by Tamuira Reid

Fog fills a dead, gray street. As it begins to part, an opulent, borderline gaudy building glows from within. Like the Taj Mahal has plopped down on this small, sleepy town.

In the front window I can see *Leah, looking out. A large neon sign, Open For Business, clicks on next to her. She yawns and then disappears from my sight.

I met Leah through an outreach project last summer, a small non-profit that has since gone under. The goal was to help teenagers like Leah – kids who had fallen into the cracks of a town gone wrong – find jobs or apply to trade schools.

When I enter the pawnshop this morning, she is vacuuming. Then she is scrubbing a toilet. Then she is polishing a glass case full of pawned valuables; wristwatches, pocketknives, flasks. A few abandoned wedding rings.

I’m used to her flurry of movement by now, and sometimes it almost seems an act of defiance, a just wait until I’m ready to talk to you type of thing. After all, I am a writer and she is my subject and all the lines and spaces in-between are blurred. We don’t always know what to make of each other. We don’t always want to trust. Read more »

 by Evert Cilliers

So our pussy-grabbing porn-star-banging supplier-stiffing majority-vote-losing Mexican-Muslim-hating Charlottesville-excusing family-separating racist Liar-in-Chief goes to Europe and trash-talks our allies. 

But when he summits with Vlad the Journalist Killer (50 dead so far), Trump goes softer than a marshmallow on a stick over an open fire.

A weak bully.

Trump’s up-sucking to Putin was best summed up in the former CIA Director John Brennan’s tweet:

“Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki rises to & exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous. Not only were Trump’s comments imbecilic, he is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Where indeed? 

And Trump’s walk-backs were a joke. 

He says he meant to say “wouldn’t” instead of “would.” 

That must’ve been his sixth lie of the day (he averages around six a day in public; who knows how many lies he tells in private). 

And when he replied “no” to the question whether he thinks Russian election meddling is still happening, his press lady said he said “no” to answering any more questions, when he in fact answered many more questions, and said “no” to that question twice because the reporter asked him that question twice.

What are we to make of all this?

Here’s my simple three-point explainer of the whole post-surrender-treason-summit truth.
Read more »

by Dave Maier

Recently I’ve been reading a couple of books attacking postmodernism and/or leftist politics, which the authors – not surprisingly – tie together as closely as they can, albeit from rather different perspectives, for maximum polemical effect. Maybe we’ll get into the gory details some other time (haven’t got very far into them yet), but for now let’s just examine a few things that struck me about the very idea of polemical interpretations. 

For example: I can never figure out whether I’m supposed to be the audience, invited to join the authors in combating these worthless and dangerous ideas, or instead whether I am the target, such that these books intend to smash my own position(s) to conceptual smithereens. If I picture myself beside the author as he fires bolts at his target, I find myself alarmed at the way he’s swinging that crossbow around: watch where you’re aiming that thing! But maybe I myself am really the target – in which case I watch in puzzlement as the bolts sail harmlessly off to one side (was that really aimed at me?). If it were consistently one rather than the other, I would simply toss the book aside as incompetent; but when the two flip back and forth like the duck and the rabbit, it makes me wonder about polemics in general. How exactly are they supposed to work? Read more »

by Michael Liss

The other shoe dropped.  

Anthony Kennedy’s idiosyncratic role as a Justice of the United State Supreme Court will come to an end a mere week from now. A lot of things are going to change.

Let’s start with the politics. Kennedy’s leaving cinches the conservative revolution (or counter-revolution) for at least a generation. For the first time in living memory, a conservative Supreme Court will be in position to review and bless the acts of a like-minded Congress and President.

This will occur regardless of who is confirmed (Trump’s list is one to which moderates need not apply), but, unless a bolt of lightning strikes, it’s going to be Brett Kavanaugh. Yes, there will be plenty of Kabuki before he gets measured for a new robe, but Kavanaugh is the one who rings every bell for both Republicans and Trump. He’s a Federalist Society member, reliably conservative on all the big issues, not afraid to advance his interpretation of the law even when it conflicts with precedent, and has a past history of partisan politics. His nomination even offers a prize in the Cracker Jack box—the unique, magnificent straddle of having worked aggressively for Ken Starr, but now being deeply committed to the idea that sitting Presidents should be immune from prosecution. Read more »

by Akim Reinhardt

Spectator sports can reflect a society’s worst inclinations by promoting pure partisanship.

Pure partisanship is profoundly anti-intellectual. Pure partisanship can disable a person’s moral compass. Anyone who follows sports, even tangentially, witnesses this frequently. This team’s victory or that team’s loss have led to countless riots. Here in Baltimore a few years ago, I listened to fans make excuses for football player Ray Rice after footage surfaced of him knocking his fiancee unconscious. And just this past weekend, Milwaukee Brewers baseball fans gave star pitcher Josh Hader a standing ovation after it was revealed that he had published racist and homophobic tweets. My team, wrong or right.

In the world of spectator sports, unchecked partisanship reveals human beings’ self-limiting intellects and ugly moral shortcomings. But when pure partisanship runs amok in politics, the possible ramifications are truly dire. A my party (or candidate, or politician) wrong or right attitude facilitates political repression and the rise of totalitarianism. That is the threat facing the United States and several other democratic nations today.

It is a recent development. For most of the post-WWII period, American political partisanship was moderated by tremendous pressure to conform. While conformist pressures certainly present their own set of problems worthy of critique, we must acknowledge that they also helped preclude the type of hyper political partisanship we now see in the Age of Trump. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jamie Elsey

Although some may be heralding the end of free speech, 2018 has been a year of far-reaching debate and discussion. In the coming months, we can anticipate attending or streaming discussions ranging from such topics as the role of race in American politics to the nature of truth, from existential threats posed by artificial intelligence to the value of religion.

As sure as I am that many readers will share my enthusiasm for these events, I’m also certain I’m not the only one frustrated by the sense that many such talks end up with the participants merely talking past one another. It’s as if the speakers have agreed to play chess, but change the rules to drafts whenever they’re put in check. I at least find myself in the good company of Stephen Fry who, well over an hour into the recent Munk debate on political correctness, expressed his bemusement that “people will look back on this debate and wonder why political correctness wasn’t discussed”.[1]

Failure to properly define the topic of discussion is, I believe, a primary cause of this frustration. Changing the format from one of debate to one of open conversation is less conducive to the kind of evasiveness and rhetorical point scoring that characterizes purely combative interactions. However, even in open-ended conversation, we want to see opposing viewpoints properly challenged, and the problem of poor definition stands even when all participants are in apparent agreement. How do we know that we are in agreement if we don’t really know what we’re agreeing to?

There is nowhere this issue of definition looms larger than in recent discussions of religion, God, and morality. Grappling with these topics is as vital as it is difficult. We can’t expect to make any progress if we do not have a shared or at least mutually understood language with which to tackle them. Read more »

 by Jonathan Kujawa

In a miracle we neither understand nor deserve, some of the most outlandish inventions of mathematicians’ fevered imaginations have later prove eminently useful in the real world. We’ve talked about some of these here at 3QD. From using the stretchy math of topology to identify data clusters in medicine, to using exotic measures of distance to fill in large amounts of missing data, to using number systems coming from elliptic curves to create strong encryption systems. These are only a few of the gifts we’ve received over the years from mathematics. Several years ago the mathematicians who congregate at mathoverflow compiled a list of applications for each of the main areas of modern mathematics.

Many of these applications contribute billions of dollars of value to our modern world, and yet in nearly every case the mathematics underpinning these were developed years, decades, or even centuries earlier. Bringing a little math to things often pays off bigly.

Plus, doing math is just plain fun! I may be biased, but I say the (fun + value)/cost ratio of math is pretty close to unbeatable. To quote Steve Earle, “I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that”.

Last month I asserted one explanation for the “unreasonable effectiveness” of mathematics is its insistence on precision in our language and thought. There is a real power in the mere act of mathematization. Even if you can’t solve the problem using actual mathematics, thinking mathematically often lays bare the real questions, the real obstacles, and the possible paths to a solution.

That’s easier said than done. As any calculus student will tell you, one of the most difficult parts of using mathematics on a real-world problem is turning the messy, ambiguous chaos of the real world into something on which you can try to do math. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Amanda Beth Peery

by Brooks Riley

For someone who spent most of his life trying to get on Page Six, (the New York Post’s iconic gossip column), hitting Page One was pay dirt for Donald Trump. Now that he’s there, he means to stay there, devouring our attention for the foreseeable future. One could even argue that all his lies and deplorable actions are motivated by a single, sorry ambition, to be the center of attention at all times and in all places. Outrage sells.

Outrage is also tiresome. Trump Outrage Fatigue set in long ago, but we still can’t ignore him. Or can we? If the fate of the world wasn’t at stake we would have dropped this guy long ago from our field of vision.

I’m spending more and more time off the grid of mainstream news coverage. There are other stories out there to excite us, to outrage us or to move us. I haven’t left the grid altogether. I do keep up. But my mind now homes in on stories at the bottom of the internet page, or the seemingly trivial fillers that pepper the meal of misery at the top. Here’s a small sample:

Ötzi’s Last Meal

What could be more important than the contents of Ötzi’s stomach? Certainly not the Big Mac wending its way through our leader’s digestive system. I’m not being facetious here. Ötzi is the gift that keeps on giving, ever since the 5300-year-old man who lay buried in ice for millennia was discovered by tourists in 1991 in the Ötztal Alps bordering Austria and Italy. Since then I have followed every gripping new revelation about Ötzi—what he wore, what he carried with him, how he was murdered. Ötzi is a time capsule spilling forth impossible secrets about life in the Copper Age. Now that his stomach has been found, lurking shriveled under his lungs, we know that his last meal was a hefty portion of ibex fat—not the meat itself but the subcutaneous fat that would help him withstand the bitter cold and give him endurance at high altitudes. According to a researcher, ibex meat tastes okay, but ibex fat tastes awful, so that the act of eating it must have been prophylactic, derived from some knowledge of survival strategies. Read more »