by Richard Farr

You might think London’s National Portrait Gallery is a temple of celebrity, and it’s true that many of the faces on these walls belong to mere royalty, or influential past Nabobs, or those more recently glossy with fame. But the people who draw me back again and again are the ones who get to be here only because they were freakishly good at something.   

Poets. Dancers. Singers. Scientists. Generals. Explorers. Actors. Engineers. Diplomats. Reformers. Painters. Sailors. Builders. Climbers. Composers. In a pretty-good eighteenth-century copy of a portrait by Holbein the Younger, Thomas Cromwell is not so much a man as a slab of living, dangerous gristle. Henry James looks dangerous too, in a portrait by John Singer Sargent that more people would recognize as great if inverted snobbery hadn’t turned under-rating Sargent into a whole academic discipline. Humphrey Davy, painted in his forties, could not be more different. He looks about 14; thinking about science has made him glow with delight. 

Thomas Gainsborough is all over the place to good effect next door, in the National Gallery, but his self-portrait here makes him look embalmed. It seems almost cruel to have placed him next to his contemporary Joshua Reynolds, whose own self-portrait demonstrates how far wit and brio can take you. A less successful Reynolds captures Samuel Johnson looking morose, or constipated; no greater contrast than with that prince among wits Laurence Sterne (Reynolds yet again), seen in full gloat after the publication of Tristram Shandy.  Read more »

Homes

we all leave home eventually,
leave the dark comfort of wombs,
leave the home of childhood,
some earlier than others depending upon
the warmth or not of particular hearths.
inevitably some step out
and abandon silver spoons like Siddhartha
who was not comforted by comfort,
while some break from huts of sheer neglect.
eventually, some even leave
the cocoon of self,
cracking its cramped shell,
flying beyond its confines,
its imaginary limits
its walls of mirrors
its life sentence
its aloneness

Jim Culleny, 4/4/22

by Mary Hrovat

There are worse places to be a stargazer than south-central Indiana; it’s not cloudy all the time here. I’ve spent many lovely evenings outside looking at stars and planets, and I’ve been able to see a fair number of lunar eclipses, along with the occasional conjunction (when two or more planets appear very close together on the sky) and, rarely, an occultation (when a celestial body, typically the moon but sometimes a planet or asteroid, passes directly in front of a planet or star).

For example, I was lucky enough to have clear skies in March 1996 on the night comet Hyakutake made its closest approach to Earth; from a relatively dark site, it was visible near the North Star, its long faint tail sweeping the sky like a hand on a clock. I also got to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in December 2020, the closest such conjunction since 1623. There were also a number of clear evenings before the conjunction, so I could watch the two planets drawing closer to each other on the sky. A viewing party for comet Hale-Bopp, on a night in 1997 when the moon was full and Venus was visible in the western sky after sunset, was notable for clouds coming and going, but we got to see the comet and the planet, and the moon was remarkably pink through hazy clouds.

However, we do get a lot of overcast nights. Indianapolis, the closest city for which I can find data, receives 55% of available sunshine; annually, it sees 88 clear days, 99 partly cloudy days, and 179 cloudy days. As a result, I’ve missed a fair number of lunar eclipses, meteor showers, and other astronomical events over the decades. When I was an astronomy student in the 1980s, I remember standing on the balcony of the observatory with a classmate, wondering whether the clouds that had moved in were there to stay. The climate here fosters doubt about the possibility of clear skies. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Figure in Environment, May 1974.

Pastel drawing on paper.

by Mike Bendzela

We love our antique coal range. Are we bad people? The answer is easily “Yes,” of course, but it has less to do with our infatuation with the coal range than with our membership in the club of approximately 1.5 billion in the industrialized world. Our utter dependence on the energy-intensive collective economic system of the developed nations makes us pretty damned rapacious, by historical standards. Our individual dependence on the coal range, not so much. The gargantuan footprint of the human enterprise is nothing any of us can do a thing about. Therefore, I say, Gather ye anthracite while ye may.

Why bother with the hassle of such an antiquated heating system? We live in a rambling, restored, 18th century Maine farmhouse with 19th century additions and barn. My spouse, Don, is a retired cabinetmaker and carpenter, an aficionado of 19th century mechanical systems, and an amateur historian of Maine’s rural social life.  He bought the stove decades ago and, with the help of a local mason, installed the edifice into the opening of an existing kitchen fireplace. It required mortaring cast iron panels into a pre-built brick infrastructure. The stove thus sits flat against the fireplace wall instead of sticking out into the room like most cast iron stoves.

The original coal grate was burned out, so Don made a pattern of  it in carved hardwood and delivered it to a foundry to be cast in iron. Coal grates must be bulky and heavy, as coal burns at a much higher temperature than wood and will destroy a wood grate. Don devised an iron pipe “water back” to go through the firebox and cemented it in place with refractory cement. (The original brass water back was missing.) Water runs through this water back, heats up, and fills the copper-nickel alloy “range boiler” to the left of the stove. From October through May, that is, during the heating season, all the hot water for the house is heated through the coal range. During the hot months we switch on the electric hot water heater and use a propane stove for cooking. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

In a recent video by Damien Walter about the Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem, the role of the Holocaust is brought front and center in Lem’s body of work. According to academic and author Elena Gomel, his work demanded that we grapple with that incomprehensible event. It’s a question that matters still since in the modern era we continued to see violence with seemingly little reason. But, Walter argued, we have refused to learn a critical lesson from the Holocaust which is a form of denial of that horrific event: Lem’s insight that the Holocaust was not a deviation from the march of history, but a byproduct of modern history itself. One particular aspect of the Holocaust that Lem explored was the kitsch culture of the Nazis. Lem believed that kitsch had its worst expression in Nazi culture. Was Lem correct? Was there a direct line between kitsch culture and destructive states? Lem honed in on a key aspect of mass society and how it shapes us and is shaped by us. I would agree to a degree. Kitsch, a critical byproduct of modernity, has been both a means of reinforcing and resisting oppressive forms of power. At its worse it can be used to motivate awful forms of violence. But kitsch can also be wonderfully subversive. Read more »

Train entering Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, from the south.

by David J. Lobina

Like the study of any other complex idea, the analysis of nationalism requires building up boundaries between different phenomena, drawing various theoretical distinctions, and recognising the inevitable splits that arise within what may look like a whole ideology at first. It is by teasing out the building blocks of nationalism that we may obtain a better view, and it is by drawing attention to its psychological underpinnings that it might be possible to make sense of where nationalism comes from, both as an idea and as a real-life event.

Say what?

Well, this is a nice little summary of my general take on the phenomenon of nationalism, as laid out, from the perspective of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, here, here, and here, and with a little help from the anarchist thinker Rudolf Rocker (here, here, and here).

I am bringing this into play now once again as a way to provide the right segue to the long-promised conclusion to my series on the use and abuse of fascism to describe current political events, especially in the US (started here). It’s been quite a while since then, and there is a fair amount to pick up and discuss, and so I thought it would be in my best interest to write a sort of “refreshment” about what I was on about last time around.

The final-parter, which will double down on my original point – to wit, that the term fascism is used far too loosely these days, that most of the people it is being applied to are hardly fascists in any meaningful sense, and that modern political undercurrents bear little to no relationship to the European fascism of the 1920-30s, especially to Italian fascism – will come out next month and hopefully bring an end to the series (pending commentary forcing me to retake it later on, of course; actually, do comments still exist at 3 Quarks Daily? I haven’t seen any recently). Read more »

by Gus Mitchell

(Read Pt. 1 and Pt. 2)

Everything is content and content is everything. An uncountable noun, like information, content has a monolithic singularity to it. A meme, tweet, image, targeted ad; a song, podcast, TV show or movie on a streaming platform; an explainer, a reaction; clickbait articles, legitimate journalism; bodycam footage of police taking down a gunman or a teenager; screenshots of appalling dating app interactions; an influencer retooling her school shooting trauma to sell Bioré skincare products on TikTok—it’s all content.

Of course, there are shades and varieties. Shareable content. Meme-able content. Viral content. Relatable content. Quality content. Exclusive and original content. Parasocial content: a conversational podcast, familiar voices filling up the dull silence of shopping, cooking, walking. Or ambient or second screen content, the actual content of which is negligible given that you’re probably consuming more content on another device at the same time.

What keeps us in this voracious state of content consumption? Decades ahead of his time, the late British spiritual writer and lecturer Alan Watts may have hit on an explanation. In a talk delivered in the late 1960s, he described the experience of flicking through Life Magazine as one of “pacified agitation.” Being in this state, he noted, leaves you with “a set of impressions” rather than giving you anything to “chew on.” It is this same agitation that keeps us coming back, consuming ever more content in search of some ever-elusive contentment. But it’s impossible to feel full when the internet’s capacity for containing, sharing, and proliferating its content is limitless. We cannot speak of the contents of the internet as we would once have named the contents of a book or a jar. The plural implies finitude, the singular a flatness, without depth or dimension. Read more »

by John Allen Paulos

Bertrand Russell’s advice for aging gracefully is rather simple: Broaden your horizons. He recommends that we should try to expand our interests and concerns. Doing so will help us become less focused on ourselves and more open to the world around us.  He adds metaphorically, “An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

I think to a large extent people tend to do this naturally. Businessmen often become less concerned with their assets and money and more with their larger family and society as they get older. Likewise lawyers frequently grow tired of having their briefs in a tangle and mellow out as they age. A similar phenomenon holds for athletes, academics, and workers of all sorts.

Of course, not everybody follows Russell’s counsel. Some remain hard-charging and a few so much so that they resemble the man in Tolstoy’s “How Much Land Does a Man Need?”Given the opportunity to possess all the land he can walk around in one day, the man’s greed leads to his death and thus provides the answer to the question in the title. A man needs about 6 feet by 2 feet by 4 feet – enough for a grave. More appealing is Dylan Thomas’ contrary exhortation not to “go gentle into that good night” but rather “to rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Notwithstanding Tolstoy and Thomas, the rocks and waterfalls of a life do tend for most people to give rise to a desire for calmer waters. Sticking with Russell’s metaphor suggests that in the limit we might arrive at what the French Nobel laureate Romain Rolland first termed in a letter to Freud the “oceanic feeling,” a sensation of eternity and of being one with the world. Stated differently, our personal identity slowly fades and is replaced by an impersonal cosmic one. Read more »

“Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds all learn new vocalizations.
The calls and songs of some species in these groups appear to have
even more in common with human language, such as conveying
information intentionally and using simple forms of some of the
elements of human language such as phonology, semantics and
syntax. And the similarities run deeper, including analogous brain
structures that are not shared by species without vocal learning.”
……………………….. —Smithsonian Magazine, Do Birds Have Language

What Needs to be Sung

. . . and here I thought I am descended from apes;
but it may be birds who speak from trees
rather than primates who swing through them
with whom I am more comfortably close
because they sing! and singing’s a beautiful thing
if done with the art of Cardinals, but
still, I can’t fully deny the grunts of apes
who share my lack of delicate precision when it comes
to telling things as they are, who pound chests
and rattle nearby undergrowth in the midst of jungles
when other brutes enter their perceived turf,
they too share my penchant to articulate,
though in more bellicose poetry
while from the canopy above
singing their way through the world
under threat of hawks and cats
or snakes who would enfold them in lethal hugs
or a fox who would steal their young

they employ the syntax of a piccolo
the semantics of a violin
the phonology of a trill
to say what needs to be said,
to sing what needs to be sung

Jim Culleny, 3/2/22

by Raji Jayaraman

Audio Version

It didn’t matter that what Addie and Maddie did or didn’t do in their personal lives was none of our business. We made it our business. We thought their behaviour begged some questions, and we made it our mission to find answers. As far as we were concerned the evidence pointed in only one direction. A scandalous one for the conservative community in which we were schooled.

First things first. Addie and Maddie were what they called each other and we called them, behind their backs. Officially, Addie was Addison Richter and Maddie was Madeleine Walker. Miss Richter and Mrs. Walker to us. Maddie was in admin, so we didn’t have much direct interaction with her. She was brick-shaped and didn’t walk so much as waddle. She was married to Terence, who was head of middle school. Both of them smiled constantly. It made you wonder how their faces didn’t hurt. Addie was the phys ed teacher. She was a permanent fixture in our lives. Each week, we had her twice for regular PE, twice for intramural sports, and then if you were on a school sports team, an additional three times. Because she did so much PE she was incredibly fit despite, what seemed to me at the time, her advanced age.

Addie was born in the mid-thirties, which means that she must have been around fifty by the time she entered my consciousness in middle school. The fact that she was, at that age, a Miss and not a Missus made her immediately suspect. Unnatural, even. The story we initially floated was that she had had a fiancé, but then he was drafted into the army and died and that broke her heart, and she remained hopelessly in love with him, disavowing men forever after.

That story turned out to be as watertight as a sieve. In its initial telling, the fiancé had died in World War II. Then one person did the math, and another noted that child marriages were illegal. Luckily, Addie was American so WW II wasn’t our only go to. The Korean War was out because of that child marriage business. That left the Vietnam War until some investigative journalist type ruined it by pointing out that Addie had long left the U.S. by the time the war had broken out, so where was she supposed to have met said fiancé? Read more »

Raqib Shaw. Detail from Ode To a Country Without a Post Office, 2019-20. (photograph by Sughra Raza)

Acrylic liner and enamel on birchwood

        “Black on edges of flames

         It cannot extinguish the neighborhoods,

         The homes set ablaze by midnight soldiers.

         Kashmir is burning.”

         Agha Shahid Ali. I See Kashmir from New Delhi at Midnight, 1997.

More here, here, and here.

Current show.

by Rebecca Baumgartner

During the recent Christmas shopping rush, I had to park at the very back of a crowded Target parking lot. By the time I trekked across the lot and reached the door of the store, my knees felt a bit achy. Not a big deal. After about half an hour of walking around shopping, I was extremely tired, limping slightly, and desperately needed to sit down.

By the time I was halfway through the parking lot heading back to my car, I was hobbling and leaning heavily on my cart as a makeshift walker. With every step, something in my knees ground against something else that wasn’t giving way, like there were too many bones fighting for space in there, or as though my kneecap were being polished like a gemstone in a tumbler. 

I’d recently been diagnosed with osteoarthritis in my knees, after more than a year of writing off the gemstone-in-a-tumbler feeling as a normal part of aging. In the Target parking lot, as I limped past the parking spaces designated for people with disabilities, I allowed myself to think for the first time, “Maybe I would not be feeling this bad if I had been able to park there.”

It appeared to me that this was a very straightforward problem with a clear solution, thanks to the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990: I could apply for a special parking placard that would let me park in one of the handicapped spaces every business is required to have. 

I got home, medicated myself, and googled the application form for my state. Turns out this is a very simple form that merely requires a doctor’s signature. But what I soon discovered is that when a doctor diagnoses you with a degenerative disease, they are certainly happy to show you pictures demonstrating how messed up your bones are, prescribe you pain medication, and perform expensive surgeries on you – but they’ll be damned if they’ll sign a handicapped placard form for you.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jochen Szangolies

The quantum world, according to the latest science, is, like, really weird. Cats that are both dead and alive, particles tunnel through impenetrable walls, Heisenberg can’t both tell you where he is and how fast he’s going, and spooky influences connect systems instantaneously across vast distances. So it seems that anything that serves to reduce this weirdness should be a godsend—a way to bring some order to the quantum madness.

Superdeterminism, its advocates say, provides just this: a way for every quantum system to have definite properties at all times, without instantaneous influences—and no cats need to come to harm. All we have to do is to give up on one single, insignificant assumption: that our choice of measurement is, in general, independent of the system measured.

Yet, belief in superdeterminism has so far remained a marginal stance, with the vast majority of scientists and philosophers remaining firmly opposed, sometimes going so far as to assert that accepting superdeterminism entails throwing out the entire enterprise of science wholesale. But what, exactly, is superdeterminism, why should we want it, and why does it polarize so much?

The story starts, as so much in the foundations of quantum mechanics does, with Bell’s theorem. I’ve written on that topic at some length before, but a quick refresher will serve to lay the groundwork for what’s to come. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

Discussions of artificial intelligence are hard to avoid. A recent Pew study, for example, found that 90% of Americans have heard at least something about artificial intelligence – which is astounding, when you consider that only about 70% of Americans likely know who the current Vice President is.

Despite this growing awareness of AI, it is quite possible to argue that, if anything, people are too slow to recognize its potential. That same Pew study noted that only 18% of all US adults have tried ChatGPT. This is disturbing, given how wide-ranging the effects of AI promise to be.

For example, as summarized by a recent explainer by Our World in Data, the capabilities of AI systems have improved remarkably in just the past 10 years – particularly in the areas of reading and language comprehension.

This increase in the capacities of AI systems has been mirrored by increased academic interest in artificial intelligence, with the numbers of scholarly publications related to AI more than doubling in the previous decade. 

Since I’m going to be arguing that these systems are neither artificial nor intelligent, it will be useful to designate them differently. I’ll call them LLMs, or large language models. Read more »