by Priya Malhotra

Virtue wasn’t always gentle.

In ancient Rome, virtus was a word of force and visibility. It came from the Latin word vir, meaning “man,” and encompassed ideals of military bravery, civic leadership, and public excellence. A virtuous man was someone who acted decisively in the public sphere—whether in war, politics, or the courts. Virtus was not about goodness in the moral sense. It was about fulfilling one’s public role with courage and competence. The term belonged to action, and it was earned through what one did, not what one avoided.

But like many powerful words, virtus changed as it traveled. As Latin gave way to the languages of medieval Europe, and Christianity replaced classical philosophy as the dominant moral framework, the term began to morph. Virtus became vertu, and then “virtue.” Its meaning narrowed, softened, and interiorized. Instead of valor, it came to suggest moral purity, humility, and patience. Instead of a call to public greatness, it became a standard of private behavior—especially for women.

By the late Middle Ages, “virtue” in women had become nearly synonymous with chastity. It was a euphemism for sexual propriety, and a woman’s moral worth was often judged not by her integrity or courage, but by whether she had preserved her virginity, and later, her marital fidelity. Her virtue was not something she earned through action, but something she was expected to carry—like a fragile inheritance, one that could be irreparably lost. The woman who guarded her virtue was good; the one who “lost” it, no matter the context, was fallen.

The consequences of this shift weren’t merely symbolic. They shaped how women were viewed, valued, and remembered. A woman’s virtue could determine her marriage prospects, her reputation, and her legal status. It was both an irrevocable statement of her morality  and a form of social capital. And over time, traits such as restraint, silence, and obedience became associated with female virtue.

This didn’t mean women completely lacked agency or complexity. They made difficult moral decisions constantly—often in conditions of constraint. But there was scant moral language to describe and give credit to those decisions or actions. Only when a woman’s strength came in the form of patience or sacrifice, was it sanctified. However, when it came in the form of autonomy or ambition, it was seen as far from praiseworthy.

You can see this dynamic clearly in the story of Penelope, queen of Ithaca in Homer’s Odyssey. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Freedom, high-day!
High-day, freedom!
Freedom, high-day, freedom!

1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do with Shakespeare or something to do with drama. So, accepted into the program were set designers, costume makers, stage managers, and teachers. I had been teaching Shakespeare, by a quirk of good fortune for 20 years or so then. (As a young teacher I was walking down the department halls when the department head stuck his head out of his office, saw me, and said, “Nils do you want to teach Shakespeare next semester?” One of the regular teachers of it had just gotten a sabbatical.) So now I was going to be an actor and I was going to try out for the role of Caliban. A professional actor was going to play Prospero.

I was 6’6” then, skinny, with a voice that had done much singing. I spoke, I guess, with the lilt of an east coast academic who had spent a lot of time reading poetry out loud though now in California. I tried roughening my voice in the audition, as I did when teaching the play, and succeeded to some degree, but the role went to another man who had a wooden leg. The director had the idea that he would have the man take off his leg, walk around with crutches, and a fishtail would dangle where the leg had been. Caliban was, after all, half man half fish according to one of shipwrecked sailors who saw him. Also, the director found my voice most suitable for the court party. He also imagined a priestly quality to my bearing, so I ended up as the “good Gonzalo.” My costume was a beautiful, flowing, blue robe. I looked a little like a young Gandalf. I could have been Nils the Blue.

There were two women who tried out for Ariel and the director needed to fit them both in for there were no other roles available. He solved his problem by having them both play the part at the same time speaking the lines together but not quite in sync. That gave the words an unworldly mysterious feeling quite suitable.

In the play, the king is in a deep depression because he thinks his son has drowned in the sea during the shipwreck that opens the play. It is Gonzalo’s job to try to cheer up the king so he won’t do something desperate in his despair. The actor who played him had just come through a bad divorce. So, just as Gonzalo in the play tried to cheer up the king, so was Nils in real life trying to cheer up the actor who played him, would take him golfing in the afternoon and for a beer afterwards so he could unload his sorrows. Read more »

Storm clouds rolled in just as the sun was setting in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Christopher Hall

It is now close to 20 years since I completed my Ph.D. in English, and, truth be told, I’m still not exactly sure what I accomplished in doing so. There was, of course, the mundane concern about what I was thinking in spending so many of what ought to have been my most productive years preparing to work in a field not exactly busting at the seams with jobs (this was true back then, and the situation has, as we know, become even worse). But I’ve never been good with practical concerns; being addicted to uselessness, I like my problems to be more epistemic. I am still plagued with a question: Could I say that what I had written in my thesis was, in any particular sense, “true?” Had I not, in fact, made it all up, and if pressed to prove that I hadn’t, what evidence could I bring in my favour? Was what I saw actually “in” the text I was studying?

These were concerns that no doubt had their origin in my set of personal neuroses. I had, in fact, done pretty much everything that was required of me. I had made close readings of text, found hidden parallels and contradictions, looked at the minutiae of the language used and connected those to the overall structure of the text. I had used and responded to previous criticism of the work. I had found analogues of the language in the text in previously written works, some not to that point discovered. I had, in short, done the work, and my committee seemed confident enough to sanction the addition of some letters behind my name.

But still. What “truth value” did my work hold? It could not, reasonably, be “replicated” – literary studies do not proceed by trying to discover if a given reader could come to the same conclusions I did independently. There was no p-value, no null hypothesis for me to overcome. None of the trappings of scientific solidity – which, fair enough, can have their own issues – were available to me. I knew, and know, that asking for such levels of evidence is pointless and counter-productive in literary criticism. But it seemed – and to some degree still seems – to me that between science and “making stuff up” there lies no graduated approach to truth – merely a massive abyss. It remains the case that we have difficultly articulating how non-scientific disciplines say things that are true without needing the scientific method to do so.

Jonathan Kramnick’s 2023 book Criticism and Truth is one of a series of recent attempts to do precisely that, and in it there is much to praise. Read more »

by Lei Wang

I solemnly swear this is not a column complaining about my parents.

But the first time I listened to this ten-minute meditation on Imagining Ideal Parents by the clinical psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dan Brown, I cried the entire way through. Also the second, third, fourth, etc. times.

“Imagine yourself as a young child, only in this scene, you grew up in a family different from your family of origin,” Dr. Brown begins in his matter-of-fact manner, “with a set of parents ideally suited to you and your nature…” He continues asking you to imagine: parents who are perfectly attuned to your unique being—your internal state and not just your behavior—who are protective but not over-protective, and who are delighted and unthreatened by your discovering your sense of self, even if that self is very different from them. Parents who have no agenda for you.

I was confused at first about the premise of this meditation because I was still under the impression (a few years ago) that meditation is about accepting reality exactly as it is, and what good was this imagining anyway? Wouldn’t my mind compare these ideal parents to my very human ones and begrudge the gap even more? Wasn’t it just wishful thinking? But Dr. Brown wrote a comprehensive textbook on attachment disorders, and a good part of healing, apparently, is using imagination to create new possibilities, even for the past. Imagining can replace negative experiences with positive ones, giving one’s brain new grooves to groove in, especially when there are also emotions involved (my crying is productive!).

But I still felt guilty. Because I have to admit: when I first started following the meditation, I found myself imagining without realizing it a white, possibly even European family of origin for myself, loosely based on the families of some of my fancy college classmates, where the dad was some benevolent entrepreneur who understood how the world worked and played with investments that allowed him to be both wealthy and home a lot and the mom was a successful artist who still had plenty of energy to nurture and entertain with Barefoot Contessa recipes. I imagined not only an aesthetic, uncluttered house very different from my home of origin but a library and generational wealth.

THIS is what I wanted from my parents? How shameful. But of course what I really wanted was for them to have had a life where they felt safe and secure, instead of being flummoxed as immigrants in the new world while missing the old. What I wanted was for them to care about frivolous things like emotions and life purposes, and to do so, I had to imagine them as different people entirely. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

The first time I tried to take a shower in Italy, I stubbed my toe, tripped, and smacked my face into the shower wall. In fact, I did that pretty much every time I took a shower there. Turns out it is not that uncommon there to have a 4-inch barrier that you have to step over to get into the shower.

I also hit my head frequently while there. I had a leg cramp from trying to bend it far enough to sit in the tiny seat of an otherwise capacious boat. Somebody said to me, “Your height is a real disability here.”

I thought, “Is it? Could it be?” I’ve been told all my life that being tall is a good thing and I’m not that tall (6’4’’). What makes something a disability? Is just any kind of inability a disability? Could it be less a matter of who you are and more about the environment – and/or how you are treated by others? It turns out that one of the most important disputes in Disability Studies concerns whether disability must be a “bad” difference – or a “mere” difference. Let’s look for that fault line by trying to define disability.

One definition of disability is any departure from normal functioning. But that can’t be right. Perfect pitch, exceptional athletic ability, or mathematical genius are departures from normal functioning.

How about disability as a negative departure from normal functioning?

There are negative departures from normal functioning that we don’t call disabilities; genetic susceptibility to a disease, being very tall, being abnormally bad at basketball or math. But there’s a bigger problem with this definition. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

To be capable of honesty, every dirge must contain an intimation of joy and every encomium has to gesture towards despair. Definitionally, were the melancholic lyric not to suggest the possibility of happiness – even if it’s lost happiness – than it wouldn’t be melancholic, merely depressing. And were the joyful poem not haunted by the specters of loss, it would be disingenuous, mere pablum. The greatest verse expressions of experience must dwell between the extremes, must intertwine the poles of human emotion. Poet Ross Gay’s work is known for its exploration of gratitude, wonder, and ecstasy without ever reducing the complexity of those things into the merely maudlin. His is a poetry that insists on the possibilities of happiness, not in ignorance of the existence of that emotion’s opposite, but in spite of it. Poems such as those within his 2011 collection Bringing the Shovel Down embody the promises of joy, and the reverent, divine, transcendent dwelling amidst that feeling, even if it happens to be fleeting. Gay’s “Sorrow is Not My Name” is an exemplary example of both this theme and his technique of describing joy by alluding to its opposite.

As a rejoinder to all the sad, young literary men, the lyric is a direct answer to any sense that poetry exists only to plumb dejection and sadness, but the title makes clear that dejection and sadness are very real things, nonetheless. By titling the poem “Sorrow is Not My Name” rather than “My Name is Not Sorrow,” Gay foregrounds the theme of sorrow, even as he negates it. It’s a rejection of dwelling in sorrow, even as the poem only can work as it does because it’s unsparing about the reality of sorrow. “No matter the pull toward brink. /No matter the florid, deep sleep awaits,” begins Gay’s poem. Telling that a lyric ostensibly in rejection of the idea of sorrow begins with two negations. The first line is framed by a parallelism that sees two capitalized instances of the word “No;” the repetition of that word before the line break allows for it to exist momentarily alone, a grand and solitary nothingness in the very first line.

The fragmentation of the first grammatical sentence in the first line makes clear that this remains a poem of rejection. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Colorscape, Celestun, Mexico. March 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by David Beer

Lana Del Rey exists in a meticulously crafted world of her own. It’s a world apart. I purchased an invite to drop-by this summer, so that I might glimpse its finer details. Along with the crowd at the Anfield stadium in Liverpool, I was standing at its perimeter, gazing inwards, wondering. The atmosphere seemed rarified, there were even lily pads on the custom-built pond. 

Afterwards, standing in the well organised queue for the shuttle bus, it occurred to me that Lana Del Rey is an artist suited to these baffling times. That’s not to say the music is escapism, it’s much more artful than that. It may be a bubble, but it has far greater intricacy than we expect of pop, and a depth of ambiguity too. Spinning at about 80 beats per minute, it’s an alternative planet. The music comes packaged with a possibility of being somewhere else, of joining an inner sanctum. This other time and space brings a promise of leaving things behind. 

The show was quite a spectacle. The stage was deeply dressed with trees, plants, a pergola, candelabra, that pond, and a full-scale wooden house. There are details everywhere, fleshing-out the little ecology of the stage.

The house itself, I assumed, was supposed to be idyllic or perhaps even quaint, yet squint and it might be the type of place Norman Bates’ mother is silhouetted at the window. When preparing the stage prior to the event, one of the road staff carefully cleaned those windows. Or perhaps the structure had been rescued from the studio lot of one of the Scream franchise films. There is a slight undercurrent to it. Though it does provide a space of sanctuary, a closed-off part of the stage that the crowd cannot see into. Read more »

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao
If you name it, it’s something else
What can’t be named is eternal
Naming splits the eternal to smithereens
………………………….. —Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC

Lao Tzu’s Lament

At first I think, I’ve got it—
Then I think, Oh no, that’s not it.

I think, it’s more like a flaming arrow
shot into the marrow
of the bony part of everything
………. but some summer nights
………. it’s hanging overhead so bright.

Then right there I lose it,
let geometry and time confuse it,
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing,
………. but some summer nights
………. it’s croaking from a pond so right.

Then again I lose it,
let theology and time confuse it,
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing.

Sometimes I think, I’ve lost it,
though I never could exhaust it,
because it’s lower than low is,
and wider than wide is,
deeper than deep is,
higher than high is,
………. but some fresh spring days
………. it’s cuttin’ through the fog and the haze

………. I’m thinking I’ve been here before
………. feet two inches off the floor
………. thinking, is this something true?

Jim Culleny, 7/15/15

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by Steve Szilagyi

How would you act as a great ship slipped beneath the waves? Freeze? Panic? Leap into the sea? If you were a man, would you quietly help women and children into the lifeboats? We all wonder. Elbert Hubbard wondered too. In 1912, less than a month after the Titanic vanished into the Atlantic, he sat at his desk and wrote The Titanic, a vivid imagining of the ship’s final moments. He studied the behavior of the wealthiest passengers, John Jacob Astor, Benjamin Guggenheim, George Dunton Widener—and found it good.

“There was not a single case of flinching—not one coward among the lot. The millionaires showed themselves worthy of their wealth,” Hubbard exulted. He reserved special admiration for Isadore Strauss, heir to the Macy’s fortune, and his wife, Ida. When offered a place in a lifeboat, Ida refused to leave her husband. “All these years we have traveled together,” she said. “And shall we part now? No, our fate is one.” The two were last seen walking into their stateroom, arm in arm, to meet death side by side.

Most of us will never face that test. But Elbert Hubbard did. Three years later, he and his wife Alice were first-class passengers on the Lusitania’s final crossing. And when German torpedoes tore through the liner’s hull, Hubbard found himself living the very scenario he had once so confidently narrated. How would he face it? Did he flinch?

Before departing, a friend warned him of the danger. Hubbard waved him off. “I have no fear of going down with the ship,” he boasted. “I would never jump and scramble for a lifeboat.”

Brave words—but Hubbard was above all, a man of words. By then, he had moved perhaps a hundred million copies of a pamphlet called A Message to Garcia, delivered countless lectures, and built a public persona as an oracle of success. Admirers called him an inspiration; critics called him a huckster. He was hard to categorize, slippery to define.

To understand how he ended up on the deck of a sinking ship, we need to return to where his journey began. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Today’s modest topic is the future of the West. Will it end in a bang, whimper or maybe just sort of muddle through in some zombie stagger? Whatever happens, a quarter of the way through the American Century, the standard of liberal democracy we hoisted as global inevitability twenty years ago hangs by the scruff of the neck and its enemies are eager to boot it straight into irrelevance.

Let’s consider each side of the transatlantic alliance. The NATO summit, the yearly expression of North Atlantic muscle held last week in the Hague, illuminates the Europeans.

And to set the table, when you have five minutes, listen to John Cage’s 4’33”. Not many musical compositions can capture the spirit of an allied summit, but this one does.

THE EUROPEANS: Shortly before ten o’clock on a Tuesday morning in June, Mark Rutte entered the World Forum Convention Centre auditorium in The Hague to open the NATO summit. He might have chewed his nails in the limo; he surely dreaded this meeting of the most powerful leaders on his continent, with the North American they depend on.

The Americans created the alliance he leads. The Secretary General’s mission was to keep the founders of NATO from taking their troops, weapons and military capabilities and going home.

Rutte labored since he took the job to make this meeting a success. In June alone he visited Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Italy, Sweden and attended the G7 in Canada, trying to pull together and hold tight to NATO cohesion. Now, on a mild summer day with a gentle wind off de Nordsee, the longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history welcomed the allies to his hometown. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

One of the last of the traditional wood craftsmen in New England was born in the nineteen-fifties outside Boston, appropriately, historic home of many spindle turners and chair caners, lumber joiners and paint-stainers. His most vivid memories of the period involve his grandmother’s house in Cambridge, including the smell of cabbage from her tenants boiling dinner in their kitchenettes. After his parents’ marriage and his birth, the family lived on the first floor of her house for several years before moving further out of town. Unbelievably, even though he would have been only around two years old at the time, he remembers the fancy wallpaper that was still in the room and all the original woodwork having been painted white from earlier owners who had tried to un-Victorianize the old house.

Throughout his childhood he would frequently visit his grandmother’s house, and he can describe the layout of the place even though he was less than eight years old at the time. The structure was a late nineteenth century three-storey, mansard-roofed tenement building that was originally a single-family home with a carriage shed. The second floor consisted of three great rooms with double doors that his grandmother shared with tenants. His father had built a wall to make a little room four feet wide between two big rooms to function as a kitchenette for one of the tenants. The room he stayed in as a boy on the third floor was only large enough to accommodate a three-foot wide bed, an armoire, and a chair. He understood at the time that the room’s small size corresponded to the layout of the bathroom below and that the diminished ceiling was caused by the pitch of the mansard roof above. He claims to be able to draw the entire house from memory to this day. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

As the days get longer and warmer and more humid, and the early spring flowers start to bloom, and the flowering trees show their finest… there’s an anticipation in the air…Then suddenly one morning you hear it—the birdsong is back. After a winter of silence you can now hear the birds. The migratory birds are returning from the south.

The towns that lie at the southern end of Lake Michigan have a special significance for migratory birds, because we are along the main flyway. As the migratory birds fly north they come upon a large body of water they must cross—lake Michigan. Tired of flying almost non-stop, eating insects that they catch on the wing, avoiding predators, they stop. They stop at an area with an abundance of trees, and they find wetlands, fields, gardens, and even birdfeeders remembered from last year. Refreshed, some resume flying around or over the lake headed to their ancestral homelands; others decide to remain in the area and breed. Because birds of the same species tend to move north at about the same time they arrive within a few days of each other. Because of the relatively large number of birds of the same species, finding a mate is straightforward.

This year I was fortunate to have several birdhouses and feeders under the eaves in front of the house, near a window where I generally sit and do my writing. I was able to follow the nesting and breeding behavior of several species of birds—the black-capped chickadee, the house sparrow, and the ruby-throated hummingbird. These birds are known as altricial birds, which are born blind and featherless, as are most of our songbirds. Other birds, such as fowl and waterbirds, fall into the precocial category: they are born with feathers and eyes open, and are independent and mobile a few days after hatching. I was interested in parental behavior and the division of labor between the sexes in caring for altricial birds, as they require a lot of care before they are able to live independently. Read more »

by Richard Farr

My sister and I live five thousand miles apart, but since we both reside in the early twenty-first century it’s easy to stay in touch. Of the many channels available to us we use WhatsApp messages mostly, with a call once a week or so. You might wonder then why we have chosen to revive the old old habit of writing letters to one another. The answer is not far to seek — it’s inefficient.

Fifty-some years ago, growing up in rural England, our parents had a black GPO 700-series telephone that weighed as much as an iron kettle. A settled part of the Christmas ritual was to book a call in advance with the International Operator, gather around at the appointed hour, and spend not a second more than three minutes very expensively exchanging the season’s greetings with our cousins in Ottawa.  

Nobody wants to go back to that, but in leaving it behind we lost something. As we have learned from the instant availability of all music, freedom from constraint has costs. We anticipated those special moments of communication, viewed them from various angles, and discussed them in advance. So it is with writing: we used to think about it. Now we drop texts and emails by the bushel, like overloaded September trees. Our devices have made it easy for us to “communicate” almost literally without a thought. 

People who write for a living, and therefore need to write with care, often report that their work is frustrating, irksome, paralysingly difficult, and at the same time comforting, exhilarating, and as optional as oxygen. Somerset Maugham: “We do not write because we want to. We write because we have to.” Red Smith: “There’s nothing to writing. All you do is sit sown at the typewriter and open a vein.” George Orwell: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.  One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 

Orwell is only half correct about my demon. I can’t resist it, but I understand it pretty well. Many aspects of the world and my place in it are puzzling to me; itching for enlightenment, I’m forever attempting to think about them. But I’m bad at thinking: trying to think is a recipe for staring out of the window. The subject could be what’s happening in the Middle East, whether we have free will, or why Chapter Fifteen of the novel I’m working on has become so truculent and unbiddable. In each case, it’s only when I put my head down and write (and write, and delete, and rewrite) that actual thinking occurs. On a good day, careful, intricate writing allows me to approach careful, intricate thinking. Not often. As the historian David McCullough put it, “Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That’s why it’s so hard.”

Good writing can be casual, though, and the written personal letter is a gloriously special form because of the opportunity it offers us — unlike the two years on a novel or the two minutes on an email — to find a line between casualness and care.   Read more »