Sughra Raza. Ice Shards on The Charles. Boston, March 3, 2019.

Digital photograph.

by Bill Murray

Just about everyone who visits the famous South Luangwa wildlife park drives through Mfuwe, Zambia. A mere wide spot in the road, a trifle to tourists, Mfuwe holds a fearsome, searing memory. It will forever be known for the Man-Eater of Mfuwe, a lion that killed six people over two months in 1991.

There are more famous man-eating tigers than lions in the literature. Tigers and people live in closer proximity in India than lions and people in Africa. I’ve seen an estimate of as many as 10,000 people killed by tigers in India in the nineteenth century.

The Champawat Tigress, the most infamous Panthera tigris, was said to have killed 436 people before she was killed in Nepal, then part of British colonial India, in 1911. After a spree of terror, hunters having failed to kill her, the authorities ultimately called in the Nepalese army. In Kenya’s Tsavo Park two lions killed perhaps two dozen Indian railroad construction workers in 1898, halting the colonizing Brits’ project to connect the port of Mombasa with the interior of British East Africa.

But the Mfuwe man-eater was no colonial-era killer. Its attacks occurred less than thirty years ago, thoroughly terrorizing an overgrown village of scarcely a thousand a spare 60 miles west of the border with Malawi, oriented toward the Malawian capital, Lilongwe. Lusaka, the Zambian capital, is 300 miles away. Read more »

by Robert Fay

Lake Simcoe, Canada. The sound of the Chickering piano. Bach.

He is lazing down a wooded foot path, teasing his collie Banquo with a stick. He wears gloves, a wool Donegal cap, muffler and long coat despite the July temperatures. He is not being self-consciously eccentric; he simply fears getting a chill, and therefore sick. The film is black-and-white, giving the imagination ample room to conjure up the verdant rapacity of the brief northern growing season. He is then pictured inside the cottage seated before the Chickering, swaying and rocking as he alternately taps and presses the keys, his hands occasionally leaping back from the instrument as if caught in flagrante delicto.

The regal pianissimo of the Italian Concerto.

He is humming. He will always hum when he’s secluded within the architecture of the immortal scores. Recording engineers will despair of this harmonizing, but the microphones must be present, and he will sing as he plays, because the two expressions are a hypostatic union, an indivisible entity offering themselves to the music. He hums because the composition is only a series of notations until it becomes a part of his body, a force within, causing him to sway and vocalize the rapturous melody.

The cottage is the perfect bourgeois expression of respectable 1950s Toronto. It is not to be confused with a cabin. It is the weekend retreat of prosperous fir merchant, not a sportsman. And the Toronto of the 1950s is Victorian, hardworking and Protestant, and Glenn Gould will decide he can live nowhere else, despite his fame and financial success. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

My seventy-something year old uncle, who still uses a flip phone, was talking to me a while ago about self-driving cars. He was adamant that he didn’t want to put his fate in the hands of a computer, he didn’t trust them. My question to him was “but you trust other people in cars?” Because self-driving cars don’t have to be 100% accurate, they just have to be better than people, and they already are. People get drunk, they get tired, they’re distracted, they’re looking down at their phones. Computers won’t do any of those things. And yet my uncle couldn’t be persuaded. He fundamentally doesn’t trust computers. And of course, he’s not alone. More and more of our lives have highly automated elements to them, “Autopilot technology already does most of the work once a plane is aloft, and has no trouble landing an airliner even in rough weather and limited visibility.” But the average person either doesn’t realize that, or they console themselves with the knowledge that humans are in the cockpit and could take over. Though perhaps the more rational thought would be to console themselves that if something happens to the pilot, the computer could take over. Maybe it’s the more rational thought, but most of us aren’t perfectly rational beings.

Society is predicated on a level of trust, we couldn’t function as communities, as towns, as countries, if it wasn’t. We trust that the food we buy in the store isn’t contaminated, we trust that the water coming out of our taps won’t make us sick, we trust that law enforcement will protect us, we trust that we pay our taxes and that money isn’t embezzled. Sometimes, this trust turns out to be misplaced, just ask the people of Flint, but even when that happens and we’re all appalled, we mostly go back to a state of trust. Because it’s hard to function in society if you don’t. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

The Anna Karenina Fix, by Viv Groskop, is subtitled “Life Lessons from Russian Literature.” It is an entertaining book, part memoir, part cultural criticism. Each chapter takes on a different work from Russian literature–mostly novels, although it also features Anna Akhmatova’s poetry. Interwoven with plot synopses are biographical details about the authors, many of which are arguably tangential to their work, such as Tolstoy’s love for eggs prepared in a multitude of different ways. Groskop is keen to humanize these writers, so this is part of the process. Layered on top of the works themselves and trivia about the people who wrote them are autobiographical snippets from Groskop, mainly drawn from time she spent in Russia during her university years. Finally, true to the book’s subtitle, there are the “lessons” that she has purportedly learned, or perhaps that we could all learn, from these works.

Groskop’s research was impressive. For each literary work featured in one of her chapters she also incorporated background material to flesh out the narrative–for example, Pavel Basinsky’s Tolstoy biography Flight from Paradise or Pasternak’s mistress’s account of their time together. Alex Beam’s The Feud, describing a protracted and heated spat between Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson about translations of Pushkin, is now on my reading list. There weren’t more than one or two outside sources per chapter, so the book was not cluttered with references.

There is something funny about the phrase “life lessons.” You don’t know if someone is being ironic or not. Even after having read the book, I don’t quite know if Groskop has meant it in earnest. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

“[T]here is in fact nothing that can alleviate that fatal flaw in Darwinism” says Professor Behe, stating the book’s central claim in the mendaciously mislabelled creationist web journal Evolution News.

The claim is clickbait, the book title misleading, and the argument long since rebutted. The historical roots of the argument show the close links between what now calls itself Intelligent Design, and biblically inspired “creation science”. The issues are important because the Intelligent Design movement gives a veneer of intellectual respectability to the denial of scientific reality. Behe is a founder member and senior fellow of the Seattle-based Discovery Institute (DI), which hails him as a revolutionary. The DI promotes Intelligent Design, and his colleagues there have greeted his book with rapture, claiming that “Michael Behe’s Darwin Devolves Topples Foundational Claim of Evolutionary Theory” and that “Anyone interested in knowing the truth about the design/evolution debate will find Darwin Devolves a must read.”

I would much rather have been able to ignore this book. Unfortunately, I cannot do so because I know that it will receive massive publicity from the “Darwin was wrong” industry, providing as it does a figleaf of intellectual respectability to the anti-scientific creationism espoused by millions of people worldwide, including the Vice President of the United States.

I wonder whether Behe’s most vociferous supporters actually understand his position. Unlike them, he accepts the plain facts of evolution, including the mutability of species, the evolution of humans from non-human primates, the common ancestry of different kinds of living thing, and evolution in progress all around us. However, his repeated references to Darwin and Darwinism may help conceal these facts from the casual observer. Read more »

New Vinyl

…..—elegy

to take an album in your hands
to feel its slight heft
to free it from its clear synthetic skin
to slip it from its cardboard cover
to scan its art, to flip it over, read,
then slide it from its paper inner sleeve
with care (platter’s rim to palm just so)
so as not to grease and soil
its lyric grooves with finger oil
which might later cause
a lead-riff smother

to hold in hands —but only by its rim
between two palms— to catch the lightglaze
caroming from its onyx spiral, cast
like hairs in onyx vinyl

to drop its center hole upon a hub
and, as it spins, to lift the diamond arm
above the disk and set its carbon tip
to spinning rifts
……………………..… (with steady
surgeon’s chance)
………………………… to do its
oscillating dance,
……………………….. its ricocheting ride
off microcliffs

to send vibrations out
as turning table shifts
and shadows scatter

ah— in that sweet tick of space & time
music’s all that matters

Jim
2/15/18

by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Epicureans famously held that we should not fear death. Epicurus argued that because we simply do not exist once we are dead, there is no subject to suffer pains. And since pain is the only truly bad thing, there is nothing bad for us to fear in being dead. In this way, they saw philosophical argument as part of the therapy for overcoming fear. Lucretius followed Epicurus’ argument with the observation that the time before we were born is relevantly similar to the time after we die – both are periods in which we are not. He reasoned that, as we do not feel dread with respect to the time before our birth, there is no reason to dread the time after our death. These two arguments, which may be called the no subject of harm argument and the symmetry argument, have attracted a good deal of scholarly attention, and for good reason. (We have even weighed in on the symmetry argument, elsewhere.) But there is a third Epicurean about death and our coordinate attitudes about life, and it has been generally neglected. We’ll call it the squandering argument.

The squandering argument is an exercise of dialectical reasoning, in that it is not a stand-alone argument to be presented out of the blue to a person. The more commonly discussed no subject of harm and symmetry arguments are of that form. Instead, dialectical arguments arise in the midst of a series of back-and-forth exchanges between interlocutors. They are developmental pieces of reasoning that are presented in the thick of an exchange between particular discussants, and so their form (and even their conclusions) can be difficult to discern, especially once the dust settles on a dispute. But, ironically, dialectical arguments hold great promise as devices for philosophical therapy. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

If you believe Sheldon Cooper, physicists have a working knowledge of the universe. Mathematicians aren’t so humble. We like to think we aren’t constrained by reality. As is usually the case, xkcd put it well:

Mathematicians like to think they are able to transcend time and space at will with a stick of chalk as their only weapon. Of course, the truth is we are all limited in what we can grasp. As John von Neumann famously said: “In mathematics you don’t understand things. You just get used to them.” von Neumann was being deliberately provocative but he was also telling the truth.

Even when we think we are on solid mathematical ground our footing can easily be shaken by a small shift in point of view. Whether we make a deliberate decision or not, how we choose to observe and record determines what we can see and understand. There is an important distinction to be drawn in math and in life between things which depend on our viewpoint and those which don’t.

We saw a hint last time here at 3QD. We discovered the humble real numbers which we know and love from our school days are a vast and ultimately unknowable universe. The overwhelming majority of them will be forever out of reach. Even so we find real numbers comfortingly familiar. Even if we don’t understand them, we’ve gotten used to them. Read more »

by Amanda Beth Peery

Mr Cogito is trying to make his soul more porous
like the screen door of a house in the country
letting all the air in.

Mr Cogito wants a soul like a net
catching colors & conversations, catching visions:
the singing through the door of a cathedral
on a crooked street, reaching for angels,
where he and the beggars outside understand
for the first time how to admire God
the crunch of ice in countless machines
the slush moving under boots in the street
& the thickness or click or throat-roll of consonants
in a dozen languages on the rush-hour subway
& the roar of fast traffic like the ocean
& the ocean itself breaking its rolled fists
on rocks and the deep
groaning of the earth — he heard the earth
is firmer here, it helps to hold
the skyscraper’s foundations
over its molten roll — he wants to scoop
the sounds, slick & meat-thick
out of the net of his soul
& feel the life of them in his fingers.