by Paul Braterman

By chance, I chose as holiday reading (awaiting my attention since student days) The Epic of Gilgamesh, a Penguin Classics bestseller, part of the great library of Ashur-bani-pal that was buried in the wreckage of Nineveh when that city was sacked by the Babylonians and their allies in 612 BCE. Gilgamesh is a surprisingly modern hero. As King, he accomplishes mighty deeds, including gaining access to the timber required for his building plans by overcoming the guardian of the forest. But this victory comes at a cost; his beloved friend Enkidu opens by hand the gate to the forest when he should have smashed his way in with his axe. This seemingly minor lapse, like Moses’ minor lapse in striking the rock when he should have spoken to it, proves fatal. Enkidu dies, and Gilgamesh, unable to accept this fact, sets out in search of the secret of immortality, only to learn that there is no such thing. He does bring back from his journey a youth-restoring herb, but at the last moment even this is stolen from him by a snake when he turns aside to bathe. In due course, he dies, mourned by his subjects and surrounded by a grieving family, but despite his many successes, what remains with us is his deep disappointment. He has not managed to accomplish what he set out to do.

On his journey, Gilgamesh meets the one man who has achieved immortality, Utnapishtim, survivor of a flood remarkably similar, even in its details, to the Flood in the Bible. Reading of this sent me back to Genesis, and hence to two other books, The Bible [actually, just the Pentateuch] with Sources Revealed,   by Friedman, and The Ark Before Noah,  by Finkel. Friedman is Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia, while Finkel is curator of the British Museum’s collection of cuneiform tablets. Most of what follows derives from these two sources.

Comparing Hebrew with Cuneiform may seem like a suitable gentlemanly occupation for students of ancient literature, but of no practical importance. On the contrary, I maintain that what emerges is of major contemporary relevance.

As Lakatos pointed out, scientists will not abandon a position, despite difficulties, absurdities, and anomalies, until a more satisfactory one is offered. Why should the creationist be any different? He is led to embrace the absurdities of Young Earth “Flood Geology” because he regards the text of Genesis as the direct revealed word of God. If you want to change his mind, you must offer an alternative that is better on his terms, emotionally and spiritually. Such an alternative, I argue, is what emerges from textual and historical analysis. And in the Americas both North and South today, weaning the Evangelical voting bloc away from reality-denying simplicities is a matter of the greatest urgency. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

With the end of daylight savings time, the long, dark nights of winter slump over the land. It is the season for cold nights, warm blankets, and reading good books with a nice cup of tea (or a dram of scotch, if you prefer). Unless, of course, you live in Hawaii or the southern hemisphere, in which case you’ll have to content yourself with reading in a convenient hammock.

Popular math books are a sub-sub-sub-genre of nonfiction, found at a local bookstore in the Nonfiction-Science-Math-“Math? For fun? Really? Ok, if you say so.” section. Even within that narrow span of the bookshelf, you’ll find there are a wide variety of popular math books. Some ambitiously try to give you a sense of deep, modern topics of research like the geometric Langlands program or statistical mechanics. Although I suspect those mainly succeed in giving Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” and Piketty’s “Capital” a run in the category of many sold but few actually read. Other authors lean towards biography. While interesting and enjoyable reads, they are not often about math, per se. I’m looking forward to someday getting to Siobhan Roberts’ well-reviewed biographies of Coxeter and Conway. Both sound great! But such books necessarily can only hint at the amazing math their subjects have done.

Perhaps unavoidably, too many popular math books end up missing the mark. Trying to talk math without the technicalities, the authors are left leaning on old standbys like the irrationality of √ 2, Hilbert’s Hotel and the marvels of infinity, and picture friendly topics like fractals. It’s a bit like eating a big bowl of oatmeal: a whole lot of familiar filling with the occasional pleasant surprise mixed in. Not that I’m throwing stones! My house here at 3QD is built from its share of tired metaphors, mathematical and otherwise. Every person who writes about math knows the truism: every equation you include cuts your readership in half. But talking about math without, you know, writing down any math is darn hard. It’s like writing about music or poetry in strict essay form. Read more »

by Lexi Lerner

“They all go the same way. Look up, then down and to the left,” the EMT said. “Always.”

Why?

“I don’t know,” he said. “Well – I think they know. When they look up, they’re just… waiting.”

And the next part – why to the left? Because of the heart?

“I don’t know. Maybe something with blood pressure differences. Maybe something else. I really don’t know.”

I’m not living, I’m just killing time.[1]

It’s absurdly easy to take this life for granted. It’s so easy that I want to, so badly, all the time. The pitfall was built into its coding. So was the challenge: if I let life matter more, I choke.

What’s the worth of sitting in the grass, watching geese, or perhaps fireflies, for days or decades on end? Is it worthy of a lifetime? Where were the geese in my college classrooms? Where were the fireflies at my jobs? What’s the role of ambition? Ambition to do what?

We sat on a bench in Soho, watching a pickup kickball game.

“Is this fragile?” I asked her.

She looked through the chain link fence. The rubber ball sailed across the field; all heads followed its enormous arc. Both teams cheered heartily.

“Yes,” she said.

“Is it sacred?” I asked.

The bruised shadows of trees, the emperor sun behind them, the pigeons.

“Yes,” she said.

On a sun-spotted afternoon in a forest, I asked my dad if he missed his dad, who passed a few years ago.

Sometimes, it doesn’t really feel like he’s gone. More like, I haven’t seen him in a while, and we haven’t spoken in a while, but he’s just a phone call away. I find myself thinking, where’s Pa? Where is he? Read more »

by Nickolas Calabrese

Is art “a right or a privilege”? This question was addressed by a who’s who of artworld elites in a New York Times feature earlier this year with regards to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s revised policy to charge out-of-towners the full $25.00 admission fee rather than their standard pay-what-you-wish policy. Predictably, this group (many of them known for their overt political or moral activism, like Ai Weiwei) overwhelmingly endorsed its status as a right (there was one dissenter, but even that came with caveats). Perhaps one of the most prominent defenders of this view, because of her station and her institutional influence, is Aggie Gund, President Emerita of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She frequently states that “art is a right, not a privilege” (as she discusses in the beginning of this interview).

As framed here, it is unclear precisely what their statement is declaring. I understand it to mean one of two things: (1) Access to art is a moral right; that is, the belief that our ability to freely appreciate and produce art objects is, generally speaking, good and ought to be defended. This looks prima facie true to me. One would be hard-pressed to deny the moral good of the freedom to produce and appreciate art, barring extreme cases like hateful art, or propaganda attributed to and distributed by despotic regimes, such as the arts that Hitler or Mussolini championed in their lifetimes. This account would also be protective of art as a facet of free speech, which also seems like a mostly good thing. There is a more rigid account of art as a right, one which makes a more serious claim: (2) Access to art ought to be a legal right; that free access to museums and other institutions housing cultural artifacts should be legally guaranteed to citizens. I believe that this second usage is what is being suggested by Gund and the respondents in the NYT article, because the first claim is nearly unanimous, and anyone who would disagree with it is probably some kind of monster. But it is this second account that I am going to dispute. Read more »

by Craig Blinderman

On a recent windy morning, walking past the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on West 89^th Street in New York City, seeing the flag at half mast, just days before the midterm elections, and a week after the deadly shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, on my way to take my daughter to her dance class at Ballet Hispánico, I couldn’t help but reflect on the offensive and false rhetoric about the caravan of men, women, and children fleeing Honduras and other Central American countries, and the horrific outcomes when one takes such ideas seriously.

As a palliative care physician who also teaches in medicine, I have been trained—and train others—to understand pain and suffering, to understand its taxonomy, its causes, and how to reduce it when it occurs in individuals with chronic pain, a serious illness, or at the end of life.

I have also spent the past five years volunteering with Columbia Physicians and Surgeons’ Asylum Clinic, a student-run human rights initiative, working with Columbia medical faculty, to offer free medical and psychiatric evaluations to individuals seeking asylum in the United States.

My palliative care skills of listening to and understanding how individuals suffer with a serious or life-threatening illness has helped me to identify and document the ways in which individuals seeking asylum have suffered in their home countries; the impact their physical, emotional, psychological, and sexual traumas continue to have on their lives; and the risk to their physical and mental well-being should they be forced to return.

Aside from the physical and emotional pain, the suffering that asylum seekers, as well as seriously ill patients, are most tormented by is existential in nature. It is the fear of their own deaths. As Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote, “The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you’ll never have.” Unlike the patient with a terminal illness, the existential threat can be attenuated (at least temporarily) for the individual seeking asylum by simply not being sent back to their home country. Read more »

by Emily Ogden

Unfitness to pursue our research in the unfathomable waters. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

What are the forms of unknowing? Ambivalence. Diffidence. The open mind. The broken mind. The mind faced with the sacred. Deprivation of an education. Naiveté—or is it just youth? Objectivity. Credulity. Amateurism. Anti-intellectualism. Forgetting. Willful forgetting. Receipt of mercy, as when we say, it’s better if she doesn’t know.

Neither good nor bad, neither innocent nor strategic, unknowing in itself belongs neither to the right, nor to the left, nor even to the clueless, privileged middle. Yet forces conspire of late to make unknowing, both posture and reality, look like the exclusive territory of the reactionary guard. I do not think progressives should cede their claim to this common property of ours. For a little while, then—never mind how long; I’m not sure yet—this column will concern unknowing: when and why one might value it.

I am aware of how untimely such a project may seem, may even be. The Trump administration’s aggressive, racialized ignorance has reached literally world-destroying proportions. Seemingly the one kind of expertise toward which the US president does not maintain open hostility is criminal defense litigation, and that’s of necessity. Republican voters take pride in their know-nothingism—see “I’m a Deplorable” bumper stickers—and their critics agree, calling them uneducated, in denial about their white supremacist sympathies, or both.

While campaigns like #bluelivesmatter and climate-change denial weaponize obtuseness, the left assumes a defensive crouch and draws tight the mantle of its enlightenment. What other choice is there? To enter certain conversations—as for example about abortion or rape—unsure of what you think is often to be judged conservative. Only slightly less often, it is actually to be so. And thus knowingness becomes at times an affected signal, and at other times a reliable sign, of progressive politics.

But—but. Aren’t there forms of unknowing one might want to protect, even prize? Read more »

by Gabrielle C. Durham

When you consume a meal, do you eat cow or beef? Yes, these are the same, especially considering where they end up, but we tend to think of the cow as the beginning of this particular process, and the beef as the product. More of these pairings include calf/veal, swine or pig/pork, sheep/mutton, hen or chicken/poultry, deer/venison, snail/escargot.

The question: Why are the “baser” elements of Anglo-Saxon origin, similar to our curse words, whereas the results typically have French roots? As you rush to beat me to the answer with your pupil’s sycophancy, it’s all about the Battle of Hastings in 1066. When the Normans, aka the French, beat the snot out of the English, or Anglo-Saxons, French words started creeping into the language. The Norman words were considered more sophisticated (as in, poultry is fancier than hen).

This applies to other, more vegan-friendly options as well, such as beverages. In this case, sophistication may not be the goal, but pretension is the indubitable result.

Many of my kindred (editors) try to replace the Latinate or Romantic words with Anglo-Saxon words. Is it a linguistic form of nationalism? Not really, although I don’t read alt-right writing, so I could be wrong. The goal is to simplify text, reducing gratuitous verbiage where possible. Or cutting spare words. See how that works? Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

When a plane lands at Larnaca in Cyprus, as it rolls past the control tower one can glimpse on a misty horizon the lone pyramid of Stavrovouni mountain. The ugly airport tower then obscures the steep mountain and the ancient monastery on its summit. It could be a metaphor for modernity obliterating the spirit of places that once seemed mysterious and eternal.

It’s an hour’s drive from the airport to the sprawling concrete capital Nicosia and up and over the green passes of the Kyrenia mountain range. Then it’s a right turn east along the northern Mediterranean coast to the hillside village of Bellapais. A remarkable 12th-century Gothic abbey dominates the village and a couple of Crusader castles brood on the mountain ridge high above it. Even the names carry a whiff of ancient Gothic Europe – Buffavento, Hilarion, Bellapais. Carob, mulberry and cypress trees crowd around the ruins as they did when knights roamed the hills.

A few hundred metres up a steep path from the abbey is a small house, once traditional, now modernised. The abbey and the cottage are responsible for the tawdry trinket shops and banal tourist cafes that have all but wiped out the old village tavernas. The splendid abbey is an obvious attraction, but the unremarkable cottage? For the literary-minded, it has an equal fascination. In it was written one of the great portraits of a city in 20th-century English literature. Here in the early 1950s Lawrence Durrell reimagined and immortalised Alexandria of Egypt. It joined the Dublin of James Joyce and the Paris of Marcel Proust in literary legend. Read more »

by Joshua Wilbur 

Repetition, in itself, is neither good nor bad. Everything repeats. “Nature is an endless combination and repetition of very few laws,” said Emerson. Seasons come, and seasons go.

But what’s true for seasons isn’t true for people. We tend to prefer some forms of repetition to others. At its best, repetition is a great source of comfort and a precondition for mastering any task. The familiar rhythms of the Sunday church service are a balm to many, and it takes years of practice to throw a 98 mile-per-hour fastball that cuts in on a hitter’s hands at just the right moment.

At its worst, repetition means monotony and aimless toil: Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill for all eternity. Freud wrote of our “compulsion to repeat” the past, sensing that reenactment lies at the heart of everyday neuroticism, psychological trauma, and the most unnerving displays of madness—“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” writes Jack Torrance, a thousand times over, in The Shining.

In between these two extremes—between the master and the madman—repetition provides the unglamorous but necessary foundation of daily life. It’s the soundtrack of childhood: brush your teeth, tie your shoes, finish your homework, eat your dinner, and so on. By the time a person reaches adulthood, she has internalized an incalculable number of habits: some good, some bad, but most avoiding the sureness of a positive or negative judgement. Thanks to our neurological adaptiveness, we are constantly slipping into patterns without realizing it, and the unrelenting expansion of consumer tech has only opened more avenues for our habitual instincts. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

It could almost be a question on a very meta personality quiz: Do you prefer the Myers-Briggs typology or the Big Five personality traits? The Myers-Brigg Type Inventory is a popular tool that was developed outside of the scientific establishment by two women who did not have credentials in psychology. It’s qualitative rather than quantitative, and in the past decade or so, it’s been criticized as meaningless or unscientific. The Big Five taxonomy is widely accepted in academia and is the basis of much current personality research. It’s quantitative; in fact, it’s based on statistical analysis. Am I rejecting science if I continue to prefer the Myers-Briggs system as a key to understanding my own personality and those of others?

A quick refresher: the MBTI evaluates where you fall along four dimensions describing human preferences. Very roughly, these are introversion/extraversion, reliance mainly on sensory data or on interpretation, favoring intellectual analysis or feeling, and a preference for making decisions or for keeping options open. Your four-letter type identifies which end of each spectrum you are closest to; it doesn’t mean you’re 100% one or the other, but that you generally lean more toward one than the other.

A Big Five–based test, on the other hand, gives you a numerical score for each of five traits: openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. These traits emerged from lexical research in which words related to personality were extracted from an unabridged dictionary. The assumption behind the lexical approach is that languages will contains words to describe the aspects of personality that matter to people, and that the most important aspects will be captured by a single word. A statistical technique called factor analysis is applied to identify groups of words that are related. Several systems based on lexical analysis have been proposed since the first study using this technique appeared in 1936. Over time, the five traits we know today emerged from the analysis. Further research using psychological tests confirmed that people seem to be talking about the same things when they use each of these words. Each of the Big Five traits has specific aspects called facets. Read more »