What Was So Great About America Again?

Posted on by Kevin Lively

by Kevin Lively

The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is confusion. Many reactions are understandable: dread about the implications for climate change, concern for the human rights of undocumented migrants in the US, or a low-grade panic over the fact that the Supreme Court has literally vested the office with immunity against legal persecution for assassinations, although apparently Obama’s assassinations of US citizens get a pass. Confusion, however, is only explicable as a consequence of a media ecosystem which rarely manages to coherently discuss many of the serious issues in American society, and crucially the role of policy choices by the government under both Democratic and Republican leadership which either failed to address or directly exacerbated these problems.

As any very stable genius glancing at a red hat in public can tell you, the appeal which won Mr. Trump his first democratic victory is ultimately rooted in nostalgia. But nostalgia for what exactly? Was American really greater in the past than it is now? And if so what changed and why?

Well this is a layered question. There is of course the obvious fact that for a non-negligible share of Trump voters this nostalgia is rooted in a time before the Civil Rights Act extended de jure if not de facto equal rights to non-white, non-christian, non-heteronormative non-men. If nothing else one can look at the day one rescinding of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility programs across the federal government and its contractors as an appeasement to that crowd. However, while this discrimination is indisputably a crucial aspect of American society and will continue to severely negatively affect human rights in the US, it is also not the only reason for Trump’s election. This in evidence from the increases Trump made among non-white voters, although the total numbers are still biased towards white men.

For the moment however, I do not want focus specifically on the very important issue of racism and discrimination, and instead look to other causes for support for Trump, although the USA being what it is, it will still permeate the discussion. Let’s start with the short term. Assuming there was a modicum of greatness in Trump’s first term we can look to an April 2024 New York Times / Sienna poll for what voters remembered about 2017-2021. Read more »

Monday, February 3, 2025

DeepSeek is Not a Sputnik moment, It is a Model T Moment

Posted on by Malcolm Murray

by Malcolm Murray

As someone who thinks about AI day-in and day-out, it is always fascinating to see which events in the AI space break out of the AI bubble and into the attention of the wider public. ChatGPT in November 2022 was of course one. The podcast-creating ability of Google’s NotebookLM almost got there, but didn’t quite reach the “getting-texts-from-grandma” level of virality. But this week, with DeepSeek’s launch of its R1 model, we had another event at the ChatGPT level that again resulted in questioning texts from spouses and colleagues.

There have already been a thousand takes on this and I apologize in advance if you’re already sick of the subject. However, I hope this piece can give you what Brad DeLong calls Value Above Replacement, since it shows where the myriad takes fit in the current broader narratives. I also shine a light on the “Model T” aspect, that I feel has been somewhat overlooked.

First, there is the geopolitical take, or what we can more formally call the delta between US and China. This is why Marc Andreessen and others referred to DeepSeek as a “Sputnik moment”. The long-standing assumption was that China was 1-2 years behind the U.S. in developing AI models. This assumption shattered this week; it turns out China is only a few months behind. This also relates to the long-cherished view in the U.S. of China being solely a fast follower, only able to copy the U.S., which the DeepSeek engineers put an end to by pioneering some very smart machine learning techniques, such as greater efficiencies from better use of Mixture of Experts (MOE) and Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA). So it makes sense that this would be a shock to many Americans. However, the Sputnik analogy per se doesn’t fully make sense. Given all the focus the U.S. already has on AI and the huge investments it is already making, it is unclear how this “Sputnik moment” would change things. Trump, Altman and co just announced $500 billion in funding for Stargate, so what are they going to do as a DeepSeek response, announce another $500 billion? That seems a bit hard given that most of the money in the Stargate announcement was already committed years ago and the rest of it might be vapor dollars that do not actually exist. Read more »

Adrift in a Sea of Bullshit

Posted on by Rachel Robison-Greene

by Rachel Robison-Greene

In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthline study found that, among those who had started a new wellness trend in the past year, 52% of them discovered the trend in question on social media. The same survey found that only 37% of participants viewed their doctor as their most trusted source of medical information. There is a concerning new trend of children self-diagnosing mental disorders, and sometimes even developing symptoms of those disorders that they did not previously exhibit in response to watching the videos. The spread of conspiracy theories on social media has led to people falling deep into rabbit holes, often losing their most valued relationships with friends and family members as a result. People sometimes develop racist, sexist, and xenophobic attitudes toward people they have never met on the basis of internet bullshit. We are staring down the barrel of even fewer restrictions on bullshit in light of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement that his platforms would no longer include fact checking of questionable posts. The White House has also announced that it will open press briefings up to “new media”—podcasters, YouTube personalities, and social media influencers who need not have any formal training in journalism or commitment to codes of conduct that govern ethical behavior in the field.

Why should we allow this to happen? Should we continue to allow social media influencers to say whatever they want on their platforms? Should we do something to stop the AI powered bots that serve no purpose but to generate chaos from entering and participating in the marketplace of ideas? Belief formation is a social practice and we have social obligations. Shouldn’t we put into place some guardrails to ensure that the practice is healthy for our communities and our children? The public figures who suggest that we ought not to provide any flags on misinformation or context for out of place content ask the rhetorical question “who are we to say what’s true?”. Such a question suggests that there is no reliable process we can use to discern truth from falsity or good faith discourse from bullshit.

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives the concept of bullshit a serious treatment in his famous essay On Bullshit. He argues that liars and truth tellers are playing the same game from different sides. Bullshitters are doing something else altogether. They simply don’t care whether what they are saying is true or false. They have an indifference to truth and may have even embraced the conclusion that there is no such thing as truth. Read more »

Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

“lacrimae rerum, “ (the tears of things)
…………………………………….. —Virgil

Everything Cries

Steel’s tears are rust,
trees weep tears of falling leaves,
clouds weep and mourn their loss
sacrificing their billows to the earth as rain,
the earth weeps its carbon into sky,
the sun weeps its energy into earth
and will die someday of the loss,
even stones weep, sobbing their very selves
by force of wind and rain into talus slopes and sand,
their hard tears roll down a mountain’s breast,
on cool mornings rivers weep their mists into atmosphere
joining sun’s tears in a symphony of sight,
the shifting colors of tears,
and my eyes well up,
a spontaneous flood comes and joins
with all the salty tears of things

Jim Culleny
10/8/22

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sunday, February 2, 2025

Artists Wrestling With Things & Faces

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

Six columns of small, thumbnail-like images of fantastical creatures, many of them bearing some resemblance to common items like cups, teapots, or bells. The images stack ten-high, making 60 individual images in the grid. The pictured work is a woodprint, so the colors are bold, and not bled into one another.
From the MFA Boston. See the enlarged image on their website: https://collections.mfa.org/objects/190862

We humans grasp and use things. We dwell among things. We devise new things. As a result of being so pervasive and common in experience, things qua things are practically invisible to us. For the most part, we tend to see them as things outside of us, not as something “inside” of us or capable of manipulating us even as we manipulate them. But deeper thought helps us see the relationship more complexly. The complex relationship of things and humans isn’t just the province of philosophers; it’s also for artists and poets to explore in works that amuse and, in some cases, horrify.

Folklore and old stories mark out some of the points of the relationship of things and humans. The lore of medieval Japanese Tsukumogami delight, as comically violent as they are, because they explore a world in which things acquire an identity—an energetic and human-like identity. The old Shinto versions tell of forsaken tools and utensils that become “ensouled” and take revenge on humans for throwing them away so carelessly. Things and humans become adversaries in the story, at times even deadly ones; yet, in order to sanctify the story for religious teaching, the ensouled old tools eventually achieve enlightenment.

The narrative follows a path of separation and estrangement finally redeemed. In the end, things ensouled and divinely blessed—attributes that traditionally only apply to humans—blur the distinctions of thing and human. All things (human, too) are united in enlightment, a signal of the animism that Shinto monks injected into old Japanese folk tales to make the stories into homilies.

Another narrative arc exploring things and humans in effect goes in the opposite direction. Rather than moving from degrading rejection and estrangement as in stories of the Tsukumogami, such stories depict the merger of things and humans (or, at least, personifications). They are inseparable, and identities dissolve into the things that, quite literally “make them up.” In the end, trying to discard a thing also diminishes the identity.

As with the Tsukumogami, there’s also a good deal of art that illustrates the relationship. Read more »

Lessons From Singapore: Crime And Punishment

Posted on by Eric Feigenbaum

by Eric Feigenbaum

Like the Montagues and Capulets, the owners of Zam Zam and Victory restaurants – adjacent to one another on Singapore’s North Bridge Road – have been at war for roughly a century. A one-time partnership turned bad led to two families operating restaurants with almost identical menus to operate in parallel.

The fare is simple involving various kinds of roti prata and murtabak – a Malaya-originated dish of giant pratas filled with seasoned chicken, egg and onion – and sometimes other fillings, served with a bowl of curry sauce for dipping. These “greasy spoon” specialties are often served 24 hours a day and are a common “after the bars close” foods.

Channel News Asia – Singapore’s equivalent to CNN –  reported on the judicial proceedings around a mid-2015 crime:

The owner of Zam Zam, 49-year-old Zackeer Abbass Khan, conspired with several others to have Victory restaurant supervisor Liakath Ali Mohamed Ibrahim slashed and scarred.

He had instructed business associate and long-time friend Anwer Ambiya Kadir Maideen, 50, to procure an attack on the victim, offering money to get the job done.

Anwer then hired secret society member Joshua Navindran Surainthiran to slash the victim’s face with a knife on Aug 26, 2015.

The victim was left with a permanent scar, and Joshua was sentenced to six-and-a-half years’ jail and six strokes of the cane in 2016 for several charges in relation to the case.

On March 6, 2020 District Judge Mathew Joseph found both Zackeer and Anwer guilty of conspiring to voluntarily cause grievous hurt.

“Business rivalry is a common occurrence,” Judge Mathew said. “It’s part of everyday commerce and it is to be taken in its stride. In the case of Victory and Zam Zam restaurants, both are household names in Singapore,” the judge said, adding that their rivalry has spanned almost 100 years. “This is not surprising as murtabak is a very popular and tasty food item eaten at all times of the day and night in Singapore.”

On Monday May 11, 2020 Judge Mathew sentenced Zackeer to six years in jail and six strokes of the cane.

In California, a crime like Zackeer’s would likely get three years in prison if charged as a felony and not pled down. That said, it can also be charged as a misdemeanor in which case a year in county jail and $10,000 fine are the ceiling of the sentence that might be imposed. Under no circumstance would corporal punishment be imposed.

Singapore’s approach to criminal justice is one of its most controversial features – at least among its Western friends. Read more »

Friday, January 31, 2025

George Bailey on the Bridge

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl
Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life," about to jump off the bridge.
In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than eight times. My daughters capitalized on their parents’ exhaustion. Their baby brother had just come home from the hospital, and this was turning out better than we’d warned—less screaming, more TV.

But even on vacation there are limits. Instead of Home Alone 4, I insisted we watch an old gem, a movie I remembered fondly from childhood. Everyone loves It’s a Wonderful Life, I declared. It’s a real Christmas classic.

You can probably guess where this is going. Did my daughters (aged five and eight) love It’s a Wonderful Life? They tolerated it. But I felt amazed by what I saw, wrung out, on the verge of tears for the whole last hour.

It’s a Wonderful Life (which, as every appreciation notes three paragraphs in, you should really watch if you haven’t) is a fantasy about contingency. The story is wrapped in holiday gauze and told through intricate flashbacks, but at its heart is George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart in his everyman mode. By the film’s third act, George wants to jump off a bridge and end it all. To stop him, a guardian angel shows him how horrible his town, Bedford Falls, would be if he had never been born. This vision causes George to realize his mistake. He returns to the bridge and prays, “Please, God, I want to live again!” And—poof!—back to the real world. In the end, George reunites with his wife and children, surrounded by friends who have rallied to his aid.

Why does a movie like that work? The brief description sounds like inspirational bunk, and many appreciations—including a surprising number praising the film’s depiction of fractional reserve banking—fail to capture what’s most effective about it. For me, what makes the film work is that when George reaches the bridge, we’re there too. We understand why he wants to jump.

George Bailey’s life is not the life he wanted. Read more »

Angelo’s Farm

Posted on by David Winner and Angela Starita

by Angela Starita

Jersey City now

Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shopping area, with enough oId-timers who aren’t going to order their shampoo and wigs and curlers online. That store was owned by a handsome Korean man in his forties who, like my father, had no real relationship to the business—unsmiling and quiet, dressed in dark sweaters, and waiting behind the register. You could buy something or not. As far as he was concerned, his job was to stock the place, keep it open during the hours posted on the front door, and find a way to withstand overwhelming boredom.

In my father’s case, that lack of engagement led to spells of jumpy, all-in energy alternating with sour disdain. When he could no longer tolerate dedicating years of his life to the vicissitudes of hair trends, his solution—to chuck the store and start a farm—was part of a long, robust tradition, one that increasingly pervades current discourse: when life proves empty, turn to the land. It’s a notion filled with the promise of self-determination and meaning, and while I have my doubts, I fully understand, even applaud, the impulse. To leave his business, my father also needed a highly supportive spouse and serious confidence in his midlife physical stamina. In fact, he had both. What he didn’t have was a community for the farming he wanted to do, no pesticides and coupled crops. He started in 1975, a period when there was no shortage of books and magazines and communal farms advocating the same methods. But my dad was not a hippie nor much of a reader. Having immigrated to the United States in his mid-30’s after spending 10 years in the Italian navy, his psychic orientation faced World War II and Europe, not cooperative supermarkets and Vermont. Though he obsessively followed current national and international politics, he had only the vaguest awareness of anything countercultural. Read more »

Thursday, January 30, 2025

The Poet Is Present

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

January 16 is the anniversary of the death of Margarete Susman (1872-1966), the German-born Jewish philosopher and poet who survived the Third Reich in Swiss refuge and is buried in Zurich. To mark the occasion this year, Martin Kudla, a lecturer in Jewish intellectual history in Germany, organized a performance of lyrical texts by Susman that had been set to music by various 20th-century composers, and which he had discovered doing archival work, sung by a mezzosoprano with piano accompaniment in a recital held at Goethe University in Frankfurt.

Kudla, whose current research focuses on the vicissitudes of German-Jewish émigrés in Switzerland, is one of the editors of a volume of essays on Susman’s work that appeared last year; the concert also served as the kickoff for a new scholarly project under his aegis: the planned publication of an annotated anthology of the poems by Susman presented that evening in Frankfurt, among others that have served as the inspiration for art songs, supplemented by facsimiles of the original sheet music of their settings and annotated with bibliographical, musicological, and literary-critical commentary.

Virtually all the texts chosen for such settings, by a wide range of mostly unknown artists, come from Susman’s 1901 volume Mein Land, when the philosopher was still quite young, still under the spell of the German 19th century, and still secure enough in the land of her birth to entitle a collection of verse, with romanticized patriotic pathos, “My Country”. And yet, even at this early stage, Susman was already marshaling the critical ideas that would be fully formulated in Das Wesen der modernen deutschen Lyrik (The nature of modern German poetry), her 1910 book-length essay on the construction of a lyrical self in modern poetry, and the role of that constructed self in a reciprocal fashioning of modernity. (My own contribution to Kudla’s 2024 collection—which began life here before being presented at the 2022 conference, in Munich and Zurich, whose proceedings furnished the material for the volume—attends in part to this complex in Susman’s later poetry.)

On the appointed evening for this newest performance of Susman’s work, in the lobby of the Goethe University’s administration building that would serve as a performance space, Kudla introduced the concert with an overview of Susman’s life and work—her birth and assimilated bourgeois upbringing in Hamburg; her struggle, against patriarchal bigotry, to be allowed to study philosophy; her interwar work in Frankfurt; her re-embracing of her Jewish heritage after the Shoah; and her long career and eventual death in Zurich—before turning the stage over to the musicians. Read more »

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Einstein’s Cults

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Are you savvy?

I like to think I’m savvy. I’m 57, I’ve seen a lot. Not, I joined the Foreign Legion and traveled the world, seen a lot. More like, I’ve lived a while, and have tried to keep my eyes open along the way.

I can’t predict the future any better than anyone else, which is to say, not at all. I’m not out to get one over on anybody. And I may or may not be wise, which is probably savvy-adjacent, but also definitely different. So when I say I think I’m savvy, mostly I mean that I’m not a chump. I rarely get taken anymore, and on the odd occasions when I do, I usually know it’s happening, but just sigh and go along with it, passively if not actively.

I’m also savvy enough to know that I might actually be quite the chump without realizing it. After all, big chumps don’t know they’re chumps. And even if I’m not much of a chump now, I can look back and see that I was much chumpier when I was younger, embarrassingly so in some cases. I can also look forward and know that as people enter their senior years, their critical faculties decline, at least to some degree, exposing them to all kinds of nonsense. There’s a reason scammers target the elderly, and I’m not that far off from being in their sites.

But for now, I think I mostly have my shit together. You wanna fuck with me? Fuck you.

Here’s an example in the form of a recently posed question: “Ever go to Trader Joe’s on a Saturday morning?”

No. Absolutely not. Never. I generally avoid Trader Joe’s and haven’t been inside one in about a decade. They’re invariably located out in the ‘burbs and their parking lots are notoriously under capacity. I’m a city boy; I just walk to my neighborhood markets. Plus, here in my corner of Maryland, supermarkets are not allowed to sell alcohol. Remove cheap wine from the TJ equation, and the place is about as special as a white t-shirt. Drive out to a faceless suburb on a weekend morning so I can fight for parking and stand-in-line with a basket of mediocre groceries sporting supposedly clever titles? You’ve gotta be kidding.

And just like that, I felt like my answer to the question, which opens Mara Einstein’s new book, marked me as savvy.

But as I made my way through Hoodwinked: How Marketers Use the Same Tactics as Cults, my unease began to deepen.

It’s not that I slowly realized, despite my cynicism, I actually am like one of the black, silhouetted sheep on the book’s front cover. I’m really not. My misanthropy, stubbornness, and asceticism pretty much inoculate me from such bovid behavior. FFS, I still have a flip phone.

No, it was something else. Read more »

Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Fire Weather: The Wild Fires in California

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara

by Leanne Ogasawara

Devastating loss in Altadena. Saint Mark’s Church

1.

It happened so fast: winds whipping up to 80 mph in Pasadena. And then within hours, Altadena was burning.

Thankfully, we were not in the evacuation zone. But we were close enough to be scared. Our immediate problem—beyond the heartbreak of hearing of friends who had lost their homes—was the thick smoke. The hazardous air quality continued for days with emergency evacuation alerts waking us from sleep and scares about the water making things feel even worse. But then, of course, we were so grateful to be safe at the end of each day, when so many had lost everything.

As we waited for the air to clear, it seemed like an appropriate time to re-read Mike Davis’ classic Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Published in 1998, it contained no mention of climate disaster or a heating world—and yet, despite this, how well the book has stood the test of time.

Even when I was a kid, people in LA wanted to live in the canyons or along a ridge with a view. Over the last ten years, my husband and I have searched high and low for a new home—but the best ones always seemed to always be located on some gorgeous hillside thick with chaparrals. LA has seen a population explosion and this has meant a massive building spree of suburbs creeping into the hills, as well as so many fantastically expensive homes in canyons and on hillsides—all this making any kind of forestry management and fire control impossible.

Davis writes:

Research has also established the overwhelming importance of biomass accumulation rather than ignition frequency in regulating fire destructiveness. As Richard Minnich, the world authority on chaparral brushfire, emphasizes: “Fuel, not ignitions, causes fire. You can send an arsonist to Death Valley and he’ll never be arrested.”

When I was a kid, fires were also a frequent occurrence—but there were animals in the hills, like goats and sheep, that kept the brush back. There were large fire belt areas under state management as well. It wasn’t just over-development, but I also grew up in a comparatively benign period weather-wise, in LA. In my childhood, we got a lot of rain. I have vivid memories of weeks of rain in winter. Of splashing in puddles and of earthworms wriggling around in the early mornings after a rain shower. But when I moved back from Japan to LA in 2011, after two decades away, the absence of rain bothered me terribly. My son never had a need for an umbrella, and I will never forget the first time I took my pup out in a very rare rain shower (which was not actually that rainy), and he just stood there looking confused. I was surprised reading Davis’ book to learn about the long periods of drought in California’s history that can be understood looking at the archaeological record, making me realize that my childhood was a glorious time of rain.

Compared to my youth, the last decade has not only seen a lack of rain, but it has also bore witness to climate driven rising temperatures, massively over-development in vulnerable areas, as well as a lack of investment in electrical infrastructure. This last issue is relevant since a faulty transmission tower is almost surely the spark that ignited the Eaton Fire. Read more »

John McWhorter and I Talk About Cartoons

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by William Benzon

Daffy Duck and Porky Pig
Daffy Duck converses with Porky Pig in “Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century.”

It began at The New Republic. I don’t know just why I did it, but I bought a subscription to that magazine the year I went off to college. I remember when Robert Wright was there and I remember when he published Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny (1999), which was about cultural evolution, a subject I’d been thinking and publishing about for decades. So I was paying attention when he formed Bloggingheads.tv in the mid-2000s. By that time The New Republic was no longer the magazine I’d originally subscribed to in the Jurassic Era. So I dropped it, even the online straggler version. But I loved Bloggingheads, which was a video webzine where two people would discuss important things.

That’s where I first became aware of John McWhorter, who appeared as a dialog partner with Glenn Loury, whom I also knew from having read an article or three in The New Republic. In time they became known informally as “the Black guys,” or so Loury likes to say. And I became a regular viewer.

Thus it came to pass that one Saturday evening I was attending a party at Rebecca and Kevin’s place on Pacific Avenue. They lived a couple of blocks from me in the Lafayette neighborhood of Jersey City. It’s the oldest neighborhood in the city and is bisected by Communipaw Ave. (According to Local Rumor, Communipaw as once a path the Lenape Indians took to go fishing in the river where, in 1609, they rowed out to meet Henry Hudson, who was looking for the Pacific Ocean. I digress.) I was resting on a couch in Rebecca and Kevin’s front room when I looked up and saw this tall dark stranger. Is that…? I got up: “Are you John McWhorter?” He was.

The world collapsed. The World Wide Web was now in front of me in the flesh in an old neighborhood in Jersey City, only five blocks away from a house where A. Phillip Randolph housed Pullman porters on layover from their train trips, and four blocks from a church that hosted Oscar Wilde in the 19th century, the Black Panthers in the 1960s, and is now home to a Hispanic charismatic Christian congregation. Again, I digress. John and I started talking.

That’s when I learned that, in addition to being a nationally reputed commentator on race matters, McWhorter was also a linguist, with a particular interest and expertise in creoles, a pianist with an affinity for Broadway musicals, and a fan of Looney Tunes. These days he’s most widely known as a columnist for The New York Times, which mercifully hasn’t fallen as far as The New Republic. No matter. Because we’re going to talk about something really important: cartoons.

Caveat: The on-line availability of these cartoons is, shall we say, sporadic. They were available as I’ve indicated at the time I uploaded this article on January 26, 2025. Who knows what may have happened by the time you read it.
Read more »

Monday, January 27, 2025

3 Quarks Daily Magazine Welcomes Our New Columnists

Posted on by S. Abbas Raza

Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was very hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:
Fountain-pens-530

  1. Christopher Hall
  2. Alizah Holstein
  3. Kevin Lively
  4. Ken MacVey
  5. Priya Malhotra
  6. Kyle Munkittrick
  7. TJ Price
  8. Scott Samuelson
  9. Max Sharam
  10. Charles Siegel
  11. Lei Wang

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “3QD Magazine” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers on or before the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new writers!

Best wishes,

Abbas

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

In Search Of Normalcy

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Puck cover illustration, titled “Money Talks.” September 12, 1906. Library of Congress.

Senator Warren Harding had a big appetite: for food, for whisky, for cigars and cards and hanging around with his cronies. For spittoons and smoke-filed rooms. For another man’s wife when he had one of his own—Carrie Fulton Phillips, with whom he carried on (sorry) for about 15 years. Their passion ended badly when, in late 1919, he felt an urge for higher office, and she felt an urge for a little monetary compensation.

The best evidence we have is that both urges were satisfied. Carrie was consoled by a bit of largess. Harding stopped writing coded-but-torrid letters and focused more on a stay at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This was as it had to be. It was an era in which the prurient was taboo—but it was also an era where few spoke on the record about it. Harding wouldn’t be the only aspiring candidate with a spotty record on fidelity. In general, boys will be boys, so long as what they do in private is kept private.

Urges aside, Harding “looked like a President”—handsome, good chin. He spoke like a President: mostly vacuously but with a roll that imparted a sense of some deeper wisdom. He was from Ohio, then, as now, a key state. He had influential friends, like Harry Micajah Daugherty, a powerbroker in the Ohio GOP, who saw him as the perfect compromise candidate—the man others would turn to after a bit of Convention turmoil. So, why not Harding for President?

That was Daugherty’s plan, and he executed it perfectly. In 1920, Republicans had a great many men who saw themselves as “papabile.” They even had several who had the standing for the job, but when the GOP assembled in hot, steamy Chicago in June, none of those men, qualified or not, could get enough traction to get a majority of the 984 Delegates. Harding was fifth after the first round, didn’t break 100 until the seventh ballot, and only made it to 135 on the eighth. Then, reputedly, the wired-in wise men of the Party—the Daugherty-types—went into a room and, after the prodigious consumption of tobacco products and alcohol, coupled with lively and creative horse-trading, made a decision. Harding went from distant third to clear first on the ninth ballot and closed it out on the tenth. Popular Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge was quickly selected as Veep. Read more »

Everything Old is New Again

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

We’re being asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We have to reckon with several  upheavals at once: more conflicts, discrimination, poverty, illness, and natural disasters than many of us have ever seen in our comfortable lifetimes, and without a clear path forward. It’s unsettling. It feels necessary to find courage for this disquieting time. I was recently reminded of Maya Angelou’s words, “Without courage, we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.” It might help to look back to stories of those who were able to maintain their integrity in the face of prior adversities as we manage this collective anxiety. 

Emile Durkheim wrote about this feeling back in 1897.  Suicide is a book-length report on the four scenarios that provoke people to give up on life: egoistic, altruistic, fatalistic, and anomic. His discussion of anomy may be a useful warning for today:

“Whenever serious readjustments take place in the social order, whether or not due to a sudden growth or to an unexpected catastrophe, men [referring to all people] are more inclined to self-destruction. …. Man’s characteristic privilege is that the bond he accepts is not physical but moral; that is, social. He is governed not by a material environment brutally imposed on him, but by a conscience. … But when society is disturbed by some painful crisis or by beneficent but abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising this influence. … Appetites, not being controlled by a public opinion become disoriented, no longer recognize the limits proper to them. … The state of de-regulation or anomy is thus further heightened by passions being less disciplined, precisely when they need more disciplining. … A thirst arises for novelties, unfamiliar pleasures, nameless sensations, all of which lose their savor once known. … What blinded him to himself was his expectation always to find further on the happiness he had so far missed. Now he is stopped in his tracks; from now on nothing remains behind or ahead of him to fix his gaze upon. … He cannot in the end escape the futility of an endless pursuit. … Time is required for the public conscience to reclassify men and things.”

Abrupt transitions make it hard to think. Some political figures recognize a crisis as an opportunity because the public isn’t thinking clearly. We go into survival mode and become more animalistic, unable to organize in order to stop questionable policies. We thirst for novelty, using distraction to cope with the upheaval. Time may be required, but what do we do if it feels like there’s a never ending urgent crisis presented, one after another? More clever commenters recognize them as planted distractions to keep us confused, but that doesn’t significantly negate their effectiveness.   Read more »

A Poem by Jim Culleny

Posted on by Jim Culleny

A Matter of Love

The question, “Can you tell me a certain thing
that is a moral fact?” is specious, because
the fact of the “certain thing” exists as a thing
essential to the survival of homo sapiens
in creating civilization.

But civilization is not always up to
the task of protecting its essential,
instead, it hacks with a cleaver at its root
in a fever dream concocted by skilled
charlatans who speak only for themselves
—who strike at the root of what is essential
to being civilized.

So then, the fact of: chaos, or free natural inclination,
becomes the universal mode simply because
morality, when it is accepted as subjective,
will not be universally defined, and we all become
hawks or vultures to each other, feeding on
carrion doves

The question, “Can you tell me a certain thing
that is a moral fact?” —has a confrontational odor
and will most often be posed by those in the
fever dream of overarching self-concern, AKA,
the very source of immorality.

It’s a question whose answer, is not always
an easy act, but is, nevertheless, a choice called

    love

which is, foremost, not a thing we feel, but

    do:

a moral act made fact

 

Jim Culleny
9/13/20

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.