by Terese Svoboda

Donald Sutherland was a connoisseur of poetry. In the 80s I knew poetry-quoting doyennes from the glittering parties the Academy of American Poets threw as well as the Sudanese who recited their histories in song, but mostly I knew poets obsessed with competing with dead ones, with an eye toward their next book. Poets generally love poetry the way auto mechanics love cars. They don’t luxuriate in the front seat, or take long winding car trips through the Berkshires, they make sure the ignition catches and go on to the next one. Hearing Sutherland recite poetry you heard the Stanislavski method of poetry-recitation, an oral delivery straight from the mind as well as the mouth. Sutherland said he was manipulated by words, not as a ventriloquist but in the relationship between feeling and meaning. Likewise, after numerous tussles with directors Fellini and Preminger and Bertolucci – he even tried to get Robert Altman fired from M.A.S.H. – he decided he was merely the director’s vehicle. Poetry directed him.

I was newly blonde when I flew out to LA to convince him to be the host of Voices & Visions, a PBS series on American poetry that I was producing. The dye job wasn’t planned. The proto-reality TV show Real People had put up a Free Haircut sign in Soho and like any poet, I was attracted to the Free.  All I had to do for the series was transform from a mousy brown thirty-year-old to a hot blonde punk in a red jumpsuit. No problem. I did a bit of strutting around on the set, and the program was ready for reruns. Unbeknownst to me, the executive director had been working his Canadian connection, the daughter of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who knew Donald Sutherland and his proclivity toward poetry. Lunch had already been scheduled.

Sutherland had the anthology of baseball poetry we’d sent to him on his desk, baseball being his only other passion outside of acting. Veteran of nearly a hundred movies by that time, he’d recently stunned audiences with his performance in Ordinary People. Did I dare to mention my brush with Real People? All I remember of the business part of that first hour was the way he quoted Auden while skating his long fingers over his desk – not as an arpeggio of show-offy emphasis but unconsciously following the cadence. I was impressed. He needn’t have auditioned – if that’s what it was – because we were barely paying scale. He called in his manager, they thought something could be done, and he suggested lunch. After arguing with his manager about what car to take, he appeared outside his office at the wheel of a beautiful white convertible. The manager held the door for me, I got in – and we drove across the street. Ah, Hollywood. Read more »

Whatchamacallit

She’s dead, he said.
So’s he, said she.

Kicked the bucket, he said.
Bought the farm, said she.

Under the clover, he said.
Crossed over, said she.

Iced with a heater, he said.
Sleeps with the fishes, said she.

Taken for a little ride, he said.
Gone to the other side, said she.

Flat-lined, he said.
Out of mind, said she.

To a better place, he said.
By heaven’s grace, said she.

Under the sod, he said.
To be with God, said she.

To Paradise? he said.
Would be nice, said she.

Could it be? he said.
Could it not? said she.

***

Jim Culleny; June 14, 2007
from Odder Still
Leana’s Basement Press, 2015

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by Ben Orlin

There is something reassuring about teaching math. On the eve of a pivotal election, as my colleagues in U.S. history grapple with their subject’s urgent and terrible relevance, I can console myself that math is rarely urgent, and (as we tend to teach it) almost never relevant.

Or so it would seem. But math has a guilty secret: its longstanding role in American statecraft.

I’m not referring to math’s technocratic applications, or the pious calls for better STEM education. Rather, math has long inspired our country’s leaders for precisely the same reason that it befuddles our students: its willingness to wrangle with abstraction.

Math is the science of unifying laws. As such, it has served as a model for our messy republic’s perpetual efforts to live up to the “United” in its name.

I scarcely exaggerate when I say that we are the people of the equals sign.

Thomas Jefferson was an avid mathematician. He described calculus as “a delicious luxury,” and trigonometry as “most valuable to every man,” adding, “there is scarcely a day in which he will not resort to it.”

(Sidebar: I spent years teaching trig, and never once heard this sentiment echoed.)

In 1776, when Jefferson penned his famous equation—that all men are created equal—he was not trying to set the U.S. apart. Quite the opposite: the Declaration’s goal, he later wrote, was “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject,” so as to persuade other nations of our cause. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

It’s a pity that both of them can’t lose. —Henry Kissinger

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. —J.K. Galbraith

I feel as dirty and disgusted as a chance visitor to Jeffrey Epstein’s island. In less than a fortnight I will walk into a voting booth and be forced to come down on one side or the other in perhaps the worst dilemma I have ever faced in my life: voting for Kamala Harris or a third-party candidate for president, which may well contribute towards a Trump victory. I have no idea where I will end up on this; I don’t even want to think about solving the dilemma, because there simply is no solution. This is not an attempt to influence how anyone votes. It is a commentary on a political system that no longer even allows us the cynical option to avoid it altogether. Whatever happens will almost certainly make life worse in significant ways for vast numbers of people. I sometimes think the only appropriate thing to do is to smuggle poison into the booth and kill myself after pulling the lever.

To me, voting for Donald Trump is supremely well beyond consideration. Many of his economic, and perhaps all of his environment-affecting ones, remind one of his helpful suggestion to drink bleach as an antidote to Covid. His plans regarding mass deportations may directly affect some of my closest friends. His nonchalance about depriving people of rights that were, not so long ago, even by Trump’s most senior appointments to the judiciary, considered secure in law, and his insistence on mentioning policies as priorities of his next administration that are far less based in statute or judicial decisions stretches the imagination in terms of possible outcomes even in a country that has been so shamelessly co-opted and corrupted as the United States has. His cronyism and criminal tendencies are the stuff of legend. He is a militarist of the first order when he thinks it will serve his purposes. If nothing else, what he has to offer is not even close to worth the risk of what he could conceivably do to our basic way of life, even if a vote against him is seen as a mere gesture of extreme disgust at Democrats who have enjoyed nothing more for the last several months as insulting important parts of the party, like the progressive wing. On Gaza, and the Middle East in general, his promises to allow the war criminal Netanyahu to  “do what you have to do” reveals that Trump may prove to be even worse than “Genocide Joe” Biden, or the bone-headedly silent Harris, on this issue, despite enormous levels of popularity amongst all voters for a permanent cease-fire, as reflected in many polls.

This being the case, it seems almost miraculous that Harris cannot simply obliterate her ridiculous opponent. This is even more the case when one considers the sickening amounts of money that have flowed into her campaign since Harris and Biden performed their little dance of death in July and August. She raised some 500 million dollars in one month after being named Biden’s successor, a disturbing amount of which came from billionaires. And that, to me, brings us to the crux of the case against her. But before I get to that, I will try to provide a brief assessment of her campaign’s main proposals. Read more »

by Jeroen van Baar

In science, a good model describes one feature of the natural world well or solves one difficult problem. A great model, on the other hand, is often multipurpose. It serves as metaphor even where nobody expected it to.

Take one keyword of our current society: busy. In a 2018 Pew survey, 60% of Americans said they sometimes felt ‘too busy to enjoy life’. Between building a career, raising kids, and cleaning the house there seems to be barely enough time to cook or exercise or read or call your mother—even though we know those things are fun and good for you. On the other hand, there’s the adage that ‘if you want something done, ask a busy person’. Some busy people, it seems, can always fit in something small. While their time is scarce, their brains have room. How does that work?

A model from computer science can help us understand. Like us, computers have tasks to complete and to-dos to remember. And like us, they sometimes get overwhelmed. When sending an email over Gmail, there’s a 25 MB limit to the files you can attach. Try to send more, and the system calls in sick. A similar problem hits iPhone users after about two years, when they’ve taken enough puppy photos to exhaust the storage: the phone becomes achingly slow because it doesn’t have space to think.

The solution is compression. Before sending that large attachment, you turn it into a .ZIP archive and voilà, it has shrunk to 11 or 12 MB. This is amazing, if you think about it. Once the receiver unpacks the archive, exactly the same information is presented on their screen, but Gmail had to work a lot less hard for that. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

1. Reality isn’t what it used to be. Neither is fiction.

Years ago, someone who worked for a daily soap opera production company told me that if a storyline included a wedding, the TV network and its stations would be inundated with wedding gifts for the fictional newlyweds—from fans unable to distinguish fact from fiction, reality from TV. Hard to believe.

But this is more or less what happened in 2016: A man who had played a successful boss on TV won the Presidential election. He wasn’t such a successful businessman, but he played one on TV. (He wasn’t really a president, but he played one in the White House.) Eight years on, that cosplayed success is still branded on the minds of Trump supporters. No facts, scandals, or criminal convictions can shake their faith in the tenacious fictions of a reality show.

With so much knowledge and information at our fingertips, why haven’t we gotten smarter? Even now, when we can see with our own eyes how it happened in 1933, we are still in danger of becoming history’s recidivists. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

There’s that list of religions from which we’re offered a choice. If none of them quite fit, at the bottom there’s None. Well that’s not for me either so I’ve taken to calling myself a Non-None. My religious feeling is not defined by any of the above, but it certainly is not defined by None. Some thoughts.

While knotting my shoes, which gets harder as I get older, I realized that if I were Catholic I would prefer to go to a church, well, cathedral really, in which the mass was sung in Latin. I’ve sung many of the great mass settings which are in Latin, and I know enough Latin to understand what I’m singing and conductors always insist on singers having a sense of what the sounds coming out of their mouths mean, but while tying my shoes I realized that I didn’t care about understanding. What I wanted was the incantatory sound, the glorious AH of Ave, the dark EH of Requiem, the round OH of Gloria. It was the sound that penetrated me, of what has sometimes been called “the holy vowels,” – think of the OM sound that some feel is the heartbeat of the universe. How rich it is to say, richer even in a chant. Some would say, and I for the moment agree, it is an all-encompassing sound. So maybe understanding the words of the mass gets in the way of the mass. I don’t insist on this, but wonder.

Remember the ending of Hopkins’ “God’s Grandeur?”

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

How great that ah! is. It is an Ah of Awe, and we feel the awe deep down, and the exhalation of our saying is prayer. (I admit that it’s good to understand the words of Hopkins that bring us to that great sound then releases us from it.)

I think we have lost the feeling of awe and so the universe we live in has grown smaller except for the astrophysicists who seem to understand the universe as a vast cathedral. Once here on earth we found the language of awe. That language was the cathedral. It spoke our feeling of awe and also recreated it in us. (Yes, there are smaller spaces that offer their version of that experience and if we use eyes and ears, nature too enjoys building cathedrals. Maybe there’s nothing that’s not.) Read more »

This is from Morgan Meis:

An excerpt from the book can be found here. The book is published by Deep Vellum. It is a kind of horror story about academics in Germany and also about movies and about the supernatural, sort of, and also is just an excellent and sometimes scary and also quite hilarious book. Extremely well written. Great. J.M. Tyree and I (Morgan Meis) have an extremely silly but also kind of fun and lovely conversation about the book that some people could really enjoy. Not everyone. But some people, surely.

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by Olivier Del Fabbro

Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that the “most ancient of all societies and the only natural one is that of the family.”[1] Similarly, Rousseau’s great antagonist, Thomas Hobbes, claims that “family is a small commonwealth.”[2] But what if the most natural and ancient of all societies is confronted with war? According to a survey by the International Rescue Committee, 74% of Ukrainians report being separated from a close family member because of the war.[3]

Maria (32) and Ivan (42) are such a family. Ivan was drafted in April 2022. Since then, he has been stationed in Donetsk, in the region of Kramatorsk. In the beginning, Maria and Ivan saw each other every four months for about ten days. Now, in 2024, he is allowed to come home twice a year for two weeks. “But you also have to count two days for travel.” The frontline is far away from where Maria lives, Chernivtsi, on the border to Romania.

On the 13^th of April 2024, when Ivan came home for his two-week leave, Maria had just given birth to their daughter, Sophia, the previous day. Two weeks later, Ivan left heartbroken for the frontline. “I cried every day until the end of May,” Maria says. “Then, I realized that I must live for my daughter, for my husband. I did not want my husband to see me crying every day, because he was worried as well.” Maria and Ivan always planned on having a family, but Maria’s pregnancy was an accident. “I don’t regret it,” she says smiling at Sophia. “She is perfect.”

Maria grew up in Greece, with her Ukrainian mother and Greek father. She went to Chernivtsi to study medicine to become a dermatologist. In March 2024, shortly before Sophia was born, Maria’s mother came to visit and help her. But just as Ivan, she left at the end of April. Still today, she is waiting in Greece for her daughter, but Maria does not want to leave her husband. She wants Ivan to see his daughter.

“It’s very difficult to be a single mother. It’s just myself and my daughter.” Maria’s mother, her father, her brothers, are all in Greece. Ivan’s grandparents from Ukraine are long gone. His father has passed away, and his mother lives in Italy. “I am all alone.” Read more »

by Xavier Muller

Colorectal cancer is the third most common cancer with an estimate of more than 150,000 new cases in 2024 in the United States (1, 2). In approximately one third of patients, colorectal cancer is metastatic at the time of diagnosis, meaning that cancer cells have already spread from the colon or rectum to other organs in the body (2). One of the most frequent metastatic sites of colorectal cancer is the liver (50% of patients). In case the metastases are localized only in the liver, the optimal treatment is to remove them surgically in combination with chemotherapy (3). Of note, resection of liver metastases is only beneficial if all macroscopically visible lesions can be removed. Unfortunately, a complete resection of liver metastases is only possible in up to 35% of patients, owing to anatomical limits imposed upon the surgeon (3).

What are the limits of liver surgery?

In order to understand the limits of surgical resection of liver metastases, one has to focus on liver anatomy. French anatomist Claude Couinaud published the first complete description of the functional anatomy of the liver in 1957 (4). The liver consists of two functional entities, the left and the right hemiliver, which are both supplied by three main structures: a vein, an artery and a bile duct (5). These three structures are referred to as the portal pedicle. There is a right portal pedicle for the right hemiliver and a left portal pedicle for the left hemiliver. The hemiliver can be further divided into individual segments, defined by the bifurcation of the respective portal pedicle into smaller branches (6). One can image the functional liver anatomy as a tree, with the left and right pedicles originating directly from the main trunk before further dividing into smaller branches as we approach the periphery of the tree. In total, there are eight liver segments with a dedicated portal pedicle (6). Read more »

A box containing an assortment of Pakistani sweets given to me by the owner of a shop in Brixen, South Tyrol, in celebration of the birth of his first grandchild.

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by Ed Simon

Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]

A good poem can do many things – be clever, edifying, provocative, or moving – but a truly great poem (which is to say a successful one), need only be concerned with one additional attribute, and that is an arresting turn of phrase. By that criterion, Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky’s “We Lived Happily During the War,” originally published in Poetry in 2013 and later appearing in the 2019 collection Deaf Republic, is among the greatest English-language verses of this abbreviated century. Within the context of Deaf Republic, Kaminsky’s lyric takes part in a larger allegorical narrative, but that broader story in the collection aside, “We Lived Happily During the War” is arrestingly prescient of both the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea and Vladimir Putin’s brutal and ongoing assault on the broader country of Kaminsky’s birth since 2022, including bombardment of the poet’s home city of Odessa. Yet even stripped of this context, “We Lived Happily During the War” concerns itself with the general tumult of modern warfare, both its horror and prosaicness, its sanitation and its tragedy. More than just about Ukraine, or Syria, or Gaza, Kaminsky’s lyric is about us, those comfortable Western observers of warfare who have the privilege to be happy and content at the exact moment that others are being slaughtered.

To return to my initial argument, the line which lodges in the head from Kaminsky’s poem is one that isn’t exactly or actually in the lyric itself but is rather the title – “We Lived Happily During the War.” Six words, only two multisyllabic, each one hits with the definitiveness of a bullet shot or an incendiary explosion. There is an initial ambiguity to the tile – who does the pronoun refer to? What war are we speaking of? If the “We” is those who are suffering through this undefined assault, then the poem becomes a testament to human endurance through atrocity. If the “We” is someone else, maybe those contemporaneous with the war but not witness to it, then the poem becomes a condemnation of inaction. Kaminsky’s lyric is largely interpreted in the second way, and for good reason, because the only instance of the title appearing as a line within the poem itself, albeit altered by a parenthetical which makes all the difference, in the penultimate stanza which is enjambed into a one-line final stanza so that it reads “we (forgive us)/lived happily during the war.” That parenthetical seemingly makes all the difference, though there is also always the possibility that there is a need for forgiveness from those who successfully survive a war, with all of the negotiations and betrayals that implies, as well. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. –Henry Ward Beecher

There are several long-running attempts to give AIs common sense. Or, at least, to build a useable database of “common sense” for AIs. MIT’s Media Lab shut down its “Open Mind Common Sense” project in 2016 after 17 years of collecting common sense, but Wordnet has been up and running in Princeton’s cognitive science lab since 1985 and is still going strong. It is now an independent, noncommercial database run by The Global WordNet Association and, purportedly, contains 12+ megabytes of common sense. The always scary sounding Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has its own Machine Common Sense project – and then there’s Delphi which focuses on “ethical” common sense. There’s probably more.

But common sense is a slippery notion. “A stabbing ‘with’ a cheeseburger,” Delphi has said, “is morally preferable to a stabbing ‘over’ a cheeseburger.” Which seems right, but common sensical? I don’t know. Cows say “Moo” is another example of Delphi’s AI common sense. But isn’t that just ordinary knowledge based on wide-spread (if sometimes second-hand) experience? If you stick a pin into a carrot, another nugget goes, it makes a hole in the carrot not the pin. Is that really what we mean by common sense?

G.E. Moore, along with Russel and Wittgenstein one of founders of analytic philosophy, famously proved the existence of an external world – which does seem common sensical – just by waving his hands about. “I can prove now,” he says, “that two human hands exist…[just] by holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a certain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand’, and adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is another’. How absurd it would be to suggest that I did not know it, but only believed it, and that perhaps it was not the case!”

I assume his appeal is ultimately to common sense – and not just his hands.

Which brings me to a paradox that occurred me when I first began studying philosophy that I still can’t quite shake. It’s this.

A philosophical theory can either go against common sense or it can support or justify common sense. Supporting common sense seems pointless. After all, what you are trying to prove is, by definition, already commonly recognized as the sensible view. But if you, instead, challenge or attack common sense what resources or knowledge can philosophy bring to bear powerful enough to overturn or undermine common sense – that which, again, everyone already knows to be the case? Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

It’s a warm June day in 1976. I am 17 years old and standing with my family and my 30-year-old husband’s family at the airport In Tehran. My mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law have red eyes and red nose tips from crying and trying hard not to cry in public. My mother-in-law is seeing her firstborn leave again to go overseas, but this time with a new wife instead of going alone. My mother is seeing her daughter start a new life far away from her, and years later she told me a part of her was always not sure she had made the right decision to marry me off so young. In the picture we took at the airport, I am standing by my younger sisters, carrying a very cool beige Samsonite makeup case and from the look of my sisters and me, I doubt we could have known that it would be the last time we were in Iran together as a family, ever. My sisters and I are looking at the camera, I am scared, excited, and sad; my sisters are standing there, wondering probably what will happen next. When I say goodbye to my grandmother who had raised me for the first five years of my life, she discreetly puts a folded one-hundred-dollar bill in my hand and closes her fingers on it. She whispers to me that she wants me to buy something for myself when I get to my destination.

The flight that brought me to America had a stop in the UK and my husband, whom I had met three months earlier, bought himself a white wool Irish sweater at the long layover at the airport, as did the young Iranian woman who sat on the aisle seat next to me. She spoke Persian with an American accent even though she was Iranian, and had come to visit her family and was returning to the States. I disliked her right away for no good reason except that she had bought her Irish sweater and I hadn’t bought anything. I also envied the fact that she was traveling on her own. She and my husband were speaking to each other mostly in English, because it was easier for her, and she was telling him about her college in Boston, how far Philadelphia, our final destination was from the airport in New York, and other things that must have not been worth translating for me, as I didn’t speak English. With their new matching sweaters, smoking Dunhill cigarettes, and speaking to each other, I felt a complicity between them that excluded me.

We landed at JFK airport, a place my grandmother had warned us about because according to her, it was the largest airport in the world. She had asked him to hold my hand there and not let go the whole time, worried I might get lost in the size of that place. Quickly after landing, my husband bought a Popular Mechanics magazine at the newsstand and his colleague who was on the same flight, bought a Playboy magazine. As he was looking at the centerfold picture, he said to my husband, “My magazine’s pictures are better than yours,” making both of them laugh and making me extremely uncomfortable, feeling naked and exposed. The Boston girl got picked up by her boyfriend who lifted her in his arms and I disliked her even more because she could have a boyfriend who loved her and whom she loved, something I wasn’t allowed to have. Read more »

Samia Halaby. Jllayq, 2000.

More here , here, and here.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic. Just as a water molecule can be broken into two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, 12 can be broken into two 2s and a 3. Indeed, the defining feature of a prime number is that it cannot be factored into a nontrivial product of two smaller numbers. Two primes that are easy to remember are

12345678910987654321

and

131211109876543212345678910111213.

Prime numbers are not only fundamental in mathematics, they are a key ingredient in the cryptography that secures your bank account, email, and everything else online. We can quickly and easily multiply numbers to get things like

1619890232090123459992473430408218409867740110001373,

but it is incredibly slow and difficult to factor a number like this into its constituent primes. The primes give us a mathematical lock that is easy to close and impossible to open unless you know how it was made.

Sadly, once again, the earthly rewards of mathematics elude us. For the purposes of cryptography, pseudoprime numbers are close enough. These non-prime numbers act like prime numbers in all the important ways for cryptography, and they are much easier to find.

Nevertheless, in math and computer science circles there was a flurry of excitement this week at the discovery of a new prime. Last week, the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search announced that

2^136279841 – 1 = 881694 … 86871551

is a prime number. The … is a yada yada of an awfully large number of digits. This new prime has 41,024,320 digits. That’s 16 million more digits than the second-largest known prime.

By comparison, AES-256 encryption is widely considered to be very secure, and it uses a key that is approximately 78 digits long. This prime is way too large to be of practical use. The goal is simply to find new prime numbers.

Why? George Mallory climbed Everest for the same reason: “because it’s there.” Unlike, say, the creators of livermorium, you don’t get to name a new prime number. But how can you not want to be one of the rare few who finds a new mathematical atom? Read more »