You can read the full text here, but the most interesting thing about it is the signatories, a variety of luminaries from business, real estate interests, top law firms, investment banking, etc., who, in the aggregate, probably control more assets than the combined GDP of all the countries in Western Europe. 

Vested interests aside, these folks are also largely right. De Blasio has become something of a punching bag because of his outsized personal ambitions as compared to his minimalist accomplishments, but the truth is, even without COVID, the Mayor’s job is an incredibly tough gig. We have an aging infrastructure, rely heavily on mass transit, are incredibly diverse ethnically and socio-economically, and have many neighborhoods where the incomprehensibly rich live cheek to jowl with the inexcusably poor. The school system alone is a stupendous challenge. In healthier times, 1.1 million kids, one in every 300 Americans, sit at a desk in a New York City classroom.  

With COVID, we are back on our heels. If I were de Blasio, I’d look at my shattered outside ambitions, focus my last 16 months in office on addressing some of the City’s real needs, and find an opportunity to refurbish my image. 163 signers of the Partnership’s letter are 163 sources of cash, managerial expertise, and other resources that could be applied to our present crisis. Ask them, and they will show up—not just out of civic duty, but also because it’s good business. They might also pressure a pol or two in Washington, including some well-placed ones who currently make a sport out of hating us. Just a suggestion, Mr. Mayor. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

https://youtu.be/Pgmoz4f8LA4

The idea has been around for awhile. Rodolfo Llinás had the idea in the mid-2000s; you can see him in the astonishing video above (c. 04:45 ff.). Christof Koch has recently speculated about it in Nature [2]. But Elon Musk is by far the most visible proponent of direct brain-to-brain thought transfer. While he said nothing about it in the recent demonstration of the technology his Neuralink company is developing [3], he has mentioned the idea in recent conversation with Joe Rogan [4] and in a long article by Tim Urban [5].

There are two problems with this idea. We don’t know how to build the necessary technology. Such technology would require millions upon millions of connections (100s if not 1000s of times the number hairs on a head) between two brains, connections that have to go into the brains without shredding them to itsy-bitsy smithereens. However challenging the technology problem is, that isn’t the deepest problem. The deeper problem is one of fundamental principle. The idea of physical thought transfer between brains as so poorly defined that it is difficult to impossible to evaluate. At the moment it is a nonsense idea, one of those ideas that isn’t even wrong.

The principle is easy to understand. I explain that in the next section, using Koch as an example. If you find that convincing then you can skip the rest, perhaps sip some nice tea, or some scotch, whatever suits your fancy. If you’re still curious, I can offer you a look inside a simple nervous system and an account of how Musk misunderstands the nature of linguistic communication. I conclude with some thoughts about dreams of the future. Read more »

by Bill Murray

In last month’s column we sailed from Walvis Bay, Namibia, to St. Helena Island, 1800 miles from Angola, 1200 from Brazil, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean. This month we continue north to Ascension Island.

When the Brits exiled Napoleon to St. Helena in 1815 they denied the emperor newspapers, subjected him to curfew, and guarded him with 125 men during the day and 72 at night. So intent were they to avoid a second imperial escape that sailing down, they garrisoned Ascension Island on the way, better to defend St. Helena.

Napoleon died six years later. With the Suez Canal fifty years in the future, the Admiralty hung on to Ascension as a sea base and it serves now as an airbase shared with the Americans, who built the island’s Wideawake airfield to move troops in WWII.

Ascension provided the middle link in an airbridge for the United Kingdom’s 1982 Falkland Islands campaign. During that conflict Ascension came alive like never before or since, as the UK Ministry of Defense ran a frenetic schedule of flights between the Brize-Norton air base near Oxford, England, and the RAF’s Mount Pleasant airport near Stanley, in the Falklands. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

In Democracy in America (1848), Alexis de Tocqueville concluded from his travels in the United States that “The particular and predominating fact peculiar to” this democratic age “is equality of conditions, and the chief passion which stirs men at such times is the love of this same equality.”  Indeed, “The gradual progress of equality,” he wrote, “is something fated. The main features of this progress are the following: it is universal and permanent, it is daily passing beyond human control, and every event and every man helps it along….”

If this is at all accurate, it seems fair to say that our conditions, and our ambitions, regarding human equality, are much diminished. But I want to draw attention to just one specific point de Tocqueville highlights.

Equality, the relevant kind of equality for him, is “equality of conditions”. It’s not abstract moral equality or equality limited to political decision making or equality of opportunity or (as contemporary philosophers say) equality in the distribution of some underlying abstraction like utility, access to advantage, or primary goods. Democracy, and the democratic spirit, called on and depended on, for de Tocqueville, a certain level of real, actual, surface-level equality. The love of equality, that he is both drawn to and repelled by – with “a kind of religious dread” – is just ordinary equality, not some philosophical surrogate.

If you ask someone at a random about equality or inequality in the United States today, they will very likely assume you mean economic inequality. This is partly because economic inequality has gotten more attention recently, but it is mostly because, if you ask people to think about whether the conditions of their life are equal or unequal to the conditions of others’ lives, the first thing many will think about is money.

Yet, at the precise moment Thomas Piketty’s groundbreaking work on economic inequality was drawing new attention to the shocking level of economic inequality that characterizes our new gilded age, philosopher Harry Frankfurt thought it imperative to insist that “Insofar as economic inequality is undesirable…this is not because it is as such morally objectionable. As such, it is not morally objectionable.” Rather, he said, “from a moral point of view economic inequality does not matter very much”.

Unfortunately, many other philosophers writing about economic inequality also deny that it is bad in and of itself. Instead, they insist that substantial economic inequalities are bad because, and where, they have bad effects.

I believe this view is a mistake. Read more »

by Varun Gauri

Covfefe.

Alternative facts.

Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.

“The line of ‘Make America great again,’ the phrase, that was mine, I came up with it about a year ago, and I kept using it, and everybody’s using it, they are all loving it. I don’t know, I guess I should copyright it, maybe I have copyrighted it.”

The style and rhetoric of the Trump era appears to be historically unique, the result of the narrow and unexpected electoral victory of a man who honed his skills performing as a reality TV idiot savant. But I believe that the rhetorical style of Trumpism — nonsense, incoherence, giving truth the middle finger— will outlast Trump.

When people say that Trumpism will outlive Trump, they usually refer to the political economy. Typically, they mean that trade shocks and the integration of China into the World Trade Organization caused unemployment and anger in the American heartland that has not yet been adequately addressed, that rising levels of immigration and the coming emergence of America as a majority-minority nation evoke nostalgia and a politics of resentment, or that the political alliance between plutocrats and populists has proven durable. All that may be true. But I think that it is not only the structural forces that are likely to endure, but also the trappings of Trumpism, what we think of as its ephemera — the circus atmosphere, the sensation that up is down, the experience of having fallen through the looking glass. Read more »

Harold Newton. Untitled, 1960s.

Oil on Masonite board.

“In 1955, 19-year-old African American artist Harold Newton was convinced by A. E. Backus, a prominent Florida landscape artist, to create paintings of landscapes rather than religious scenes.^[6] Newton sold his landscapes from the trunk of his car because art galleries in South Florida refused to represent African Americans.^[7] The following year, 14-year-old Alfred Hair began taking formal art lessons from Backus and, after three years, also began selling landscape paintings. Newton and Hair inspired a loose-knit group of African American artists to follow their leads. Newton is recognized by fellow artists for his technical inspiration while Hair is the considered the leader and catalyst “who set the tone for the group through the 1960s.”^[6][8] They attracted a group of a “young, energetic” artists who painted large quantities of brilliantly colorful impressionistic landscapes that they each sold from their cars.^[6] In 1970, the group lost its charismatic leader when Hair was killed in a barroom brawl at age 29 and the prodigious output of the movement’s artists began to wane.” (Wikipedia)

More here, here and here.

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you’d like a punch to the throat, use classroom hours as a measure of the work of the next teacher or professor you meet at a social event. It’s like only counting hours on the playing field for a professional athlete or hours in the air for a pilot.

There is hidden work in every job. For university faculty, a big part of their job is conducting research, publishing that work, and getting the grant funding needed to do that work. For both teachers and professors, there is also the mentoring of students outside the classroom. For university faculty, this frequently comes in the form of student research projects.

Many of my essays at 3QD have focused on the work of professional mathematicians, but there is a vibrant community of student researchers, as well. Indeed, Involve is an entire journal devoted to publishing new research in mathematics suitable for publication in mainstream research journals, but with the extra requirement that at least 1/3 of the authors be undergraduate students. Full disclosure: my colleague, Mike Jablonski, is an editor at the journal.

Four years ago we talked about the work of my former student, Rhyker Benavidez. Rhyker worked on questions involving the symmetric group which were inspired by biology. I have worked with several students since then, but none have done projects which seemed suitable for a 3QD essay. On the other hand, my collaborator, Rob Muth, was just telling me about some great work done by students of his at Washington & Jefferson College. Rob was justifiably proud of their results and I thought they were perfect for the readership of 3QD. Read more »

by David Kordahl

Paul Halpern’s new book, Synchronicity: The Epic Quest to Understand the Quantum Nature of Cause and Effect, takes its time to get there, but its best parts discuss the intersection of two puzzles for 20th century rationalists: psychoanalysis, and quantum mechanics. This intersection is dramatized by the correspondence of Carl Jung, Freud’s influential protege, and Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist whose “exclusion principle” provides the quantum explanation for why matter doesn’t simply collapse. Halpern situates the Jung/Pauli dialogue in a broad-strokes science history. The first 120 pages roam from ancient Greece to modern physics. Then we get the interesting hundred-odd pages on Jung and Pauli. Finally, unconvincingly, John S. Bell and his famous theorem are described in terms of Jungian synchronicity.

This hook could work for a popular history, but already in the introduction, I realized this book wasn’t for me. Halpern has written an unabashedly Whig history, picking winners and losers, judging historical figures largely on whether they agree with the opinions of modern researchers. “Many great thinkers over the ages have conflated valid, testable scientific connections with pseudoscientific analyses,” he writes, confidently picking out the “specious numerology” of the Pythagoreans and the astrological impulses of Kepler as examples.

There’s nothing exactly wrong with this—I’m not going to the ropes for the numerologists—but it does call into question why we should care about this history. In a sort of thesis statement for the book, Halpern chides,

In retrospect, Jung’s insights about the need for a new acausal principle in science were brilliant and prescient. Nonetheless his low threshold for accepting anecdotal evidence about ‘meaningful coincidences’ without applying statistical analysis to rule out spurious correlations was a serious failing in his work. Jung trusted his intuitive sense of when things were connected. But in the light of the mind’s capacity to fabricate false linkages at times, pure intuition on its own is not genuine science.

This is all perfectly reasonable, but it misses the point. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Paul Orlando

Louise Bourgeois was an artist based out of New York and most often thought of as a sculptor. My favorite of her works was called Maman — a giant spider that I walked under many times while visiting the Tate Modern.

She also used to hold an artists’ salon out of her home in Manhattan.

Her salon was famous both for it being her salon but also because she continued it for over 30 years. I’m at an age where doing something for over 30 years is just becoming understandable. So I thought I’d share my experience attending.

Years ago I was part of an artist group and learned about the salon. I had never experienced such a thing before, which seemed fitting more with old European novels than my life in New York. But one by one over a few years, different artist friends in the group told me about their experience at Bourgeois’ salon. Good and bad (where criticism was tough), but mostly good.

Eventually, I resolved to try it myself.

The next day I went to my phone, looked at the number to call, and let a year go by.

The next year, when I got up the nerve, I reached Bourgeois’ assistant and was told that the salon was already full for that week.

I waited another six months. Same result.

A year went by with only occasional thoughts of calling again.

Finally, one day I picked up the phone and with minimal worry, called, was connected, told to arrive that Sunday at 3pm, and of course that Louise liked chocolate. Read more »

Roses and Dolomites, as seen from a walk above the village of Latzfons in the mountains of the South Tyrol in September of 2020.

by Brooks Riley

On January 28^th of this year, just as the biggest black swan event of the century was about to unfold, the South Korean band BTS debuted their latest single Black Swan on CBS’s Late Late Show. Looking back on this moment of Jungian synchronicity, one might be tempted to ask, ‘How did they know?’  

Then in February, when the Tonight Show featured BTS performing their song ON in the deserted main concourse of New York’s Grand Central Station, the rare sight of that vaulted Beaux Arts architecture devoid of travelers seemed also vaguely ominous. Weeks later, an empty Grand Central was no longer the wee-hours venue rented out to a TV show. It was a daytime reality, thanks to a pandemic which shut the city down.

Like many fellow Koreans BTS believes in fate. They seem to gravitate to moments that are portentous and credit at least some of their massive success to fated good fortune—notwithstanding hard work, innate talent, good management, and the support of an abiding Army of fans.

Those early omens were not the only brush the band would have with the sober realities of 2020. The massive demonstrations for Black Lives Matter in June after the death of George Floyd prompted BTS to donate $1 million to BLM, an amount spontaneously matched by their Army of fans the next day, donations that may have influenced more Americans into giving as well.

This summer, Stay Gold, a sunny, upbeat plea to keep dreams alive, complete with golden retriever and technicolor landscape, was the perfect fit for a pandemic playlist. And a simple PSA about social distancing funded by Hyundai made staying at home as glamorous—or not—as they are, sending the essential message that no one, not even stars in the pop culture firmament, are exempt from the challenges that a lockdown imposes. Read more »

by Katie Poore

I majored in English in college.

This statement tends to get one of two reactions: the first is a vague and uncomprehending stare, the kind that belies complete indifference to anything literary, much less anything academically literary. The second is a furrowed brow, a slight narrowing of the eyes, and the question “Why?” or any of its variants (“What are you planning on doing with that?” “Do you want to be, like, a teacher?” “What can you use that degree for?”).

These reactions are understandable, and even somewhat reasonable. Forbes frequently lists English Literature as one of the worst majors for a return on investment. Comedian John Mulaney lampoons the major in his stand-up act Kid Gorgeous at Radio City, saying of his own English education at Georgetown University: “I paid $120,000 for someone to tell me to go read Jane Austen, and then I didn’t. That’s the worst use of 120 grand I can possibly fathom.”

English degrees, like many humanities degrees, invite skepticism, and in response to these skeptics, English majors have rallied the troops, battened down the hatches, and said with force: “Literature fosters empathy.”

Maybe you’ve heard this before. It’s something that I’ve said innumerable times to anyone who will listen, and something that I’ve heard repeated by classmates and professors and even during my graduation ceremony. The Director of the English Department’s speech read like a rousing, if not hilarious, defense of the major so many of us young undergraduates had naively decided to undertake. It was as if she were trying to say to the parents who had foot their child’s educational bill: “Don’t worry. That money you just paid was worth it. I swear.” Read more »

by Ali Minai

I came to Empires of the Plain: Henry Rawlinson and the Lost Languages of Babylon by Lesley Adkins (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003) because I was looking to read about Henry Rawlinson – someone I had wondered about and admired for a long time. Copying the immense and inaccessible trilingual cuneiform inscription of Bisitun, and then working to decipher not one but three ancient languages from virtually nothing were feats fit more for legend and story than reality. But Rawlinson was real and, if anything, even more remarkable than my limited knowledge of his accomplishments had suggested. Nominally, the book is a biography of Rawlinson, with a strong focus on the period he spent in Iran (or Persia, as it was called then) and Iraq (then under Ottoman rule). But, in fact, it is the story of a Great Adventure that completely revolutionized our knowledge of human history in ways that is almost beyond imagination for us in the 21^st century. And it is told by the author with great skill and verve in this gripping book. This article too is not intended as a book review, but rather as a general reflection on archaeology and how it has changed the world, albeit seen through the work of Rawlinson and his peers.

There is certainly something to the trope that our vast knowledge of the world has taken away some of its magic. No longer being able to say “Here be dragons” has, in effect, killed off the last dragons, and left us to look for them in pages of fantasy or Game of Thrones. And what is true of geography is also true of history, though in a far less complete way. There are still plenty of unvisited places in time past, and teasing out information about those places remains one of the most exciting adventures for the human intellect. In the list of such quests, the one by Henry Rawlinson and his peers was surely one of the greatest.

Imagine the state of historical knowledge in the early 16^th century. Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus – and others who shared their lands – derived most of their knowledge of ancient history from scripture and tradition. Time itself was uncertain. Some – using Biblical calculations – believed that the world was 6,000 years old. Others clung to stories of vanished civilizations of indeterminate antiquity, or put their faith in cosmic philosophies of ages past, present, and future. The Chinese, as one of the most culturally continuous civilizations in the world, had perhaps the longest tradition of true historiography, but even that only went back no more than 4,000 years or so, and dealt only with Eastern Asia. For the West – and for much of the Muslim world, which ultimately derived its intellectual capital from Greek sources – concrete history went back to Thucydides and Xenophon and then to Herodotus. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

One of my favorite science fiction novels is “The Black Cloud” by Fred Hoyle. It describes an alien intelligence in the form of a cloud that approaches the earth and settles by the sun. Because of its proximity to the sun the cloud causes havoc with the climate and thwarts the attempts of scientists to both study it and attack it. Gradually the scientists come to realize that the cloud is an intelligence unlike any they have encountered. They are finally successful in communicating with the cloud and realize that its intelligence is conveyed by electrical impulses moving inside it. The cloud and the humans finally part on peaceful terms.

There are two particularly interesting aspects of the cloud that warrant further attention. One is that it’s surprised to find intelligence on a solid planet; it is used to intelligence being gaseous. The second is that it’s surprised to find intelligence concentrated in individual human minds; it is used to intelligence constantly moving around. The reason these aspects of the story are interesting is because they show that Hoyle was ahead of his time and was already thinking about forms of intelligence and life that we have barely scratched the surface of. Read more »

Unknown artist. Zuljanah (devotional folk art related to Moharram).

Digital photograph by Sughra Raza.

Thanks to Sara Suleri Goodyear for finding this poster in her collection.