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 »

by Adele A Wilby

It is difficult to remember a time over recent decades when a president of the United States (US) has created so much controversy and division within the US and challenged its  credibility and standing  in international relations as has the incumbent president, Donald Trump. Indeed, so bewildering to many is the election of a former reality TV star and dubious businessman without experience in government, to the high office of president of the US and ‘leader’ of the ‘free’ world, a plethora of literature to account for such a phenomenon has emerged. Similarly, commentaries on evaluations of Trump’s calibre and character, and just how far he is fit for such high office and powerful position in global politics, are plentiful. Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels can be viewed as a contribution to the literature on those issues.

Meacham is not concerned with examining the many sociological and economic factors that offer explanations as to why the American electorate put Trump in office, nor a critical examination of Trump’s suitability as president of the US. Instead, Meacham informs us Trump is not such an anomaly in terms of presidents of the US; ‘imperfection’, he reassures us, ‘is the rule not the exception’ insofar as US presidents are concerned. What differentiates Trump’s presidency from past imperfect presidents, in Meacham’s view, was their ability to dig deep into themselves and to rise above their personal views in the wider interests of the populace and the nation when required to do so, whereas Trump rarely has.

The history of the US, Meacham’s exposition reveals, is replete with presidents with nefarious political views and social practices that besmirch the US image of its own ‘exceptionalism’. Arguably, US ‘exceptionalism’ lies in the fact its founding fathers and past presidents, at crucial times in the nation’s history, challenged their own political views and veered on the side of social progress. Meacham reveals to us just how far US politics has historically epitomised a struggle between what he refers to as the ‘better angels’ and the ‘darker forces’ within past US presidents for it to emerge as the country it is today, until the election of Trump that is. However, Meacham reassures us that the ‘darker’ side of politics that Trump’s presidency represents for so many, will pass, and with the end of his time in office, the opportunity for the people to elect a president of a different calibre will occur again. How then does Meacham explain the assumption to office of Trump? Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

What do you prove by fooling somebody? What did Alan Sokal prove when he got his bogus paper on ‘quantum hermeneutics’ published in Social Text? What did Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian prove when they got several bogus papers published in several different journals?

Earlier this month three authors (to whom I will henceforth refer as ‘PLB’) published an exposé in Areo Magazine in which they explained how and why they had tricked several academic journals into accepting or seriously considering for publication hoax articles. The hoax articles often defend ideas that PLB themselves consider to be highly unethical, such as equating privately conducted masturbation with sexual violence, or calling for training men like we train dogs. The journals in question apparently condoned these ideas even though the articles intentionally lacked good arguments to support them.

According to PLB, this teaches us a lot about the postmodern left. I think it doesn’t. In the following, I will provide some comments on what our hoaxers claim they have shown, how little of that they have actually done, and what they could have done instead. I will start with a relatively minor point: whether PLB are entirely honest about what they’ve pulled off. My main point, however, will be that PLB simply fail to link their evidence to their conclusions. Read more »

by Max Sirak

Last fall, after a day spent hiking around the neighborhood, I ended up back on my porch with my buddy, Chef Mike. We were drinking beers and chatting about life.

We covered a lot of ground. Both in our walks and our talks that day. Mike was getting ready to move. He’d been in Colorado for five years and knew it wasn’t his “forever” home. As his name implies, he works in restaurants. One nice thing about that line of work is if you’re good, then you can peddle your wares anywhere. Oregon was his next stop.

At one point, when our conversation hit a lull, as conversations are wont to do, he turned to me and said…

*Chef Mike apologizes. It turns out he missed a word in this recording…

I was a pile of laughs before he even finished. “Dude?! What the hell?! What was that?!,” I managed to spurt out between giggles.

“It’s a Chinese tongue twister.”

To fully appreciate my response it might help to know a thing or two about Chef Mike. I was hoping to post a picture, those being worth the words they are, but he said he’d rather I didn’t. Instead he sent me his personal logo (featured above).

Mike’s in his thirties. He’s a good ol’ Italian boy from Chicago who’s built like a bear. Burly. 230 lbs. Six feet tall. Bearded. And, to the best of my knowledge in the course of our two-year friendship, Mike knew no Chinese. Read more »

by Christopher Bacas

The William Penn High School Marching band was a juggernaut, the coolest team in school. Its director, Holman F James, strode the football field, unzipped windbreaker, cigarette dangling, the Greatest Generation’s bandmaster. A sterling musician, he played trumpet and piano, wrote or arranged all the music and choreographed our field shows. He was also a solider, avid outdoorsman and master craftsman, everything Hugh Hefner should have been.

I got the band music months before our first rehearsals and trained myself to look away from the page as I played. At the first summer music rehearsal, more than two-hundred teens packed the band room. Mr James ran our opener. Sixty-odd woodwinds repeatedly muffed their way through his rapid figurations.

“Whoa. Whoa. Can I hear each of you on that?”

Everyone had a chance to show him our homework. I came prepared. Mr James used me to call out upperclassmen. He wouldn’t accept adolescent sloppiness. Anyone could receive a dressing-down: drum major, soloist or just a rank and file band member with dirty white shoes. Each week, we had uniform inspections and rehearsals on the field. Talking back was unthinkable. Particularly after a kid who cursed him felt Mr James’ dress shoe in his ass. We all watched tears drip from the kid’s eyes as he continued to stand at attention. Read more »

by Holly Case

A few years ago I found among my effects fourteen typewritten pages of prose fastened together by a rusty staple. A relic from the summer of 1996, the text was a guide to reading poetry. “It is impossible for me to write anything about the explication of poetry without pontificating a bit,” it began. The author was L., then a masters student in English literature at one of the state universities.

L. and his wife lived in a dark, forever-damp colossus of a barn that sat isolated on a flat plot in a shallow valley, close enough to the James River that it was called a neighborly “Jim.” There was a vacant dance hall upstairs in what had once been a hayloft, and downstairs living quarters that flooded perennially, their polychrome carpet mingling with Jim’s riverbed in a lavish, whiffy delta. L. wrote his master’s thesis there, as well as the epistolary exegesis on poetry for a young me.

That summer our separate holding patterns intersected in my parent’s two-story living room, which we were hired to paint while waiting for real life to begin. As the heat rose each day, I got crankier and L. grew more avuncular. Often the subject turned to poetry, his spiritual homeland but an exotic destination to me. After listening to him go on about iambs and enjambments and “-ameters,” I likely lost patience and told L. he’d have to begin at the beginning. Intent as he was on becoming an English teacher, he must have taken my defensiveness as a challenge. Shortly thereafter I got the packet. Read more »

by Hari Balasubramanian

A bit of self indulgence – also a kind of preface to all the 3 Quarks Daily essays I’ve written.

I’ve always thought of myself as someone who is more drawn to the humanities than to math or the sciences. This can seem very puzzling to someone who looks at my career details: degrees in engineering and a career in academia in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research. Even I am stumped sometimes – how did I get so deep into a quantitative field when all my life I’ve held that literature (literary fiction in particular), history and travel are far better at revealing something about the human condition than any other pursuit?

Some follow an ambition stubbornly wherever it takes them and whatever the consequences. I did not have that kind of resolve. Growing up in west and central India, I read a lot English and American fiction – Agatha Christie, Alfred Hitchcock, Alistair Maclean – and decided that I must become a writer (English only of course for the mentally colonized, why would I write in Tamil or Hindi?). The ambition was strong enough to have a grip on my thoughts for the next two decades, but never strong enough to counter practical concerns. Like many middle class families, my parents felt I had to get into an engineering or medical college since both offered the promise of financial stability. I simply went along, following what high school friends around me were doing. After toying with majors as diverse as electronics and metallurgy I finally settled on something called production engineering. In 1996, I left home and attended what was then called the Regional Engineering College, twenty kilometers from the south Indian city of Tiruchirappalli: a semi-industrial, semi-rural middle of nowhere kind of campus where teenagers from far flung states of India came and lived in packed hostels for four years.

The ambition to become a writer, meanwhile, bided its time. All you had to do was write one breakthrough novel, something like Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, become famous, then write full time: that was the naïve worldview that sustained me for a long time. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

Two weeks ago, Maniza Naqvi evocatively wrote here on the resonance of a mythological rape in the eventual confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court (“The State of The Rape of Sabines”). Today, I would like to revisit Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony, focusing on how the qualities of her voice were put front and center by those who refused to take her actual words seriously. In the Ford-Kavanaugh events, we witnessed, again, how female suffering—the female voice itself as it tells of violence and injustice—is dismissed and mistrusted. And I would like to show that this resonates powerfully with another two of our civilization-forming myths: the rape of Persephone and the song of the Sirens.

During her testimony, disparaging comments on Blasey Ford’s childish tone and her vocal fry appeared on social media; these qualities were, for those responding to it, signs of her untrustworthiness. Such disapproving comments are an example of fairly run-of-the-mill misogyny: a suspicion against what a woman has to say simply because she sounds too feminine. But with vocal fry in particular, there is an interesting inversion of expectations at work that is worth considering. Read more »

by Thomas Wells

Middle age brings sometimes uncomfortable self-reflection. One thing I have realized is that I am not a particularly good person. Not evil, just mediocre. Lots of people are much better at morality than me, including many of my students. On the other hand, I am quite good at the academic subject of ethics. Good enough to teach it at a university and write papers that occasionally appear in nice journals.

Is there a contradiction between these two observations? Is there a causal relationship?

When I started studying ethics I assumed it would somehow make me a morally better person. But I never really thought through that ‘somehow’ and after 15 years I can see that my complacency was not justified. My moral achievements still derive mostly from the good habits my parents trained me in. If I am at all a better person than I was 15 years ago, that has had more to do with the good people I have been lucky enough to know than with what I have been reading, thinking, and teaching.

Some years ago, for instance, I worked through the arguments around animal rights and decided to my intellectual satisfaction that the case against eating them was completely compelling. But I still eat meat nearly every day. I did try vegetarianism a couple of times but gave up because it was too hard. Vegetarian food in every situation was always worse than the meat alternative. And I got very tired of eating cheese.

Aristotle would diagnose my failing as akrasia, or weakness of will. I characterize it in more familiar terms as moral laziness. I claim moral principles, but I am not prepared to put much effort into living up to them. In the same way, I think I want to be thin, but – practice has revealed – I am not prepared to exchange my comforts for ascetic bowls of muesli and pre-dawn running regimes. Either I don’t care about being good as much as I think I do (a motivation problem), or I am not really convinced by my own moral reasoning (a rationality problem). I think it may be a bit of both. Read more »