by Rafaël Newman

Morgan Meis, The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (Slant Books, 2020)

Reviewing a new translation of the Iliad, the military historian Edward Luttwak speculates about the enduring popularity of the ancient epic:

Why are our contemporaries so keen on buying and presumably reading the Iliad’s Iron Age reminiscence of Bronze Age combat? Publishers certainly view it as a paying proposition: at least twenty new English-language translations have been published since 1950, not counting ones from private presses. In Greece, as in Italy for students of the liceo classico, it is a compulsory school text (several modern Greek versions also serve as cribs), but why are the passengers at Terminal 2 in San Francisco buying the English versions? Uniformed and desert-booted soldiers are a common sight in US airports – the uniform secures lounge access and early boarding – and it is a fair surmise that warriors and would-be warriors, these days more often college-educated, are war-book buyers, of which the Iliad is the echt and ur. Some of course – nasty fellows – would widen the explanation by seeing Americans as a whole as war-lovers, hence war-book addicts, hence Iliad buyers. That’s lame to begin with, for there are countless ways of getting that fix much more easily than by reading 15,693 lines of hieratic verse bound to offend military history buffs, because of … the extreme, pervasive emotionalism – all the weeping wives of other war books are outdone by the floods of tears of Homer’s greatest warriors…

For the ancient heroes in Homer’s epic – Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus – are indeed often to be found weeping, whether in conventionally lachrymose settings, such as over the death of a comrade in battle or at a funeral, or when enraged and frustrated at the indignities visited on them, or, signally, when recalling their own brilliant past and lamenting their impending mortality, and subsequent obscurity. Read more »

by Ram Manikkalingam

It was December 1999. Two years before the attacks on the Twin Towers by Al Qaeda. I landed at Geneva airport and checked into my hotel. I was on my way to Colombo. I had stopped in Geneva to meet David Petrasek. I had never met him before. But I knew that he was working on a project on the human rights violations of armed groups. Human rights activists in Sri Lanka were struggling with the violations of the Tamil Tigers. The Tigers controlled territory and ran a de facto state in the North. While people on the ground in these areas were dealing with the oppressive rule of the Tigers through small scale resistance or highlighting their violations, there was no coherent international framework in human rights to confront the violations of armed groups, other than the laws of war. But these dealt with fighting and its impact on civilians and soldiers, not with the behaviour of non-state armed groups in other situations.

States were wary of conceding that these groups controlled territory and managed quasi-governmental functions. Doing so would be an admission of weakness on their part. An admission that they did not control all of their sovereign territory. And many international human rights organisations, not to mention legal instruments laid primary, if not sole responsibility, for violations on the state. This was a legacy of the struggle against one party dictatorships in Eastern Europe and military dictatorships Latin America. But this was a far cry from reality. The lived experience of people in large swathes of Latin America, Asia and Africa was different. Many armed groups were not necessarily seen as freedom fighters struggling against oppression, but often as oppressive violators of human rights, themselves.

At that time, I was working at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. I was looking for innovative and interesting initiatives that connected local challenges to international efforts in the area of peace, security and human rights. I heard about David’s initiative and decided to meet with him on my way home to Colombo. David looked at the silences in human rights work – what were policy makers, human rights activists and scholars not talking about – either because of political bias, academic fashion or political correctness. David could not have predicted that two years later, on September 11^th, 2001, the issue of armed groups, their funding, and their actions, not to mention, their impact on world politics literally exploded on the international security and human rights scene. But David was already prepared as a thinker and an activist. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

In the wake of the pandemic, many people sense an opportunity to reimagine and rewrite public education so that it aligns with their particular political agendas. Progressives sense an opportunity to reassert the critical capacities of a democratic education. From the religious right, there is an attempt to blur the lines between secular and religious goals and needs. Neoliberals sense an opportunity to further privatize public education and align learning to the needs of capital. Democratic socialists sense an opportunity to recreate a system that can equitably distribute opportunity across race, class and gender. Technologists see the potential to create a techno-utopia of learning that is no longer constrained by terrestrial notions of time and space. Neoconservatives want to reclaim public education as the engine of white nationalism and free-market capitalism through the curricular standardization of “core” knowledge. What they all can agree on is the essential political nature of public education; it has always been a mirror that reflects the best and worst impulses of our nation. If you want to get a sense of a nation’s health, just look at its public education system. From the good and the bad to the downright ugly, our schools have always represented who we have been, who we are, and who we hope to be.

As the pandemic continues to rip back the curtain on economic and political inequality in the United States, it also has highlighted the nation’s failure to provide meaningful and equitable educational opportunities to all of our school-age children. With this in mind, I’ve provided a very brief and admittedly incomplete blueprint that might help at a foundational level guide all of those people–some more qualified than others–who are now sensing an opportunity to reimagine public education. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Neon Lichen Expressionism, 2015.

Digital photograph.

by Akim Reinhardt

I’ve taught shittily these last two months. That’s nothing a teacher ever wants to admit and normally has no excuse for, but these are not normal times.

I work at a public university in Maryland. There are multiple layers of bureaucracy, not all of it always terribly efficient. Maryland is a border state, and a senior colleague once described these university administrative processes as Northern bureaucracy meets Southern efficiency.

So you just knew that figuring out what to do about coronavirus was going to take a while. In all, there were two false starts before the final reckoning.

First they told us school was closed for the three days leading into Spring Break, but we would be back after that. Then, shortly before we were to return from the break, they told us the first two weeks back would not actually be “back”; instead, we would be teaching online. Some time thereafter, the third and final edict came down: we would be online for the rest of the semester.

I had spent my Spring Break planning to adapt my three different courses for two weeks of online teaching. I dove into it, coming up with the best plan I could for a limited disruption. Then, with not much time to adapt, I had to extend that two weeks into seven and a half. What to do? Read more »

by Timothy Don

The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I’m going to use this column to talk about the work of some of the artists and art professionals I have met in the Bay Area. I ask you to support artists wherever you find them and however you can.

An explosion has occurred; a cave at the mouth of a prospecting site has been blown apart. Surfaces and shards of color and rock float in undefined space. Lonely, fragmented, incoherent, they seem to be searching for an order in which to gather, a language that would speak their place and purpose in creation. Guided by forces unseen, they look for hinges, sympathies, and affinities. Everything is present, yet nothing makes sense—until a coalescence transpires. Rhythm and energy emerge. With almost gravitational intention, shapes find their place, nestle together, and are transfigured, returning to themselves and becoming once more glowing rock, moving stream, dark cave. The entire experience transpires in a mere four minutes.

Astrophysicists tell us that at the moment of creation, when the universe gave birth to itself with explosive and ever-expanding energy, everything that exists now was present then in an infinitely dense point. A singularity. A black hole. A primordial cave. Breach, which records the image of a cave being blasted apart and then reassembling itself back into a cave, suggests that the universe is best imagined as a kind of cosmic cavern. The universe gave birth to itself from a cave, and as it cools and condenses, it becomes a cave. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by John Hartley

One wet January I happened to attend a meeting of the Newman Association – a Catholic group concerned with ecumenism. Long tailbacks on the motorway meant the guest speaker, making his way from Birmingham, was delayed. When Archbishop Bernard finally appeared an hour later, I was deep in conversation with my neighbour, a slightly built octogenarian with dishevelled white hair and a brown blazer.

David Ieuan Lloyd, I learnt, had studied and taught alongside Rush Rhees, Peter Winch and R F Holland, Howard Mounce and D Z Phillips, Dick Beardsmore and David Cockburn, in what was known as the ‘Swansea school’. The Philosophy department of Swansea University first cropped up on my radar some years earlier, when İlham Dilman’s treatise on Free Will singlehandedly side-tracked my undergraduate dissertation!

“Yes, I knew İlham well,” Ieuan reflected.

“What’s the big deal with Wittgenstein,” I finally asked, “It just seems like a load of nonsense!”

Ieuan gave a wry smile and what followed led to a series of semi-regular coffee shop conversations. Our inaugural meeting was a Pandora’s Box of maxims, rabbit holes and tangents, of which Ieuan later reflected “I hope the time today was of some use. I wondered when walking back that I stayed too long on the scepticism matter. More positively, would it be an idea when we next meet that you write a short menu on what you would like to discuss.”

Over the course of eighteen months I came to understand something of the ‘Swansea School’, from the many second-hand stories of someone who lived and breathed it, long after its cessation. Ieuan once recalled a story Rush Rhees had told. Read more »

by Denis Robinson

Some philosophers I know seem to be engaging in a “this is what I work on in no long words” meme game. I’m retired and I don’t think I could have done it anyway. But in 2005 there was a wee game of that ilk, in which the aim was just to write some philosophy in words of one syllable. I wrote some thoughts I had had: short words but a long piece. I’ve taken this opportunity to make a couple of improvements I’ve long thought of. Here is the whole thing:

Some say it’s all just text and what it means must be as may be, no neat or sharp thoughts or claims which mean just what they say, no grand tales we can know to be true, just a mix of words which shift as we look at them or speak them or hear them some way or not, say “yes” or “no” to them, or play our word games with them just as we play our life games, fight our word wars with them as we fight our life wars, and so on and on and all this and that. If it takes text to say what text means, and then yet more text to say what that text means, and so on, how can it end but in text? At least in France.

But I say this. You can think of words as like tools.

So let’s think of tools for a bit. Stone age folks had a few rough tools, which would do a few rough jobs – split a rock, or a tree, or a skull, crush a nut, spear or skin a fish or a deer, store an egg or some seeds, light a fire, but all no more than fair for what few things they had to do. You might think a lot of rough tools could just make more rough tools at best. Not so. We now have lots of good fine sharp tools, which cut and draw and rule straight and true, we can make a neat screw bolt with a nut to fit tight on it, we can weigh a small wee bit of an ounce or a gram, we can build a plane or a ship or a great big house or mall or hall or bridge, we can see things much too small for the eye to see on its own, we can make small hard drives which store gigs and gigs of stuff, we can surf the net and phone some place on the far side of the world while still on line. We have tools which each do their own jobs well, just as we wish them to, more or less, and each new lot of tools lets us make the next lot yet more fine and use them for yet more things.

I say, so it went with words. It may be that once we had just rough blunt words as tools to speak our speech and think our thoughts. It may be that back then our thoughts, or at least our words and what they meant, were vague, not clear, a mix, like things seen in dreams. Our words would not add all that much to our ways of life, just help us share a bit, work a bit, play a bit, each with each, but all vague, each like a broad dim patch, not a bright spot or dot in the great field of things we might think or mean. But just as you can start with blunt tools and make tools that are sharp, you can start with dim thoughts and make thoughts that are clear, start with vague words and make words that mean things sharp and true, words that do well to state just what you mean and such that each one who knows those words knows what you mean when you say them. Read more »

Alpine meadow in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2020. See photo of how it looked three weeks ago in comments.

by Bill Murray

News from the leisure travel world is worse than grim. More than half of the 16 million travel industry jobs in the United States have been lost. On 14 April last year the TSA processed 2,208,688 air travelers. This year that number was 87,534. 

It’s the same everywhere. Da Nang saw a 98.5 percent year on year drop in visitors over Vietnam’s four day Reunification Day holiday. Ninety nine point nine percent fewer foreign visitors entered Japan in April than a year earlier. Planes are parked and ships are docked.

They outfit the American cruise ship industry in a low key shipbuilding town on the Bay of Bothnia in Finland. Turku shipyards built the world’s biggest floating petri dishes, the 360 meter long ships Oasis of the Seas and Allure of the Seas, for Royal Caribbean International.

Seventy seven thousand employees, Royal Caribbean had, until a virus as unfriendly to people as plastic to the sea torpedoed its heart, soul and balance sheet in three months flat. Maybe Turku can save its shipyard jobs by building hospital ships; Royal Caribbean may tread choppy water forevermore. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

Two months ago, COVID lockdown was still new; in the US it was horrific that 3,000 people had died and  I wrote about some possible longer-term technology innovation that might come out of  this crisis.  Fast forward to today and the US has just passed an unimaginable, grim milestone, 100,000 dead. And while states are starting to emerge, some slowly, some too quickly, from the most extreme aspects of the lockdown, it’s becoming very clear that some things may be changed permanently, or at least for a very long time to come. 

Back in March, I wrote about the resistance to telecommuting that I used to face from bosses and colleagues who questioned what I was really doing if I wasn’t sitting in the same space as them all day. One of the answers I’ve given over the years is that unless you’re sitting next to me all day long and looking over my shoulder at my computer, you don’t know what I’m doing most of the time anyway. Instead, you should judge me on my output.  Famously Marissa Mayer, on taking over Yahoo, banned telecommuting, “Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” the company’s human resources director told employees.” But the truth is, we all know how much time can get frittered away in offices with water cooler chatter and coffee break flirtations, endless seemingly pointless meetings and “quick” breaks to pop out and buy something.

Two months ago, though it seems like so much longer, I said, “we’ve all been thrust into a great social experiment to see just how productive, perhaps more rather than less even, the entire workforce will be working remotely.” Well, it’s Memorial Day weekend and the verdict is in: turns out, we’re all pretty productive, even more so than we were before in fact. We’re using the time that we used to spend showering and commuting to sit down with a cup of coffee and start responding to emails at 7 am. Even with the distractions of home schooling and sharing our spaces with partners and pets, it turns out that most people don’t need even the illusion of managerial constant monitoring of their physical selves to get them to do their jobs. And a lot of companies have taken note. More than that, they’ve realized just how much money they’ve saved as they’ve stopped paying for WeWork space, dropped pricey office leases and T&E has basically plummeted to almost nothing as we’ve all realized that we didn’t need to fly across the country for that one hour client meeting after all and instead could have conducted it on Zoom all along. Corporate America’s conclusion: if we can all be just as productive, maybe more so, sitting on our sofas AND they can save millions in expenditure, then let’s just keep doing this. Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi 

Today will mark the death of at least one hundred thousand Americans because of COVID. The science was clear. Lockdown. Stop movement. Distance. This would have stopped large numbers of people dying. In short, stopping the virus from becoming a pandemic meant pausing the profit principle.

The pandemic has laid bare the cruel and clear fact that pausing for people is not possible for capitalism. If the accumulation of capital is the primary principle, then humans in comparison to this hegemon are only inputs for its expansion and its accumulation—humans are interchangeable and dispensable while the hegemon of capitalism is supreme. And all else are in the service of ‘his’ malady.

Those who should have acted and acted fast and done everything they could, did not.  Even though they knew what the science was saying early on. All of them. Their Intelligence services were surely telling them what was going on in China? Or were they only focused on maximizing the sales of weapons?  A war on Iran?  If the Intelligence Services knew then why did lockdowns not happen earlier? Read more »

Jaun Roberto Diago. Sin título (Untitled), 2011.

More here, here, and here.

by Jonathan Kujawa

According to Johns Hopkins University, as of this writing, 315,023 people worldwide have died from Covid-19. One of those 315,023 was the incomparable John H. Conway.

At the age of 82 and with health issues, Conway was well within what the CDC euphemistically describes as “people who are at higher risk”. It was perhaps not unexpected that someday soon he would no longer be with us, but it was a shock to the mathematical world, nonetheless. Conway’s mathematical powers, irreverent style, and forceful personality made him a well-known and seemingly permanent feature of the mathematical community for more than sixty years.

When I was a graduate student twenty or so years ago, John Conway came to my university to give a series of lectures. Like many math departments, we had an endowed fund to bring in eminent visitors who were well regarded as both researchers and speakers. In our case, the standard format was for two talks: one for undergraduates and one for the faculty. In truth, this more often ended up being one for graduate students and faculty, and one for specialists. Not surprisingly, many mathematicians aren’t the greatest at making their talks accessible.

As the OG mathemagician, Conway had no trouble being accessible, interesting, and entertaining. That said, I must confess that I have only the dimmest recollection of the talks themselves. But I do remember the talks for a quintessentially Conway reason.

At the time the department had an honorary T-shirt which was given to speakers as part of the introductory activities. Nearly every speaker made the same joke. Without fail they would chuckle and ask if they were to put the T-shirt on immediately. We would politely laugh as if we hadn’t heard the same joke told by the previous week’s speaker.

Conway being Conway, he skipped right to the punchline and beyond. Conway stripped off his shirt, strode barechested across the stage in front the entire math department, pulled the T-shirt on, and dove straight into the beginning of his first lecture. Read more »

by Brooks Riley