by Christopher Bacas

The month ended anticlimactically. We’d done shitty business for the hotel and, due to some nastiness caused by remnants of our ship crew, hadn’t endeared ourselves to staff. Heading inland, the rhythm section came unmoored. Bass and drums baited each other; refusing to listen and digging in hard. Their beat was a floor covered in marbles: balance gone, you ducked low and grabbed the sides to stay upright. On a tiny stage in Salt Lake City, we closed with A’s original theme; a bizarre dirge with tribal drums, cantorial clarinet and peppery brass commentary. When we cutoff the last note, the curtain was closed. I heard angry words behind, then turned to see T down his bass and walk straight into the trap set, fists raised. Jack hastily de-throned himself and threw his arms forward. Cymbals and drums toppled. Manager waded in and got between them.

T’s lip quivered as he paced the stage between rounds. Jack motor-mouthed himself to the dressing room, leaving his gear in a heap. This wasn’t going to be resolved anytime soon. A divine intervention followed. T caught a bad cold; pneumonia, really. He couldn’t sleep at night and the bus became a torture chamber. He writhed, shivering and hacking, voice a sandpaper squawk, refusing any help. Soloist suggested T check-in to a hospital for a few days. Guitar could play T’s instrument. In Boston, Guitar often gigged on bass. He sounded great and it was a simple way to make money. Those gigs destroyed his hands, so Guitar didn’t relish playing bass in a big band, but he’d do it to help out. Sitting behind the driver, unshaven, eyes cratered, T hated the idea.

“FUCK YOU!”

He croaked from his diesel deathbed.

“You’re not gonna take my gig!”

“I don’t WANT your gig. I don’t like playing bass. Take a couple days off, man”

Soloist added,

“Chrissakes, T, let him play!”

“No fuckin’ way. He wants to steal my gig!”

In a reversal, Guitar was frustrated by someone else’s paranoia.

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by G. M. Trujillo, Jr.

Among the gray crags and russet stalagmites of Hades, Sisyphus heaves a boulder. Zeus, the king god, banished him there after he tricked Thanatos and Persephone, thus making a fool of death and rebirth. He thwarted the gods, so they thwart him. He must endlessly haul the rock up a mountain, but before it reaches the crest, the enchanted boulder crashes back to the base. Sisyphus must retreat, heave again. Toil upward, slump downward. Already in the underworld, not even death may liberate him. So there he trembles and labors. His sinews creak; his lungs gasp. The gods tremble and gasp as well. With laughter.

Homer and Ovid immortalized these poetic images, but why has Sisyphus inspired so much philosophical reflection? Traditionally, philosophers analyze the myth to understand the meaning of life. We see ourselves in Sisyphus and muse about the implications. Here, I continue that tradition by asking: how can Sisyphus endure his struggle yet judge his life worthwhile? I argue that Sisyphus’s life is meaningful because of the relationships he has with others. The myth of Sisyphus affirms that social activity consecrates our lives with significance.

Many interpretations consider Sisyphus only as an individual and thus neglect the fact that he lived with others, just as we do. Theories about meaning in life should reflect the profound and intricate nature of the social interactions we cherish. By exploring the social aspects of life, we stumble upon an insight: a person’s life may be made meaningful when others view it as such, when we enjoy rich relationships with others. Maybe Sisyphus could find his life meaningful through an act of reflective defiance, constructing meaning for and through himself. Maybe his participation in rituals of the Greek afterlife contributes meaning to his existence. However, even when subjective interpretation or objective activities fail, our friends, family, and lovers anoint our lives with meaning.

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by Thomas R. Wells

Let us assume that the automation of our job tasks by algorithms and our physical displacement by robots proceeds at a rapid pace. What is the future of work? Will it be awful or will it be nice?

Some people focus on the jobs that robots can’t do now, or not very well, such as cleaning toilets or programming other robots. But there aren’t enough of those jobs to be interesting. Others focus on who owns the robots, and what kind of jobs they might like the rest of us to do, such as Downton Abbey type flunkies. But this seems too determinedly dystopian.

It makes more sense to treat the future of work as the economic question it appears to be – at least at first. Especially since we have two hundred years of historical experience with technological revolutions. When technology displaces human employment, what generally happens to the humans? In every case, humans move down the value chain, moving into work of less economic value than before.

For example, in 1800 the overwhelming majority of people still worked on the land, even in Adam Smith’s Britain. They had to. Producing food required enormous amounts of human labour. Most people spent most of their income on bread, which is not surprising since that was the main product of the economy. As the agricultural revolution spread new technologies and methods, productivity per worker soared. Millions of workers were no longer required. Those workers moved to the cities and the new economic opportunities in factories. They went from growing food (essential to human survival) to making things that were merely nice to have (helpful to human living). A similar thing happened when factories became so efficient at making things that we could afford to transfer most of the human labour force to services (around 75% of most developed economies).

In other words, automation increases productivity, the amount of economic value a society can produce with the same inputs of labour and materials. That means we can have all the things we used to have, plus we now also have some spare labour that we can use to produce things lower down on our collective list of priorities, such as mass higher education and healthcare and telemarketing. The reason we didn’t make those things already is that they were not valuable enough to be worth the cost of giving up anything higher on the list. Technology driven economic change increases general prosperity by expanding the frontier of what an economy can produce, and therefore what the people in it can consume. (How those consumption possibilities are distributed is a different, political rather than economic question.)

Applying this logic to our current revolution in automation, it seems reasonable to conclude that the future of human work will be producing things even further down our list of priorities than what most of us do now. What might that look like?

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by Samir Chopra

One winter vacation some years ago, as my wife and I waited for a ferry from Fajardo in Puerto Rico to the island of Culebra, I noticed on the walls of our waiting room a poster for the Cayo Luis Pena in the Culebra National Wildlife Refuge. As I gazed at dazzling blue waters and painfully white glistening sands, bewitched by the promise of the colorful aquatic creatures that frolicked below the waters of an oceanic snorkeling and scuba-diving paradise, I felt myself succumb, yet again, to the tyranny of the guidebook. I felt the terror of that most fearful of things: the inadequate, not properly-realized, not fully-treasured, missed-opportunity vacation; the tourism poster I was gazing at provided an artful reminder of all I stood to lose if I did not ‘get it right’ and see the sights it showcased. There is a mode of oppression the travel guidebook and poster have the market cornered on: making us feel like failures even when we manage to put down the laptop, take our fingers off the keyboard, dock the smartphone, and head out, bravely putting away our calendars, for the wilderness.

The artfully put-together tourism poster—like illustrations of improbably delicious-looking concoctions in cookbooks—promises us a glimpse of the impossible, the inaccessible, and the too-beautiful. Its photographs of attractions are invariably of ‘postcard’ or ‘coffee-table book’ quality, fit to be mailed to friends; they suggest the ‘attraction’ is not possible to actually visit: surely the photographer was granted ‘special’ access to the Shangri-La that beams at us from the poster? But the poster and the guidebook assure us with a devastating twin salvo that this place has been visited, and more damagingly, that if we do not visit it, we have somehow failed to meet some unknown evaluative standards for vacations. The guidebook does this acutely with listings of the “essential,” the “must-see,” the “ten things any visitor to X must do.” These are resisted by pronouncements like “That’s only what the editors of that guidebook think; what do they know?” But such rhetorical bluster is just that; under the weight of the prescription, our resolve crumbles. We become acutely conscious of the need to play by the guidebook and the poster’s playbook: Visit this place! Have these experiences! Or else!

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by Carl Pierer

A few months ago, this column discussed Rae Langton's argument that pornography subordinates women. This argument forms the first part of a longer paper re-published in her book Sexual Solipsism. The second part of this paper argues that pornography silences women. In light of recent events and discussions, this idea seems to have acquired a new relevance.

The second part of Langton's article builds on the speech act theory of the first. Silencing means, for Langton, the failure to perform a speech act. Her argument in this part of the paper is to first argue that speech acts can be silenced, secondly that there are silencing speech acts, and to conclude, thirdly, that pornography is a silencing speech act that silences the speech act(s) of women.

Along any one of Austin's three dimensions of a speech act, a speech act can fail to develop its force. So it is that along any one of these dimensions a speech act can be silenced. It is worth noting with Langton that when this happens there is an implicit power relation: because the dimensions of the speech act depend on qualifications concerning the speaker, the failure to perform along any of the dimensions is a measure of powerlessness.

The first, with undeniable political significance, is a failure to perform even a locutionary act. Potential speakers are intimidated, prevented from speaking, do not speak because they will not be listened to. They are not in the position to utter the words they want to utter. This is perhaps the most obvious case of silencing that comes to mind when thinking, for instance, about tyrannical regimes limiting free speech.

The second is a failure to accomplish what is intended by the speech: to comfort, without attenuating sadness, to invite, without guests coming, or to argue, without convincing. These are failures along the second dimension of speech acts, consequently they may be called perlocutionary frustrations. They too might have a political significance if failure along this dimension is, for example, due to the speaker's class or gender.

The third, of greatest interest for this article, is a failure along the third dimension. It happens "(…) when one speaks, one utters words, and fails not simply to achieve the effect one aims at, but fails to perform the very action one intends." This Langton calls illocutionary disablement. As mentioned earlier, certain speech acts require the speaker to have an authority to perform the illocutionary act: in the classic example, an ordained priest is required to pronounce the couple husband and wife in order for them to be married. This, Langton points out, means that the ability to perform an illocutionary act can be taken as a measure of authority and political power.

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by Richard King

STEM. It sounds sciencey, doesn't it? A stem is a type of cell, after all, as well as one of the two structural axes of a vascular plant, or tracheophyte. There are also "stem groups" in evolutionary biology, and Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy, and Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modellers. Probably there's a group of physicists somewhere who play Jean-Michel Jarres covers and call themselves "The Stems". Yes, STEM is a sciencey acronym for the sciencey twenty-first century.

STEM, as 3QD readers will know, stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. And it is the go-to concept for anyone concerned with the future of our embattled species, especially when it comes to questions of how that species will continue to reproduce itself under conditions of waged labour and property and profit. Ever on the lips of politicians or at the fingertips of commentators, it is the universal remedy, not only to economic problems, but also to problems of social inclusion and democratic participation. Wondering about what kind of jobs we'll be doing in the future? Think STEM. Worried about the future place of women in the workforce? Think STEM. Beginning to doubt the wisdom of sending yet another generation of kids to college, where they can accumulate yet more student debt and keep the financial sector ticking over? Think STEM.

Well, STEM schtem, I say, at least until someone can tell me, in a bit more detail, what it is our kids are supposed to be doing with all these sexy, STEMMY skills. For to dig down past the bland assertions of Bill Gates and his analogues, through all the rather vague pronouncements about generic skills and job clusters and coding and systems thinking and the like, is to discover, well, not much at all. I must have read at least fifty reports on the importance of STEM in the last couple of years, and nearly all of them cite the same statistic that 75% of the fastest-growing occupations will require workers with a STEM education. Little mention is made of what these sectors are, or of how big those sectors might become (regardless of their rate of growth), and when one digs down a little further most of them seem to lead back eventually to a handful of slightly aged studies. It's all beginning to smell a bit fishy. What is going on?

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by Paul North

Santiago-Viñas-Santiago / October 2017

For Willy Thayer, who moved a river in me

Theory in the Critical International. Professors travel. They trek their personal penury and their meager intellectual wares over highlands and lowlands, and, because culture is supposed to fly outward without stopping and never—gods forbid—turn around and go home again, altered by the foreign, we aren't really supposed to be affected by what encounters us on our travels. We are professors, not students. We are experts, untouchable.

How lucky they are in Chile! How lucky they are in Chile, the past is dead and gone, how lucky that their state did not externalize it's hideous violence into secret ops, proxy wars, distant destruction of sovereign states and peoples without sovereignty, offensives in which the people at home barely believed. How lucky they are to have had a home-spun dictatorship, how fortunate that it is over and has been expelled from their nation once and for all. How envious I am that they, so far south, got the full benefit of the freest free market from the Hayek school, the Chicago School, the American corporate school up north. Between us the driest desert in the world—money scoffs at distances. It turned a murderous coup into a social reformation. What stability! "Chile is one of the most stable economies and our honest ally." How lucky that they converted brutalities into profits, detention centers into shopping malls. This is not all. How charmed the life of critical theorists suspended between the desert and the glacier. They don't know how lucky they are! To have their object so clearly in front of them, even if few ears are listening. Except the students, not the students!, some few students whose ear for critique has been sharpened by the experiences of their parents and teachers. They hear the past calling like the hollow whisper on a wireless call.

Portrait of a Thinker in Traffic. Neo-liberalism is good for traffic. Rules are for following, people without means who clutter up the city are for moving out of the centers to new desolate zones. Not like in Argentina—there's no dawdling here, that is the old way. The old way blows away. Stiching his car through the city, the thinker—nothing can block him, not diligent workers or entrepreneurs with their malls, offices, homes. No place to go, no matter. Keep driving. Flow is everything. We are happy with small affordances: to pass consumers and producers by. Passing is pleasure, unlike the acrobats who greet us at each traffic light, jugglers who illuminate the cliff edges of the system of flexible labor. Gainfully employed by contingency, they stand on their heads, balancing balls, a few pesos. "Viste, no se me cayó ninguno." "See, I didn't drop one."

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by Michael Liss

I was born one mornin’ when the sun didn’t shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number 9 coal
And the straw boss said “Well, a-bless my soul”

(“16 Tons” Merle Travis)

Who in his right mind would want to be a coal miner? It’s scary, dangerous, terrible for your health, and destructive to the environment. In popular mythology, coal miners live in tar-paper shacks without indoor plumbing that are situated next to toxic waste dumps, buy all their supplies from the company store at ruinous rates, send children below ground by the time they are 12, and look 70 at 40—if they get there.

Hyperbole aside, it actually is dangerous, and the danger isn’t just part of the historical past of Black Lung, the Coal and Iron Police, and Johnny Cash singing “16 Tons.” There have been 13 deaths just this year. In 2010, at the Upper Big Branch Mine disaster, 29 miners died at a site that had over 350 safety violations, including lack of roof support, poor ventilation of dust and methane, failure to maintain proper escape ways, and the accumulation of combustible materials. The CEO of owner Massey Energy, Don Blankenship, was aggressively unrepentant. He wasn’t going to slow production for safety’s sake. The only thing he cared about was running coal, and running it as fast as it could be wrenched from the ground, at the lowest possible cost. If that meant cutting corners, that didn’t trouble him.

Let’s pose the question a second time: Who in his right mind would want to be a coal miner? Turns out, quite a lot of people. One of the most striking things about the various retraining programs for out-of-work coal miners and other old-economy/Rust Belt jobs, is how many reject them. They don’t want to learn alternatives—the want their old jobs back. Along the Allegheny Mountain Range, where there’s still plenty of coal to be mined, they think they should have them back—and will soon, because Trump promised to bring them back.

So, these are foolish people—either too ignorant to understand market forces or too uncaring about the environmental damage mining coal can cause, or just too reckless with their own lives and that of their children? And we need to save them from themselves…

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by Leanne Ogasawara

I wrote about Piero della Francesca's the Flagellation of Christ in my post about my botched Piero Pilgrimage of 2015. A woman of many mangled pilgrimages, this one continues to haunt me. Perhaps Piero's most famous picture, there are numerous explanations for what is being depicted. The conventional understanding of the left side is understood to be of Christ being flogged by the Romans, while Pilate –looking like the Ottoman Sultan– sits watching off to the side. Hence, the picture's title. But who are those three people on the right and why are they so oblivious to the cruelty going on?

British art historian John Pope-Hennessy, whose essay on the Piero Pilgrimage is in my top three essays of all time, doesn't think it is Christ at all being flogged–but rather, Saint Jerome.

Do you recall Saint Jerome's Dream?

To attain the kingdom of heaven, Jerome had left everything and headed off toward Jerusalem to wage holy war. Prepared to meet any enemy and to undergo any hardship, the one thing he found it surprisingly hard to give up was his library of beloved books. And so he made a pact with himself to undergo all the necessary hardships and to fast by day so as to reward himself at night in reading Cicero. It was just his little secret and everything was going well enough–until he had that dream. Hauled before the "Judgement seat of the Judge," he was asked who and what he was (because people back then could be asked to whom they belong).

“I am a Christian,” he said meekly (for he really had been fasting and was all skin and bones).

But He who presided said: “Thou liest, thou art a follower of Cicero and not of Christ. For ‘where thy treasure is, there will thy heart be also.’”

His lord then ordered him scourged.

Waking up from this troubling dream, Jerome decided in his heart to devote himself to the study of the Book of God, not to the books of men– for, as some translations have it, he had to prove that he was not a "Ciceronian" but a Christian.

Not surprisingly, Saint Jerome became very adept at translating the ancient Greek and Hebrew languages. Making the first Latin translation of the Bible, he is the patron saint of translators.

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by Akim Reinhardt

No, I'm not suicidal. Not that it would matter much if I were. If an adult decides they've had enough and want to call it quits, who are we to say they don't have that "right?" Rights are, after all, little more than make believe: dinner table manners and Christmas gift lists filtered through politics. And if there's only one "right" Santa Clause should honor, it would be the right of a person to cash out at the time of her or his own choosing.

But, barring some painful or debilitating disease or injury in my future, such is not my fate. I have a strong survival instinct. My fight-or-flight works just fine, and while I find life to be meaningless and even ludicrous, I have no interest in offing myself. I'll continue hanging around, not for some hazy, misguided hope that things will get better, but through simple inertia.

Thus, when I say it's perfectly fine if I die now, I am simply acknowledging that I've already lived a very long time, I have no outstanding or important obligations to anyone else, and I've done quite enough.

Should it all end for me today, I'd really have nothing to gripe about. Nor, quite frankly, would my friends and loved ones.

I will soon begin my 50th year. That's as long as anyone needs to live. It's longer, historically, than most people have lived, and I do not think that a particularly a tragic statistic.

Half-a-century gives one the opportunity to experience all that's worth experiencing, particularly nowadays. I've been a child and an adult, relishing my physical prime and now coasting into the early stages of decline. I've filled every family role I wish to fill. I've had more good friends than I'm worth and more kind and willing lovers than I deserve. I've traveled more than would have been imaginable just a hundred years ago. I've pursued a substantial amount of education. I've said everything I need to say and a fair amount of what I'd like to say.

It's not that there's nothing left to do. There's plenty, of course. There's always more one can do and see and experience and feel. But at some point it becomes fair to say that a person, should they reach their expiration date, was not cheated of the opportunity to do and see and experience and feel. Especially a middle class, straight, white, American male of the late 20th and early 21st centuries such as myself. My opportunities have been relatively boundless. Any shortcomings or glaring omissions on my mortal resume are owed to nothing and no one but myself.

However, if I am quick to acknowledge that the world owes me nothing, it is also necessary to ask, what debts do I yet owe?

Drawing up that tally begins with my father.

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by Humera Afridi

On a frigid winter afternoon in February, in a western suburb of Paris, I stood outside the 17^th century home of the last female survivor of the Special Operations Executive, a clandestine British organization, also known as Churchill's Secret Army, or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. During World War II, the SOE plotted dazzling acts of sabotage against Hitler's war effort through espionage and propaganda. Their guerrilla campaign was critical to the outcome of the war.

Having rung the bell, I waited in a bemused trance for the 91-year old veteran, incredulous that I would meet her. In the quiet of the countryside, I discerned the faint sound of yapping dogs from beyond the high stone wall. A month earlier, an envelope with her name had slipped out of a folder amid the papers of a Dutch relative of Noor Inayat Khan, an undercover radio operator
recruited by the SOE to serve in the Resistance. A tremor went through me as I examined the handwritten chit from twenty years earlier describing the terrible torture that Noor had endured at the hands of the Gestapo at the Dachau concentration camp before she was executed along with three other SOE women on September 13, 1944.

The note was addressed to a mureed, or spiritual disciple, of the Sufi Order International— the Sufi mystical organization founded by Noor's father Hazrat Inayat Khan in Europe—who had, in turn, shared it with Noor's cousin at The Hague, whom I was visiting. I assumed that the author of this note was dead like everyone else I wished to meet who had known Noor. Days after my return to New York, as I was sitting at my dining table my eyes grazed the spine of a book, The Secret Ministry of Ag and Fish, authored by none other than Noreen Riols.

A witty memoir of her time working as a decoy in the SOE under Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, head of F (for French) section, to which Noor had belonged, the book's discovery felt nothing less than divine intervention. Riols had also worked at Beaulieu, the famous training school for secret agents that Noor attended. I was flummoxed. For the life of me, I couldn't trace how the book had arrived on my bookshelf. I scrambled to contact her publisher, relieved to discover Noreen Riols was very much alive, this woman whose first name is phonetically similar to Noor's in an uncanny assonance that seemed to further intertwine their SOE destinies.

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by Tamuira Reid

I see him here every night around dusk. Which must mean I’m here every night around dusk. I’m sure I have shit to do upstairs – clean, pay bills, cry – but it’s a hell of a lot less depressing outside. I don’t want to be alone.

We’ve never talked or touched but we have a relationship. A stoop relationship. He sits across the street on his. I sit here on mine. Occasionally we make eye contact and then quickly look away. Other times we’ll hold it for a second, half-smiling. The unspoken bond between two left-behind people.

Tonight is different though. Tonight I have balls and decide to do something I’ve never done before: cross the street and talk to the guy. Out loud, not subliminally.

He sees me coming and at first I think he’s going to pick-up his beer and run inside, but he doesn’t. His eyes are soft and brown and he’s prettier close up like this.

Hi. I’m Tamuira. I live over there. I point to my building.

I’m Mike. I live here. He points behind him.

Uh, got an extra cigarette?

Sure. He gives me the last one from his pack and tries to light it for me, but his hands are shaking and he drops the matches. I pick them up, and sit down next to him.

I quit smoking, I tell him, giving him back his cigarette. Just didn’t know how to start a conversation like a normal person.

He laughs and stares up at the darkening sky. A moving van speeds by in front of us. Some kids chase it, throw rocks at it. A woman sells flavored ice from a cart, calling out the flavors in Spanish. We talk about the weather for a while – muggy, crappy, unbearable – and he eventually leaves with a quick goodbye.

I sit there for a while before going home, ignoring the magnetic pull of my life waiting for me.

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by Bill Benzon

Also known as Tottle and Stutter. But the real name was Tudor and Stuart: The Tudor and Stuart Club.

The Tudor and Stuart Club was a literary society at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore – yes, they insist upon that “the” before “Johns” – and I was the club secretary for several years back in the late 1960s and 1970s. I don’t know just how that honor came to me. But I’d taken many literature courses as an undergraduate, half of them or so with (the now legendary) Richard Macksey and the others with members of the English Department: Earl Wasserman, Donald Howard, D. C. Allen, and J. Hillis Miller. They must have decided that I had a future as a literary critic and so deserved this honor, though, naturally, it came trailing a few pedestrian duties. I was pleased. I’m pretty sure it was Dick Macksey who told me.

T&S was established athwart the boundary between those pesky Two Cultures academic reformers are wont to natter on about [1]. The club room was located on the Arts and Sciences campus (where I was), but the Medical School (across town in East Baltimore) had an equal partnership in the club’s affairs. Sir William Osler, FRS, FRCP [2], one of the four founders of The Johns Hopkins Hospital – yes, you read right, “Sir” in the New World no less – endowed the club in 1918 as a memorial to his son, Edward Revere Osler, who was killed in World War I. Osler was a legendary character, the Father of Modern Medicine, but also a bibliophile and historian. Part of his son’s book collection went to the club, along with some of his fishing tackle – at least I think it was his Revere’s. But it might have been Sir William’s. I don’t rightly recall what I was told at the back then. Anyhow, I assure you, there was fishing tackle in the club’s oak-paneled room in Gilman Hall and it had a distinguished provenance. Had to, it belonged to T&S!

The Tudor and Stuart Club Room, c. 1929

Meetings were organized around an academic presentation, which was followed by cold cuts, tobacco, beer, conversation and, on a good evening, conviviality. As Sir William had been a physician, not a literary scholar or critic, the Medical School contingent and the Arts and Sciences contingent alternated in picking topics and choosing speakers for the monthly meetings.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Deema Shehabi & Kazim Ali

As a Pakistani writer who grew up during the Soviet war in bordering Afghanistan, and one who has never known a time when Muslim-populated cities across the globe were not under attack, I insist on defining my “Muslim-ness” outside the gallery of war, turning away from the qibla of Empire that would have me forever circumambulate its own game, its own naming. I have found much to celebrate in my Muslim identity, especially since researching my first book Baker of Tarifa which is based on the history of the “convivencia” in al-Andalus or Muslim Spain (711-1492) and traces the near-millennium of Muslim influence on European civilization in fields as varied and modern as architecture, fashion and the book arts, navigation technology and surgery; Muslims served as a bridge not only in establishing legendary interfaith bonds in Iberia but also served as a bridge between Greek learning and Latinate cultures via translations in Arabic— the lingua Franca of educated Europe of the time. But the dominant narrative about Muslims in the West, as we know too well, paints a negative picture of Muslims of the past, present and future.

Imagine then, my astonishment and delight, on receiving a note from Professor Charlotte Artese of Agnes Scott College inviting me to present at an event titled “Celebrating Three Muslim-American Writers.” I had never before seen the word “celebrate” in such close proximity to “Muslim-American,” though I’ve never doubted that we are worthy of celebration. These poetry/panel events at Agnes Scott were remarkable in every way but the conversations they spurred among the presenters were truly extraordinary. Professor Waqas Khwaja, himself a poet, led an excellent panel discussion, one which elicited such responses from my fellow-panelists, Kazim Ali and Deema Shehabi, that I really wish I had written them down. Both Deema and Kazim brilliantly described the complexity, beauty and challenges of their journey as Muslim writers in America. In an effort to continue our conversation, I asked them further questions.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi: How does poetry figure in the sacredness of everyday life?

Deema Shehabi: Poetry is an act of cognizant observation, of transformative listening and of ebbed consciousness. In quietude a poet can apprehend (even when fleeting) the sense of what’s sacred and what’s otherworldly in a seemingly quotidian scene. Poetry brings us closer to that vacuous space that looks and reflects upon the interior. The poet Mary Oliver, in the poem “White Owl Flies Into And Out of the Field” writes of a “scalding/aortal light—/in which we are washed and washed out of our bones.” Her rendering in language of this metamorphic, sacred light is only possible because of observation and sustained attention to what’s sacred in the everyday.

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by Dwight Furrow

Perhaps the most important development in cuisine over the last 20 years has been the emergence of what has come to be known as modernist cuisine. Originally referred to as "molecular gastronomy", it is a form of cooking that uses materials and techniques first employed in the food industry to create new dishes and taste sensations. Its proponents now prefer to call it "modernist cuisine" because they view themselves as an avant-garde dedicated to revolutionizing traditional cooking and radically transforming the emotional and sensory dimensions of eating. In traditional cuisine, diners expect what is familiar and the chef delivers. Modernist chefs aim to create novel foods that provoke a reaction, disrupting expectations and forcing diners to revise their conception of what is possible.

As Nathan Mhyrvold, the most prominent theoretician of the movement and author of the cookbook Modernist Cuisine writes:

This movement is the true intellectual heir to Modernism, and for this reason I think it should be called Modernist cuisine. It shares a number of key characteristics with Modernism. A small avant-garde seeks to overthrow the establishment rules. Change and novelty are valued both as a tool for reforming the intellectually bankrupt rules of the past and as a virtue unto themselves. The Modernist kitchen could easily adopt the command made decades earlier by Ezra Pound to "Make It New!" The creative process is informed by theory and deliberate conceptualizing—these chefs explicitly seek to confront diners and have a dialogue with them. Finally, these chefs are distinctly and self-consciously modern in their outlook, taking whatever technology is available to push forward the realm of the possible.

Thus, dishes such as cocktails that look like marshmallows, egg and bacon ice cream, and orange, flower-shaped lollipops that taste like octopus are among the stranger-than-fiction concoctions these techniques make possible. The rap against modernist cuisine is that it's idiosyncrasy for its own sake, dishes that are interesting without being satisfying, pleasing to the chef who can display virtuosity but not necessarily to the diner who is confronted with unfamiliar mash-ups of incongruous flavors. Thus, there are real questions about whether such cooking will secure a sufficiently large audience to make it viable.

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by Carol A Westbrook

Apples… colorful foliage…Halloween….pumpkin spice latte…There are a lot of things we love about fall, but setting our clocks back is not one of them. Every year in early November, 300 million of us, in every state except Hawaii and Arizona, "fall back" an hour from daylight saving time (DST) to standard time. I have yet to meet one of those millions who like it. It's about time we stopped this awful tradition and stayed on DST forever.

Doing away with seasonal time changes is not likely to happen because it would take an act of Congress–literally. More to the point, everyone thinks its an important sacrifice that we have to make for our country, though most can't say why. Popular belief has it that daylight saving time is necessary to help farmers. That is far from the truth. Farmers were strongly opposed to daylight saving time when it was instituted in 1918, because it led to increased labor costs. That is because farming is done by the sun, although shipping schedules and farm hands followed the clock, so more overtime pay was required. Led by the farming lobby, DST was repealed in 1919 and not reinstituted until 1943, and it has remained on the books every since, though with some minor tweaking.

DST was enacted into law in the US in 1918 because we were at war, and our enemies the Germans were doing it. The Germans introduced DST in 1916 to conserve energy and coal resources during wartime; the rationale was that adding an extra hour of daylight at the end of the work day meant less artifical light would be needed at home before bedtime. Britain and its allies, as well as many neutral European countries, followed suit, as did the US. Today, about 40% of all countries in the world have adopted seasonal clock changes, mostly those in temperate or cooler climates (green, on the map below). Some formerly used DST but stopped, or are on permanent DST (blue), while other countries have never adopted DST, primarily equatorial states (white).

Daylight saving time's primary effect on energy savings is on residential lighting, which consumes 3.5% of electricity in the US. Yet times have changed a great deal, and so have energy usage patterns.

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by Thomas R. Wells

North Korea’s development of atomic fission bombs and ICBMs is very worrying. Unfortunately the analysis of it in the news media is woeful. Some commentators assume that North Korea works like a normal country (like their country); some clearly don’t understand how war works; some believe the regime’s propaganda; some seem unable to think in a straight line at all. Some manage to make all those mistakes at the same time and more. One can only hope that the US, South Korean, and Japanese war ministries have better experts. In the meantime, at least we can throw out the worst nonsense.

Myth 1: This Will Lead to World War III

The exchange of threats between Kim Jong-un’s regime and Trump’s leads some to assume that world war is imminent. It is never explained how. The Cold War was the last time we seriously thought about an exchange of nuclear weapons and it seems that a lot of people who write for newspapers still think in the same patterns, in terms of extraordinary powers of annihilation and hair trigger global alliances.

But this situation is nothing like that.

War is the use of military might to achieve political objectives against the will of another government. Killing lots of people isn’t the point of a war; only a means to an end. North Korea could already do that with its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons. The fact that Kim Jong-un will soon be able to kill lots of Americans in spectacular fiery explosions doesn’t mean he can now beat the USA into submission in a war. In any nuclear exchange, America’s government would be the only one left standing.

It is possible that nuclear weapons might allow Kim Jong-un to achieve certain political objectives against America by their threat rather than their use. For example, getting America to renounce its defence treaties with S. Korea and Japan. Although you may have noticed that countries with nuclear weapons don’t generally have much success in using them to order other countries around. After all, if it worked then America would already have used it on North Korea.

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by Samir Chopra

The American philosopher Ivan Soll attributed "great sociological and psychological insight" to Hegel’s remarks that "the frustration of the freedom of action results in the search of a type of freedom immune to such frustration," that "where the capacity for abstract thoughts exists, freedom, outwardly thwarted, is sought in thought."[1] The perspicuity of this insight of Hegel—one found in Nietzsche and Freud’s explorations of the depths of human psychology too—is visible in a species of literary and intellectual production intimately associated with physical confinement: prison literature. This genre is populated with many luminaries: Boethius, John Bunyan, Marquis De Sade, Antonio Gramsci, Solzhenitsyn, Bukharin, Elie Wiesel, Henry Thoreau, Jean Genet—among others. These writers found constraint conducive to creativity; the slamming shut of one gate prompted the unlocking of another; confinement produced a search for “substitute gratification”–whether conscious or unconscious–and the channeling of the drive to freedom into the drive for concrete expression of abstract thought. Like Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morals these writers argued—by the act of writing their works—that if pathological repression is to be avoided, our drives must be appropriately and masterfully directed toward alternative, creative, expression. The prison writer thus demonstrates the truth of the claim—with which Hannah Arendt and George Orwell’s visions in The Origins of Totalitarianism and 1984 resonate—that the prison officials who place prisoners in solitary confinement convey crucial information to future oppressors: mere imprisonment of the political or moral gadfly is not enough; if confinement is to work as a mode of repression, it must aspire to totality.

The Peculiarities of Prison

The central irony of the prison—as the prisoner quickly discovers—is that it is a zone of legal enforcement and lawlessness. Prisoners confront unblinking, resolute bureaucracy, beholden to its procedures and their utter rigidity, all the while knowing their guards—the corrections officers who can ‘correct’ them at any time—can violate them with impunity. The incarcerated are always aware they are powerless, that their guards can exert all manner of power over them. Prisoners do not just fear other prisoners; they fear the lawless application of the law too. Any formal legal redress available will not diminish the terrifying powerlessness in the face of a guard exerting total and final control over body and mind. The long arm of the law rarely reaches out to accost a prison guard; the prisoner is at the guard’s mercy.

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by Dave Maier

Nowadays the term “postmodernism” is synonymous with a certain sort of trendy, obscurantist philosophical nihilism, the self-consciously radical negation of solid common sense (“Words have no meanings!” “There is no truth!”). This is a shame, as it seems that one might very well criticize certain aspects of the modern era in an effort to move beyond. Indeed, to the extent that one sees the fundamental presuppositions of the modern era as both questionable (or at least past their sell-by date) and feasibly revisable or replaceable, one’s thought would thereby count as “postmodern” in a purely descriptive sense.

But words do indeed have meanings, and vox populi has spoken in this matter. Still, we are allowed to stretch out a bit if we think it helps. Here, for example, a neutral sense of the term helps make sense of my title. For if “postmodernism” is nonsense, then clearly no one should be postmodern. On the other hand, if it’s simply (potentially) unobjectionable philosophical criticism of modern dualisms, then why shouldn’t we be, science critic or not? A neutral term leaves open the latter possibility (thus necessitating an argument for my title claim) while reminding us that such things can easily go very badly wrong (not to mention hewing more closely to actual contemporary usage).

By “science critics” I mean a broad range of people, from sociologists of science to creationists, as well as the sort who gave “postmodernism” its bad name in the first place. Each is worried in their characteristic way about the dogmatism they perceive in science’s self-conception as the royal road to truth. Science is, they may claim, overly obsessed with objectivity, or with its own characteristic method, or with knowledge for its own sake, or with its epistemological status relative to other kinds of inquiry or other human activities more generally, or the metaphysical status of the laws or entities its theories are concerned with. In reply, critics may emphasize the essentially human (i.e., discursive, embedded, embodied, perspectival, etc.) nature of scientific activity as a corrective.

At this level of generality, any or all of these correctives might be appropriate. We cannot simply rule such judgments out of court from the beginning. Let’s let the critics make their case at least, lest we confirm the verdict of dogmatism right up front.

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