by Tim Sommers

The fella says, we must never forget that we are human. And as humans we must dream. And when we dream, we dream of money. —David Mamet/The Spanish Prisoner (1998)

Long after Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it and wisely counseled giving back to Caesar what, very obviously, was Caesar’s (‘Didn’t you see the picture?’), Adam Smith tried to tell us that money was not invented by governments. Money, and economic life entire, come from “a certain propensity in human nature,” he says, “the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” Smith gives a detailed account of how such barter might arise in a group of shepherds or hunters. He does not pretend that this is an actual group of which he has actual knowledge. But what genre of story is this then?

Although many economists have told the “money comes from barter” story as nonfiction, contemporary economics textbooks tell it neither as fact nor fiction, but as a hypothetical. To see the benefits of money, one textbook advises, “imagine a barter economy.” “In a complex society with many goods,” says another, money replaces barter, since “barter exchanges involve an intolerable amount of effort.” More poetically, one textbook asks us to imagine that we “have roosters, but…want roses.”

The trouble is, as anthropologist Caroline Humphrey points out, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing.” Never?

Barter societies, where they exist at any scale, are what happens (initially, briefly) to societies that once used money after their central government collapses. So, while economists would have you believe that barter initially arises from “a certain propensity in human nature,” but that, given barter’s intolerable complexity, barter gives rise naturally to money, and that the use of money leads to credit and debt, David Graber argues that, basically, the opposite is true. Read more »

by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

A new study has revealed a troubling development in the state of Maryland: while murder rates fluctuated between 2005 and 2017—first trending downward, then increasing for a few years—the homicides recorded during that period have grown steadily more violent the entire time.

According to “Increasing Injury Intensity among 6,500 Violent Deaths in the State of Maryland,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of the American College of Surgeons, researchers examined the intensity of deadly incidents over a 13-year period. Intensity was measured by the number of gunshots, stab wounds, and fractures exhibited by victims. Across all three causes of death, while the rate of homicides varied during the period, the percentage of high-violence crimes consistently increased.

Conducting the study was easier in Maryland than it might have been in other states. Maryland is unusual in that its Chief Medical Examiner is required to report on all murders, suicides, and unusual deaths, which means that researchers had access to a broad-based data set. State policy meant that researchers had access to information about victims who died under medical care and those who died at the scene of the crime. The state’s data set was geographically comprehensive, too, including cases from Baltimore’s urban center, the suburban areas around Baltimore and Washington, DC, and the rural areas in the eastern and western parts of the state. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Nils Peterson

I

This is how it felt. 

Yankee Stadium Gone – Impossible. It’s like going to your old hometown and finding your house – No! the neighborhood tarmacked over. Yes, we live in the world of Heraclitus, “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed.”  Flux is all.

The first time I went to Yankee Stadium, I lived in New Jersey and I went with Bunny Reid, a neighborhood friend who lived in a strange house filled mostly with aunts. It had a big, big yard, and in the fall we’d play football on the long open side yard. In the spring and summer we’d play catch with mitts too big for our hands or we’d throw a pink rubber ball against the side of a garage that had been a carriage house keeping careful track of balls and strikes. We were Yankee fans. His father wasn’t around much. I think he had something to do with the railroad, but he took us to see a real game at Yankee Stadium.

I guess we drove up there through the Tunnel or over the George Washington Bridge, but memory isn’t certain here, because it was wartime and gas rationed and difficult to find, the speed limit 45 as I recall. I think I would remember train or bus. The great players were off playing for Uncle Sam, so likely this is 1944 or maybe ’45 before VE and VJ Days. However we got there, I was thrilled at being in that marvelous, seemingly eternal Coliseum, the House That Ruth Built.

Bunny’s father got the tickets, gave me mine – and, all of a sudden they were gone, Bunny and his father were nowhere in sight. There I was, 10 years old, 11 at most, 50 miles from home, maybe 50 cents in my pocket for a hot dog and a drink. Maybe there was a moment of panic. Maybe not. I took my ticket, asked an usher where my seat was, and went to it. Read more »

Alpine salamander in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

by Richard Farr

I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what you’d experience with your back to the railing at Niagara. As if pleased with the roar, this part of the airframe wags intermittently, like the rear end of a hopeful dog. Objects made of metal have no right to be this flexible – especially not airtight objects that are essentially several thousand small tin trays tacked together. (Welded? Bolted? Riveted? What is a rivet anyway? How is it possible to reach my age with essentially no idea what a rivet is?) 

When I read Simon Winchester’s history of engineering, The Perfectionists, I must have missed the bit about rivets, but I did learn that the turbine blades in a jet engine have to be manufactured by advanced magi of the alchemical arts, who employ exotic alloys and mind-bogglingly fine tolerances to fight metal’s very natural desire to melt or shatter when spun at ferocious speeds inside a furnace. I try not to think about the fact that a manufacturing imperfection the size of a flea’s toenail could get me into a news story.

According to my watch we’re at 6,000 feet, but that’s only an indication of the lowered cabin pressure. It’s nothing, from a climber’s point of view, but presumably it explains why my head hurts, my hands look like a pair of lizard skin gloves, and half the passengers are farting. Read more »

Stardust

—on a celestial photo

look to the spiral arc of stars
of which the nearest star and you are part

and see your milky way
and climb your finite climb

and run your finite run
and whirl and turn and wind

while they spin their finite spin
and glow their finite glow

and give you finite light
to tell you what they know

of the stuff you’re of and in,
both brief and infinite

Jim Culleny
9/4/15, 7:10 am
Photograph by Dave Lane

Kathleen Ryan. Bad Lemon (Creep), 2019.

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More here, here, and here.

by Mike Bendzela

The term “Little Apocalypse” is borrowed from New Testament studies, referring to the Olivet Discourse in Jerusalem. This speech first appeared around the year 70 CE, in Chapter 13 of the original written gospel, the Gospel of Mark. After the scene of the cleansing of the temple, before the Last Supper and the arrest, one of the disciples draws attention to the massive stones of the temple, evoking from Jesus the promise that the temple would be destroyed. They sit “on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple” (hence “Olivet Discourse”), and the disciples ask Jesus to elaborate, thus prompting his long monologue predicting the End, when “Heaven and earth will pass away,” a view to be developed later in what might be called the “Big Apocalypse,” the Book of Revelation.

“Apocalypse” in its Greek sense means an “unveiling,” particularly when a visionary prophet or writer is vouchsafed a revelation of God’s plan. Emily Dickinson’s vision of the cosmic order in the poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers” is much briefer than Jesus’s Little Apocalypse but is no less striking. Her vision extends beyond traditional Christian boilerplate imagery to encompass something distinctly more up-to-date.

The poem’s first stanza discloses a portrait of the Christian dead lying in their tombs, awaiting the End of Days:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning—
and untouched by noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone—

The utter stasis of the scene is housed in a single inverted sentence, in which the predicate comes first, with the sentence’s only verb–“sleep”–continually delayed by those “untouched” phrases. Then, finally, appears the subject, “the meek members of the Resurrection,” lying there inertly near the end of the sentence. The whole thing is capped off with a metaphor of a dwelling, the “Satin” interiors of their coffins represented as “Rafter” and the “Stone” tomb covering as “Roof.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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 short lyric can be an ingenious device, a clever mechanism, an engine for generating multiple meanings – that’s the first axiom of my argument. The second axiom is that all truly great poetry is, at some level, about poetry itself (if not about the individual poem itself). Robert Bernard Hass’ “The Metaphysics of Presence,” which was published in the December 2023 issue of Poetry magazine, is an exemplary example of both of these aforementioned principles; a lyric that ironically draws attention to itself, to “Your hipster cynical voice” and to “clever puns,” but in the deferral between ultimate meaning and surfaces suggests a far more profound, if ineffable, lesson than the playfulness which the work itself initially implies.

The title of the work is consciously foreboding, with “The Metaphysics of Presence” sounding as if something that would be emblazoned on the spine of a door-stopper of continental philosophy. It’s not incidental, however, for that’s precisely and literally what Hass’ poem is concerned with, which is to say the relationship between what language represents and the thing-in-itself, between the sign and signified, the presence and the inevitable absence of words falling short of ultimate reality. To that end, “The Metaphysics of Presence” is a love poem. Hass even says so, writing in as straightforward a manner as is conceivable at the tenth line that “You’re in the presence of a love poem,” which is both accurate and not, and an example of a literal declaration in a poem that has fun with the incommensurability of literal declarations all while gesturing to something that lay beyond language. Read more »

At a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

“These are dry,

didn’t you soak
the stems in a vase before

you came here?” Mother said
as I showered blood

red rose petals
on her grave.

by Rafiq Kathwari

by Carol A Westbrook

The sun has always been an object of fascination and interest, appearing as it does as a bright, shining sphere crossing the daytime sky. On Monday, April 8, many of us will have had the opportunity to see the sun in all its glory as the moon crosses between it and the earth, briefly revealing its spectacular halo, the solar corona. Although we tend to take the sun for granted, an event like this makes us stop and think of how little we know about this celestial object.

Primitive peoples recognized that the sun was the source of all the earth’s heat and light; it was as important as the air we breathe and the water we drink. The sun was necessary to raise food crops and forage. Who could grow a garden in the shade? The sun marked the days and the seasons with a predictable regularity providing security and structure to their lives. The longest days, the shortest days, and the two equinoxes, had a special significance to their lives as they delineated the seasons, and they celebrated these days with feasting and sacrifice and prayers to their gods; and they raised large and impressively accurate monuments to mark these days. Stonehenge inf England is the best known of these monuments, but there are many others such as the pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico which casts a shadow in the shape of a serpent climbing the pyramid at the vernal and autumnal equinoxes. It is perhaps this disruption in this regularity and dependability that tend to make solar eclipses such memorable—and perhaps frightening–events. Read more »

by Martin Butler

Recently I read an article which included the idea that nature can have rights, something I have to admit I had not come across before, despite a keen awareness that nature needs protecting. I discovered that this is a well-established point of view – there is a lengthy Wikipedia page on the topic. I found this rather odd – it seemed a misplaced use of the concept of a right. But it made me reflect that in the modern world the possession of rights is one of the few ethical ideals that is taken seriously wherever you happen to be on the political spectrum, so it’s understandable why those who want to protect nature might adopt the language of rights.

From the right to bear arms to transgender rights, rights matter across the board, having an authority that religious commandments, the claims of ‘social justice’, and other varieties of moral prescription seem to lack. The idea that we have rights is an unquestioned certainty, but rights are also often a source of considerable conflict in the modern world. Which rights do we actually possess? Do animals have rights? How can conflicting rights, which are presented as fixed, be reconciled? Do some rights automatically trump other rights? If so, how could a hierarchy of rights be devised? The language of rights, it seems, very quickly leads to dogmatism and impasse. Jeremy Bentham certainly had no time for rights:

Natural rights is simply nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense on stilts.[1]

He wrote this in an essay entitled “Anarchical Fallacies; being an examination of the Declaration of Rights issued during the French Revolution”(1796). Interestingly, Bentham’s arguments have something in common with Karl Marx’s and Edmund Burke’s critiques of rights – and these two philosophers are at opposite ends of the political divide. Read more »