by Angela Starita

Large-scale housing projects have been the subject of the public’s wrath and ardor for at least the last 70 years. Considering the extraordinary housing crises in cities across the country, it’s not surprising that Herman Jessor, the engineer-turned-architect behind the best-known cooperative developments in NY, is the subject of two studies and exhibitions, both coming out of The Cooper Union, Jessor’s alma mater. I work as a writer at Cooper, so perhaps my Jessor-looms-large-in-the-zeitgeist notion is skewed in his favor, but I can’t help but think that his work, which so promoted community bonds, is ripe for a reassessment exactly because we seem suddenly aware of the dangers of solitude. It’s also a moment when most everyone wants to beat a fast exit from civilization. Magazine and newspaper articles describe women starting their own small-house community, LGBTQ collectives built around farms, and MAHA families embracing back-to-the-land philosophies reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog.

What makes Jessor all the more intriguing, though, is that his solutions were decidedly urban, on a very large scale, and highly successful by any number of metrics—he is estimated to have built more than 40,000 residences most of which are still occupied and have low turnover. The March 2025 exhibition at Cooper included a map of the five boroughs with all of the Jessor-designed projects, including Penn South in Chelsea, Seward Park Houses on the Lower East Side, Co-op City in the Bronx, and Rochdale Village in Queens, the largest Black-majority housing co-op in the world. Most were built for unions like the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the United Housing Foundation which was run by Abraham Kazan, an organizer and frequent Jessor partner.

The buildings, variations on the towers in the park scheme popularized by the modernist architect Le Corbusier, prioritized ventilation, eat-in kitchens, and numerous shared spaces. Co-op City, for instance, includes gardens, playing fields, a cooperative grocery store, and schools. Jessor and Kazan developed streamlined construction systems that made for more affordable buildings. Most of them remain affordable thanks to programs like the Mitchell-Lama program in New York State that subsidizes housing for middle-class residents.

What Jessor’s work doesn’t provide is anything akin to low-rise neighborhoods like Greenwich Village and the aesthetics associated with them. Read more »

Sign in the Alter Schlachthof restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Brooks Riley

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Sughra Raza. Landings, Dec 23, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Rafaël Newman

At the end of each of the past twelve years I have written a long rhyming ballad, reviewing the period coming to a close, giving thanks for some events and lamenting others. I began in December 2013, while I was recovering from a lengthy illness; and I recited what would be the first of a series at a family New Year’s Eve party, among some of those whose support had been indispensable to the recrudescence of my health, and to whom I therefore wished to express my gratitude.

My poem began that year with these lines:

Let’s raise a glass this festive day,
On Saint-Sylvestre or Hogmanay,
And toast to all both far and near
Who graced the now departing year:
To cracksource Cook, who nearly gotcha,
To Edward Snowden in his dacha;
To Granta, Guardian and Gawker,
To David Denby, and Tom Scocca;
To Pauline Marois, our own Grand Mufti,
As well as Josh and Benny Safdie;
To Edie Windsor, Stephen Fry,
And Malala Yousafzai;
Barack Hussein—“Make Drones, Not War!”—
Dan Savage, and the myriad score
Who hailed with glee, or rising gorge,
The birth of Once and Future George.

This initial ode to a year gone by, following its “public” proem, then went on to become more private in substance—with cryptic tributes to the various attainments of my assembled kinfolk—for all that it borrowed its tone and humor from “Greetings, Friends!”, the Christmas poem written every year for many decades by Roger Angell and published annually in The New Yorker. Angell, better known as a baseball reporter, would compose his retrospectives as jokey commentaries on notable happenings in the public sphere; they featured sometimes quite ingenious (if often groan-worthy) rhymes on topical celebrity names, for which he evidently required increasing guidance from younger advisers as he grew more venerable (he died in 2022 at over a hundred) and less plugged in. Read more »

A Simple Ontology

maybe flower petals are held to stems by thought
and the wind’s a counter-thought that plucks
and sets them elsewhere in the grass
to grow in contemplative resolution
beside the notion of a grub-pulling crow

maybe the wind itself’s a palpable bright idea,
something about motion and the abhorrence of vacuums
something about coming and going,
about ferocity and stillness
about war and its absence

maybe the moon’s the concept of fullness,
loss, abatement, regeneration from slivers,
hope at the hour of the wolf, the opposite of
darkness at the break of noon, the
upside of shadow

maybe Descartes had it right
and this, from horizon to horizon, is
a simple ontology,
an inherent daisy chain of ideas chasing its tale
regardless—

one
…….. idea
hatched in this synapse nest
is to harvest
…….. thought
from thought
under a
….      perception
of blue
while the
….      conception
of breeze
riffles the
 ,,,,,     hint
of hair
and I place them
like
….       dreams
of plums
into the
  ….      essence
of basket
and give them
with the
  ,,,,      intention
of love
to my
c….      belief
in the natural being
of….
………. you

by Jim Culleny

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by Ken MacVey

Donald Trump has creatively explored ways to monetize the presidency. These include launching the $TRUMP crypto business a few days before resuming office on January 20, 2025 or using Truth Social–a private business venture he helped start– to platform his presidential and personal pronouncements.

Monetization began early in the first Trump administration with the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC, which  became, according to an October 18, 2024 House Committee on Oversight staff report, a hotel of choice  for foreign and domestic influencers and would-be appointees to government positions, such as judgeships and  ambassadorships.  According to the  report,  it was also the hotel of choice for  various presidential pardon recipients. This report alleged that at least five such recipients stayed at the hotel spending thousands of dollars in 2017 and 2018.  The report went on: “[T]hese expenditures are particularly troubling in light of allegations that former President Trump’s former personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, was involved in efforts to sell presidential pardons for $2 million apiece—an amount Mr. Giuliani reportedly planned to split with President Trump.” (These allegations stem from a lawsuit against Giuliani by someone who used to work for him– Giuliani denies the allegations.) Since this report, Trump has pardoned Giuliani for his role in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

A number of Trump pardons in the last few months have caught the public’s eye. For example, in October Trump pardoned billionaire crypto entrepreneur and convicted  felon, Changpeng Zhao. Zhao and his company pled guilty to failing to stop money laundering, which according to the Department of Justice aided  terrorist groups like Isis. Forbes reported that Zhao’s company had made a deal in May 2025  with a Trump family  affiliated company that helped boost Trump’s net worth by  hundreds of millions of dollars. Liz Oyler, head pardon attorney for the Department of Justice until last March, is quoted by Forbes as saying:  “Trump has created a pay-for-play pardon system.” Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Cruelty, at least the old-fashioned kind, has a shape. It announces itself. It arrives with words you can quote later, replay, contest, reject. Even when it stings, it offers a surface against which the self can brace. Ghosting, by contrast, has no edges. It leaves no fingerprints. It is not an act so much as a disappearance, and it wounds precisely because it refuses to declare itself as one.

To be ghosted is not merely to be rejected. It is to be rendered uncertain about the status of reality itself—about what happened, what was meant, whether the past you shared was ever mutually understood. The pain does not come only from loss, but from ambiguity. And ambiguity, it turns out, can be more violent than an explicit no.

There is a reason direct cruelty, however unpleasant, often feels cleaner. A rejection, an insult, even a harsh goodbye acknowledges a shared frame. It says: We are in the same room. I see you. This is my position. Ghosting refuses that acknowledgment. It leaves you alone in a room you didn’t know you were exiting, wondering whether the lights will come back on.

At its core, ghosting is an injury to recognition.

Philosophers have long argued that being recognized—seen, addressed, responded to—is not a luxury but a basic human need. Recognition confers reality. To be recognized is to be confirmed as someone whose presence registers, whose existence calls for response. Ghosting withdraws that confirmation retroactively. It doesn’t just end the relationship; it quietly calls into question whether the relationship existed in the way you thought it did.

This is why ghosting can feel like erasure rather than rejection. Rejection says, I choose not to be with you. Ghosting says nothing at all, and in doing so, suggests something more corrosive: You do not require an answer. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

We shall not cease from exploration.
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot

Robert Kurson closes Rocket Men: The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 with a deceptively simple scene. Decades into the twenty-first century, he takes his teenage son, armed with an iPhone, an Xbox, and all the distractions of modern technology, to see a Saturn V laid on its side, bursting out of its building. The boy doesn’t check his phone. He doesn’t take a picture. He just stands there, staring at the five enormous F-1 engine nozzles, each taller than a person, and after several silent minutes asks if they can stay longer. The Saturn V guarantees turning every person, no matter how young or old, into that boy.

I had just returned from a visit to NASA myself, standing beneath the behemoth and feeling something close to vertigo. You can know the numbers – 363 feet long, millions of pounds of thrust, nearly a million gallons of propellant – and still be unprepared for the physical reality of it. The rocket overwhelms abstraction. Like Kurson’s son, I found myself wordless, pulled into a long stare, asking the same unspoken question: how did anyone dare build this thing? Rocket Men provides part of the answer.

What the book does better than almost any account of Apollo is make the case that Apollo 8, usually treated as a dress rehearsal for Apollo 11, may have been the most consequential spaceflight of them all. Apollo 11 was about arriving. Apollo 8 was about leaving, about the first time human beings severed the umbilical cord to Earth and committed themselves to a quarter-million-mile journey with no rescue, no precedent, and no margin for error. Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins’s later remark, quoted near the end of the book – that a century from now Apollo 8 might be judged more significant than Apollo 11 – sounds provocative until Kurson patiently shows why it may simply be accurate. Read more »

Rachel is one of the winners of the American Philosophical Association’s 2025 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest for one of her essays here at 3QD. There is more information about that and other APA prizes at their website:

The APA committee on public philosophy sponsors the Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest for the best opinion-editorials published by philosophers. The goal is to honor up to five standout pieces that successfully blend philosophical argumentation with an op-ed writing style. Winning submissions will call public attention, either directly or indirectly, to the value of philosophical thinking. The pieces will be judged in terms of their success as examples of public philosophy, and should be accessible to the general public, focused on important topics of public concern, and characterized by sound reasoning.

Rachel Robison-Greene (Utah State)

“The Temptations of Nostalgia” (3 Quarks Daily)

Rachel Robison-Greene earned her PhD from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 2017. Her research interests are largely in meta-ethics, epistemology, and applied ethics (with particular interests in animals, the environment, and technology). She is the author of the book Edibility and in Vitro Meat: Ethical Considerations. She is a regular contributor to the popular blog 3 Quarks Daily. Rachel serves as the Secretary of the Culture and Animals Foundation and is the Chair Elect of the Intercollegiate Ethics Bowl.

More information about the APA prizes here.

Congratulations, Rachel!

And Happy Newton’s Day to All!

A Remembering by Nils Peterson

Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My brother and I went to Sunday school there when we were old enough because the small Lutheran church of our parents was not large enough to have one. My father was a chauffeur for one of the rich families.

The caroling was held in a large, handsome meeting room where, in the spring, the flower show would be held. A lot of chairs were set out and there’d be a big tree beautifully decorated and boxes of candy for the children to suck on when it was all over. I remember a particularly revolting lime-green ball sour enough and bitter enough to make even the greediest child spit it out. Some of the gathered Presbyterians had begun their celebrating before the sing, because after about the third carol, some wag would start calling for the “Hallelujah Chorus,” the last song in the songbook, and the calls, catcalls almost for the calls for it increased as the carols went on, grew until at last the leader with a sigh gave up and we hallelujahed our way out of there.

At home, the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage, there would be a supper of Swedish meatballs and boiled potatoes and lingonberry and sardines and cheeses and cookies. At the right moment, we’d go down the stairs and, across the driveway to the path leading to the big house – crunch of gravel, full moon shining between tree branches, feel of tended grass – to the kitchen door where Marie, the cook, my father’s cousin and my godmother, waited to let us in. Anet is there, the downstairs maid, and Martha, the upstairs maid. They are “the girls,” the three live-in Swedish servants. Marie, the cook, was my father’s cousin, my godmother, and the one responsible for getting my father the chauffeur job in 1932 in the heart of the depression. He had been out of work since he and mother came back from visiting their parents in Sweden to show off how well they were doing in America. Shortly before their return, the stock market crashed. The year, of course, 1929.

Anet was the one who served the Deforests the dinner Marie had cooked. She had her own pantry next to the kitchen where she kept jars of cookies to serve with the lady’s tea. Martha, the upstairs maid, was looked on as being a little racy because she smoked. She quit her job one time and went back to Sweden, but returned in a few months. The rich people never quite forgave her desertion. Read more »

by Ed Simon

Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. —2 Corinthians 3:17

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. —Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsky

It had been twenty centuries since He’d last walked upon the Earth, and it was in the ninth year of the new reign that He quietly appeared again late afternoon on a cold Christmas Eve, this time at a needle-exchange clinic in Alphabet City. Long greasy black hair in front of a scarred tawny face, hunched over, short, hobbled, and ugly, the destitute man of sorrows quietly and at first without notice went from empty chair to empty chair, sitting silently next to the junkies and the HIV infected for a minute or two.  He wasn’t recognizable; He barely looked like all of those Pietas and nativity scenes and Crucifixions affixing the walls of the Met and the Cloisters. And yet, His people slowly recognized Him, and soon others began to recognize Him as well. Brows that had furrowed with deep fear for so long that they had seemingly never felt eased, suddenly felt eased. Eyes that had darted nervously, wondering who was an informant, and had scarcely relaxed for almost a decade, suddenly relaxed. Bodies that ached and were cold suddenly felt whole and warm.

He was in the clinic for maybe less than fifteen minutes, but as he headed the few blocks towards Washington Square Park, the cold and huddled masses of citizens, used to food and fuel shortages and the prediction of yet another swirling polar vortex freezing the northern part of the North American land mass, jabbed each other in hungry ribs with angular elbows, and pointed at the man in the soiled purple wind-breaker and the filthy stocking cap who walked those trash-strewn streets.

A young woman who had been homeless for the past two years, her siblings long since sent by bus to one of the black sites near the border, and herself only managing to survive by purchasing forged citizenship papers for close to three weeks under-the-table pay, and a few hours of her dignity, felt tears in her own brown eyes when she looked into His brown eyes. The gold-plated rosaries that were the last relic of her parents’ love, before they were ostensibly bussed back to Ecuador after they were seized in the middle of the night, seemed warmed by an internal heat as she closed her hand around them in her pocket. Read more »