by Max Sirak

Knowing what something is not isn't the same as knowing what it is. Being aware that red is not blue, the sky is not the ground, or that dark is not light helps us in the beginning. It lets us narrow down the field and start to figure out what red, sky, and dark actually are. However, eventually we need to stop defining things in the negative (by what they aren't) and begin to work in the positive (saying what they are) if we hope to gain any clarity.

Imagine what it would be like if we had to say “the not-red-green-purple-yellow-not-below-us-which-we-don't-stand-on-is-not-ugly-or-unattractice-in-this-not-dark-with-no-stars,” instead of “the sky's a pretty shade of blue today.” Communicating anything to anyone, including ourselves, would be a nightmare.

Knowing what something isn't is good. Knowing what something is, is better. One operates in the negative, the other in the positive. One leads to a startling amount of confusion in a short amount of time. The other helps elucidate and lets us pretend at sense-making. Which, if we're being honest, is about as good as it gets.

Falling Short

I bring this up for a reason. Until very recently, I didn't have any standards or metrics to measure the success of my life. Because – I don't live a conventional life. I'm 35. I don't have a girlfriend. I've never been married. I've never been divorced. I don't have any kids. I don't have a proper career. I'm not on a corporate track. I don't own a home. I don't have a 401k. All the traditional markers of success for a mid-30s life (house, spouse, career, kids, etc.) are noticeably absent from mine.

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by Elise Hempel

It's hard not to think about smiling these days, with all of the dental ads talking about it, with almost every dentist out there promising to give you “a healthy smile” or “the perfect smile” or even “a smile makeover.” A brief internet search reveals that many dentists are even using the word “smile” in the names of their practices. In Chicago, there's “We Smile Dental”; in California, “Beautiful Smiles Dentistry.” Here in central Illinois, we have, of course, “Central Illinois Smiles,” and also “Smiles Dental Center” and (yikes) “Creative Smiles” (I'd like mine the standard straight and white, please). One dentist in my town has a “Smile Gallery” on his website, with before and after photos of previous patients, all widely and happily smiling in their after-shots.

And for those who've never smiled before, there is this slogan from another website: “Start Smiling with Dental Implant Consultation Today!” In the world of dentistry, it seems, the word “teeth” is a thing of the past. Smiling is important.

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by Maniza Naqvi

The inclusion of a hijabi, her photo somewhat snarling, in between the covers of this October's issue of the Playboy magazine is a delicious illustration of our times. Playboy, much defended by men for the heft of its ‘articles', is not known for its penchant for contraptions of modesty and demure unless they heighten the libido of individuals engaged with themselves in their solitary pursuit of release. So, I am impressed that Playboy has settled the issue, of what the hijab is in the west. What is it about? The titillation of having dominated and crushed and won. Sex. And packaging it just right, fresh, clean, just a bit dirty, oh yeah. The symbol of the crushed, inviting domination.

The French, of course had figured this out way before everyone else did, after all, the French are known for their superior sense of all things au contraire and colonized. The French should know a thing or two about the turn-on of a veiled Muslim. Ah the colonies of Algiers, Tangier, and so forth. Alexandria. The Levant. After all French artists led the pack (Henri Adrien Tanoux, Georges Jules Victor Clairin, Auguste Adolphe, Eugene Delacroix and so many more) in Europe who imagined the harem and and committed their imaginary inmates to paintings.

The nikab'd and the naked. Naked and unnaked can they serve the same purpose? To provoke? It is interesting that it is in France that Muslim women are being forced to take off their cover. The country which prides itself on its wardrobes, is forcing Muslim women to disrobe. Well not surprising this, since it has always imagined Muslim women as naked.

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by Christopher Bacas

In Novokuznetsk, our hosts, the “Symphony Society”, a group of music-lovers, artists and bon-vivants, met us at the station. Among them, an accordionist with impeccable skills. Isolated in this far eastern town, he was hungry to play and produced his instrument soon after we arrived at the venue. His knowledge of Jazz repertoire was limited, his ears and virtuosity were not. I quoted “Stranger in Paradise”. He took that quote, a small section of a much longer work by Alexander Borodin, and seamlessly connected it to all its' original modulations and permutations. He nodded to me to join him and continue what I started, but I begged off, thoroughly schooled.

After the gig, the Society brought us to their clubhouse. It was rustic; a cross between a hunting and fishing lodge and an instrument shop. The table settings included a troika of bottled beverages: red wine, white wine and vodka; roughly a bottle per guest. The starters came on huge circular platters: pickled local vegetables (domestic produce from a brief, intense growing season): cucumbers, tomatoes, onions and carrots; roasted peppers, eggplant, beans, cured meats, cheeses and home-smoked local fish. Dill sprigs punctuated the glistening rows.

Toasting commenced, with vodka tumblers refilled on the turn. After two toasts, roughly six or seven ounces of liquor, I was finished. Thereafter, I held the glass to lips and tilted my head back; miming what the others did. The booze brutally burned my lips. Whenever a club member came to refill my glass I turned away and nodded my head, then glanced up to see his disapproving look. When the main courses, roast fish and meat with starches and more garnishes arrived, I was plenty drunk. Servers hefted tray after tray to the table.

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There's no doubt about it: conflict commands attention.

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by Holly A. Case

Croatian State Archives, main reading room

This story—a true one—is about a graphomaniac. I found him in the Croatian State Archives, Zagreb, where even the washrooms have signature tiles. Art nouveau beads drip from the lamps over the desks and carefully restored owls stare down from the tiled ceiling. The building, once wasted on university students cramming for exams, is now reserved exclusively for carriers of the twin fevers, bibliophilia and graphomania (that is, for historians), and is saturated with the smell of old paper and the dust of disintegration.

There, in a collection marked F. 227 MVP NDH Zagreb, 1941-1945, I came upon the chubby, bespectacled Vladimir Židovec (b. 1907), one-time lawyer and “first-class chess player.” His paper footprint filled folder upon folder, spilling over the edges of collections: foreign ministry, interior ministry, party archive, people's tribunal… I tracked him through the Second World War; shopped with him for his first tuxedo when the brand new German puppet known as the Independent State of Croatia sent him as its ambassador to Bulgaria; listened in as he and the Bulgarian prime minister talked politics over cabbage and pork cutlets; checked inventories of his state-furnished rooms in Sofia; bent over desks and tables as he wrote and wrote and wrote; and gawked at the Bulgarian social and political scene through his quirky “who's who” of Bulgaria.

Dimo Ačkov: “Knows Turkish well. Was a personal friend of Kemal Pasha [Atatürk].”

Dimitar Čorbev: “Very sly man. Some affairs have been mentioned in connection with his name. Good speaker.”

Georgi Genov: “Easily frightened. Hasn't left his house in the evening for a long time.”

Mihail Genovski: “Lately he has come under suspicion by the Germans. It is to be expected that steps will be taken against him.”

His documentary zeal vis-à-vis the lives of others left little room for details of his own person, so it was only in a folder of personnel files that I found certificates of recognition and praise from his superiors. My own assessment was similar, but for different reasons: One of his colleagues, the Croat ambassador to Slovakia, was barely literate by comparison, wrote few and uninformative reports, and got drunk and went to the beach, where he bawled out youngsters for going to the beach rather than joining the fight against the Soviets.

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by Richard King

When economist Branko Milanović first published his now-famous chart showing changes in global income distribution between 1988 and 2008 he furnished the world with a neat explanation for the various anti-establishment types now rocking the boat of Western politics: sandwiched between the Asian middle class and an increasingly bloated 1%—the winners from twenty years of “high” globalisation—the middle class of the rich world had been left behind and was voting in the rabblerousers. He also furnished it with a serviceable metaphor. From memory, it was Toby Nangle who first noticed that the chart resembled an elephant, and his inspired little graffito (below) twittered across the world in a flash. Journalists needed no further prompting. The chart was the elephant in the room … No: It was a sleeping elephant that threatened to wake up and destroy the joint … No: It was the eponymous pachyderm in the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant—a beast the nature and significance of which depended on which bit of it you happened to be feeling … And so on and so on.

Now the metaphor-making has entered a new phase. Responding to a report by the Resolution Foundation that seems to cast doubt on Milanović's data, or some of the interpretations of it, some commentators have declared the “elephant chart” irrelevant. Once called “the most important chart for understanding politics today”—the one gif you need in order to make sense of the current intersection of domestic politics and macroeconomic trends—it is now a liability, a statistical howler. Scribblers in the conservative sheets were especially keen to ventilate the report's findings and the presses ran hot with their picturesque efforts. The elephant had been shot, no, tamed …No: It had wandered off from the herd and gone in search of the elephant graveyard … It had packed its trunk and said goodbye to the circus. (Okay I made that last one up; but surely it's only a matter of time …)

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by Thomas R. Wells

Collective action problems pit individual selfishness against the collective interest in areas as diverse as pollution, trade, peace, and public roads. The invisible hand of the market can't reach them. Instead we need politics. The European Union used to be good at this. But not any more.

An example. Public goods like roads and schools and police are worth far more than they cost. We would all be better off as individuals if we each donated some portion of our gains from them into a collective fund for providing them. Unfortunately, we would each be even better off if we were able to escape paying our fair share while everyone else paid theirs. Then we would have our cake and be able to eat it too, to drive on the roads that other people paid for. But then only suckers would contribute, and so the roads wouldn't get built and we would all travel very slowly and inconveniently.

Collective action problems are mitigated rather than solved. The main approach is the one recommended by Hobbes in his classic statement of the problem: we call our donations ‘taxes' and appoint someone with a big stick to come along and make sure everyone pays. Introducing an external power ('the government') with the power to punish anti-social behaviour changes the pay-offs attached to our choice of whether to contribute to the public good. Now individual rationality lines up with rational collective choice and the roads get built.

There are however two alternative approaches to the Big Stick. We can institutionalise cooperation, for example by making it easier to make binding promises to each other. Or we can moralise it, by taking up a 'team' perspective and acting on the maxim, 'Act as I would wish others to do'.

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by Carl Pierer

As in any other academic field, outsiders as well as insiders often ask what do pure mathematicians actually do? What do they work on and how do they work? It probably does not help that whether the objects of study actually exist, or rather, what it would mean to say that they exist, is unclear. Who, then are the people who are drawn to this field?

It is notoriously difficult to make a film on intellectual work. Yet, there has recently been a surge in this kind of films: from Margarethe von Trotta's Hannah Arendt (2012) and Maria Schrader's Stefan Zweig: A Farewell to Europe (2016) to the more Hollywoodian Morten Tyldum's The Imitation Game (2014) and Matt Brown's The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015). The difficulty is really rather trivial: there is not very much to show about intellectual work. Somebody sitting at a desk, tearing her hair out? Typing a couple of words, only to delete three more sentences? Or the theatrical stare into the distance while chewing on her glasses? That hardly makes for a feature-length film. But the protagonists of these films are famous beyond their respective field. As some kind of ‘intellectual celebrity', their lives and characters have a special sort of attraction. There is a natural interest in their persona, maybe because of their work's status in general culture. To tell their story, then, is sure to attract interest, because their names have become a sort of institution. It is quite a different task to shoot a film on current, less glamorous and perhaps more ‘ordinary' research: the ongoing work of academics.

After the very well-received Colors of Math, Ekaterina Eremenko has recently come to Edinburgh to screen her most recent film The Discrete Charm of Geometry. Eremenko graduated with a masters degree in mathematics from Moscow State University in 1990, but later obtained a second masters degree in Film Directing from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography. She has directed a few documentaries before turning to films about mathematics.

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by Michael Liss

“Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,' we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”
—John Ellison, Dean of Students, University of Chicago

I was an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins University in the 1970s, a place and a time where the phrase “safe space” referred to the stocked civil-defense structures under the campus, and “trigger warnings” were letters you didn't want to be receiving from people in positions of authority.

I raise this not to launch into a “when men were men” rant, but rather because Dean Ellison's letter reminded me of two lectures I attended at JHU—the first given by Alger Hiss, the second, in connection with the receipt of an honorary LLM awarded by the University, by Princess Ashraf Pahlavi of Iran. Hiss, as people of a certain vintage would know, was a government and State Department official accused, in 1948, of being a spy for the Soviets. in 1950, he was tried and convicted for perjuring himself before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and jailed for three and a half years. He then spent the rest of his life protesting his innocence. Princess Ashraf was the once-exiled twin sister of the Shah.

Hiss's talk was fascinating. Tall, thin, balding, and wispy looking, his cultured voice a little grainy with age, he inhabited the stage—if I recall, he had a stool, but moved about a bit—with the ease of an actor. His memory was like an old library filled with leather-bound books. He would select an event, pull it out, find some passages to share, put it back, and move to the next volume.

He was playing before an easy crowd—liberal college kids and faculty who loathed both Richard Nixon and the McCarthy-Era mindset he sprang from. Watergate was burning up everything in sight, and the yin-yang of Hiss and Nixon seemed to illustrate the obvious innocence of Hiss. A profound injustice had been done—Hiss had been made to pay an enormous price (his career and his freedom) to satisfy the colossal ego, ambition, and paranoia of Nixon and a passel of self-appointed patriots who looked for Commies under every bush.

That is at least what we thought, when going into Shriver Hall. And yet, after hearing him speak, my friends and I left with more questions than we had when we arrived. There was something about Hiss, maybe his affect, maybe just a studied compartmentalization, a reserve that came from living a life too often in shadows and alleyways, that gave us a slightly clammy feeling. We didn't buy Nixon's accusations of Hiss endangering the fiber of American life, but there was the odd sense of not hearing the entire story, of things omitted, choices unrevealed.

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by Akim Reinhardt

Let’s be honest. 3 Quarks Daily isn’t the type of website that attracts many Trump supporters.

But that’s not just a 3QD thing. It turns out that online or off, most Clinton supporters have minimal contact with Trump supporters and visa versa. It’s a national phenomenon that speaks to the profound geographic and social segregation of partisan America.

Indeed, it’s probably a bit pointless for me to post an open letter to Trump supporters here. But honestly, I’m not sure where else to turn. After all, I don’t get to hoist monthly essays onto any Republican-leaning websites, and what follows is bound to be a bit too long for that modern day version of a Letter to the Editor, the beastly maelstrom known as a Comment Section.

So if you happen to be among that slim minority of Clintonistas who has real and meaningful interactions with Trumpatistas, feel free to share this with them, he said, like a pen pal in want of a postman.

Dear Trump Supporter:

I get it. Clinton supporters can be insufferable, condescending elitists.

I understand this on a personal level, just like you do. You see, even though I’m a kind of a lefty and kind of a liberal, I’m not actually a registered Democrat. So if they see you Republicans as the enemy, then they see people like me, who agree with them on many issues but don’t always vote Democrat, as apostates.

In their world view, it’s like we’re all living in that ghastly, disease-infested stink pot that was Medieval Europe. And in their super violent, smelly little fantasy land, they’re the Christians, you’re the Muslims, and I’m part of a tiny schismatic reform group. They’d love nothing more than to permanently take the entire Holy Land back from you and kill or convert every single Mohammadean. But it ain’t gonna happen. And they realize that no matter how much they hate you, and no matter how many murderous crusades they send to massacre your brethren, on some level they simply have to accept you and your ilk as the savage enemies they can never fully vanquish. So they’ll find a purpose for you. They’ll turn you into the permanent villains they can pour their hatred onto, the heathens they can use to define themselves as civilized.

It’s like you’re each other’s Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

We were so young back then.

Maybe that's why the absence of a shared language never seemed to slow us down much.

Arriving in Tokyo on Easter Sunday 1991, I was a recent college graduate and spoke no Japanese at all.

And Tetsuya spoke not a word of English.

In those days before smart phones and the internet (and with neither of us having enough money to buy an electronic device to help), we were stuck with his old student dictionaries to facilitate communication. He said they were from his 10th grade English class in high school. With their red leatherette jackets, one was Japanese to English and the other English to Japanese. We took them everywhere! In the early years, we hauled them in our bags all around Tokyo, placing them right in front of us at the table in restaurants and cafes; almost as if marking off the two worlds: English here and Japanese there.

We were endlessly looking things up. Too hard to read the foreign words out loud; one pointed to a definition, and the other read the translation, smiling and nodding— understanding at last.

Our romance with the red dictionaries lasted for ten years into our marriage; despite the fact that within a few weeks, we came up with our own means of communicating to supplement the dictionary definitions. Speaking a kind of made-up language, we disregarded grammar and often dumped the verbs (preferring to act those out in mime); he avoiding all pronouns, in the style of spoken Japanese, and me (having Italian blood) doing a lot of arm gesturing and pantomiming. We made do communicating in this manner, and the two red dictionaries became colorful accessories to all of our outfits—from formal gear to pajamas. And, although communication between us involved some physical effort, it was rare that one of us would feel frustrated at the inability to communicate something. Onlookers would laugh and shake their heads—perhaps attributing our ability to communicate without a shared language to young love.

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by Brooks Riley

We are born into a noisy world. For most of us, it starts right off with the cries and whimpers of our own Mum as she tries to help us tunnel our way out of the womb. What from inside may have sounded like the couple fighting next door, explodes into the full-blown cacophony of voices and diverse environmental clicks and clacks of the natal experience, once you’ve made it through the birth canal to the outside.

You can’t really see all that well yet, so what you hear is what you get: Voices, ‘Ooh, aah’, ‘it’s a girl,‘ the clatter of instruments the doctor is using, the slap on your bum to get you breathing, your own voice too, adding clarion outrage and high-decibel relief, and then the squeak of rubber-soled shoes as the nurse carries you to your mother’s arms or your first bed ever. I was spared much of the clatter, my mother opting for anesthesia, allowing me to emerge into a deceptively tranquil world.

In the realm of sound, music gets the most attention, deservedly so. Music is nothing short of a human triumph, the bending of sound into methodical systematic arrangements that manage both to please the ear and to give the listener’s brain a rush of emotion that it might otherwise never have experienced. It’s right up there with language as a supreme accomplishment of the species, but its greatest achievement may be its uselessness. Music is an evolutionary luxury, serving no known purpose in the survival of the species no matter how often you hum along to ‘I will survive’.

Noise, belonging to sensual imput without intent, is etymologically compromised, left well behind in the rush to music. As distinct from the word ‘sound‘‘, the word ‘noise’ means that what is being heard is unpleasant or annoying (the word stems from ‘argument ‘and ‘nausea’). As a single word with an article, however, as in ‘a noise’, it is neutral, a sound that may very well be satisfying to the ear after all.

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