Sughra Raza. M – Through The Honeycomb. Oolloo House, August 2024.

Digital photograph.

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by  Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan

Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like Chelsea Handler and John Oliver have leaned into them. Friends on social media have traded quips about Vance’s “one nightstand” and his illegitimate “love seat.” Kamala Harris’ own PR team even joined in on the fun.

The parade of puns all stemmed from one satirical tweet that was never meant to be taken seriously or believed literally. The fact that Democrats nonetheless embraced the idea, couching their attacks on Vance in sofa jokes, signals a fascinating shift in psychology that merits a closer look.

When we say that something is true, we generally mean one of two different things. The first is that whatever claim we are making is factually accurate. “Kamala Harris attended Howard University” is true because she did, in fact, graduate from that institution.

The second is a bit more slippery. Think of the way in which a great work of fiction like Heart of Darkness or The Color Purple can express profound truths about the human condition. Novels aren’t factual, but what they reveal can still be true in a deep way. That’s what we call narrative truth, rather than factual truth.

19th-century philosopher William Whewell wrote that facts are like pearls, valuable in their own right, but that in order to make a necklace out of them, we need a string: a coherent story that connects all the facts together in order to give us a deeper understanding. The narrative that allows us to make sense of the world is as important as the facts it connects.

Democrats have long been obsessed with factuality, with the pearls. “Find the Falsehood” is practically an Olympic sport on the left. Steve Bannon knew this, and he encouraged Donald Trump to “flood the zone” by telling as many whoppers as he could, turning Democrats’ fact-checking obsession into something akin to the last level of Space Invaders, when there were so many alien ships you could barely shoot them all down.

The GOP, on the other hand, has built its entire platform out of “alternative facts” that are thoroughly derided by “the reality-based community.” In the last few days, Trump has tried to disallow live fact-checking during his interview at the National Association of Black Journalists’ annual convention, and he’s refusing to allow fact-checking during any future debate he might have with Kamala Harris. Republicans love narrative truth, accessorizing their campaign outfits with one faux pearl necklace after another. Read more »

by David Greer

A group of island neighbours were enjoying a glass of wine in the old wooden boathouse when our quiet conversation was interrupted by an explosive Whupf! from the direction of the sea. We turned to look just in time to see the black-and-white hulk of a six-ton orca, curving gracefully into the water after a deep breath, its six-foot-high dorsal fin marking it as a mature male.

Where there is one orca, others are sure to follow. Loud blasts of spray echoed through the evening air as other members of the pod appeared, mothers with calves, juvenile males, a couple more large mature males. Some close to shore, others a half a mile out at sea. The whales’ appearance hadn’t been a complete surprise, one of our group having received a text alert from a fellow sighter in the Southern Gulf Islands Whale Sighting Network that the orcas had been seen heading west from Saturna Island towards our vantage point by Brooks Point on South Pender Island, the southernmost of the Canadian Gulf Islands, in the heart of the Salish Sea and smack in the middle of southern resident orca critical habitat.

As suddenly as they had arrived, the orcas were gone, continuing west towards Vancouver Island. Then, moments later, a much louder explosion of breath took us by surprise. This we were not expecting. Gazing seaward again, we watched as a far larger black body edged silently above the surface, like a nascent island arising from a seafloor volcano, a high cloud of fine mist dissipating above its pair of blowholes (orcas have only one). The adult humpback, forty tons give or take, perhaps more easily imagined as the size of a school bus, had passed less than a hundred metres from the point, heading northeast. Unlike the orcas, the humpback travelled alone, and there was no apparent interaction between the two species. To watch both in the space of ten minutes at relatively close range left us awestruck. Leviathan tends to have that impression on puny human observers.

Humpbacks and Orcas–Gentle Giants and Dolphins with Attitude

The contrasts between orcas and humpbacks are striking. Both are cetaceans, the animal group whose name derives from the ancient Greek word for sea monster. Cetaceans comprise two groups: whales with teeth (toothed whales) and whales without (baleen whales, including the humpback). Toothed whales include narwhals, belugas, sperm whales, beaked whales, porpoises, and dolphins. All dolphins are whales but not all whales are dolphins. The largest of the dolphins is the orca (Orcinus orca), commonly known as the killer whale, an apt descriptor for a meticulous and cunning predator with very specific tastes: chinook salmon for southern resident orcas, marine mammals for transit orcas otherwise known as Biggs orcas. Orca pods have been known to attack humpbacks on occasion, but generally only when an adult is accompanied by a juvenile, a potential meal for mammal-eating orcas. Read more »

by Laurence Peterson

I do not specifically remember when I lost my you-know-what about the way the word “humanitarian” is being tossed around these days. Possibly it was when a State Department spokesperson referred to what he called “humanitarian circumstances”, implying thereby that the designation could be sensibly applied to purely chance events. Or maybe the sheer obscenity of tagging the word to “zones” in middle of what is probably the most hellish place on earth right now (only to bomb the same areas anyway, subsequently) did the trick. Whatever it was, I have decided to try, for what it is worth, to come to terms with the matter. So here goes.

In my lifetime, which has spanned 63 years and some change now, I don’t recall the word being used that much except to describe individual persons and certain organizations, until rather recently. But, maybe starting in the ‘nineties, conditions began taking on the designation, especially in the media and in public relations; and phrases like the one I have chosen for my title, “humanitarian disaster”, or “humanitarian catastrophe” became more common. I distinctly remember at this time being annoyed by this: was the disaster supposed to be experienced primarily by the humanitarians?  It kind of sounded to me like that was a real possibility. If that was not the case, why use the word humanitarian at all? Why not just call it a disaster or catastrophe? It seemed like something unseemly lay at the core of the reasoning that surrounded the employment of such phrases; like something rather sanctimonious was being smuggled in, too.

So I decided to try to understand what might be at the logical core of this kind of usage of words. What struck me at first was the employment of the word humanitarian was possibly being invested with a tacit, but palpable preeminence amongst possible adjectives in any specific case. Humanitarian concerns are somehow supposed to reflect a self-evident moral superiority over other ones, so that when the word is employed, there is a suggestion that the humanitarian concern should, perhaps prima facie, be considered the most important consideration. I am certain many people would, naively or otherwise, assent to this assertion (some environmentalists might consider environmental concerns to be paramount compared to humanitarian ones in certain cases, but, even here, many of them would consider both environmental and humanitarian matters to be of utmost importance). Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

My sister Leyla and I are walking in New York City, talking about how some people love their dogs almost more than their children. In fact, in a very uncharacteristic moment, Leyla shares that she can’t stand the late night tv ads for abused dogs when there are people who are going hungry and suffering; and not only do I agree with her, but add about dogs’ different odors and that dog people think their dog doesn’t smell even though I can tell a house has dogs the minute I walk into one.

Growing up in Iran, we had two dogs at different times and invariably, something unexpected would happen to them. Shouka, a beautiful black and white hunting dog, lived with us, a large family of two parents, five girls, and two grandmothers. He was quite playful and once he made it all the way upstairs from the yard where he lived, to my sister’s bedroom. My sister woke up startled and Shouka was punished for frightening her. I felt bad for my sister who was getting comforted but felt even worse for Shouka who was all excited to hang out with us upstairs and was re-banished to the yard.

Shouka didn’t last with us very long. He was accompanying my father and his friends on a hunting trip in the mountains outside Tehran, according to the story we were told, and he disappeared. My dad said Shouka was so beautiful that probably a commercial truck driver must have stopped and offered him a piece of meat or other treat and there went this disloyal dog. Maybe he preferred being a dog that lives in a truck and gets to travel around, without the pressures of finding whatever poor bird my dad and his friends had shot. Maybe being in a family of too many females and only one male was too much pressure on him; I will never know because he never came back to us. Read more »

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]

Russian Formalist theorist Victor Shklovsky argued in his 1917 Art as Technique that verse “makes the familiar strange so that it can be freshly perceived. To do this it presents its material in unexpected, even outlandish ways: the shock of the new.” Central to the interpretive vision of Shklovsky and his compatriots was that poetic language, which is figurative and consciously literary language, in opposition to prose and the literal, must engage in some form of defamiliarization. That is to say that poetry transforms the prosaic into the profound, but in the process, it draws attention to itself as artifice, as language itself. Prose, intended to convey information, whether it’s factual or fictional, largely eschews being about itself, but in some sense the Russian Formalists claimed that all poetry is about poetry. Verse toggles between the abstract and the concrete, gesturing towards the strange function of poetry itself, making clear that what’s being communicated is somehow both more and less than what it seems.

Such defamiliarization need not only be transforming clouds and trees into things which are strange, for as dramatic an event as a presidential assassination is converted into uncanniness by the Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong in his poem “Of Thee I Sing” in his 2016 collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds. Written in an ekphrastic idiom, the poem depicts one of the most totemistic moments of the twentieth-century, President John F. Kennedy’s assassination at Dallas’ Dealey Plaza while traveling by motorcade while campaigning in 1963, so that Vuong makes this horrific and already deeply analyzed event into something even more ethereal, otherworldly, strange, even while in that poem the narrator, Jacqueline Kennedy, disturbingly “pretend[s] nothing is wrong” in the seconds after her husband has been shot in the head (whether because she won’t or can’t is left unsaid).

Common sense would dictate that the social, cultural, and political ruptures of an assassination are anything but normal; while the sheer violence of Kennedey’s assassination, as emblazoned into the collective consciousness of Americans through the wide-spread viewing of the infamous Zapruder Film, means that the murder is already an event that is defamiliarized. The opposite is actually the case, for regardless of the (thankfully) relative rareness of presidential assassinations, Kennedy’s death has been so parsed, examined, interpreted, and analyzed that “Of Thee I Sing” reminds us of the singularity of the event and of its broader metaphysical implications (which are not necessarily limited to the event itself).

Read in the context of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, as well as the broader poetic interests of Vuong which often focus on American military involvement in the nation of his birth, a lyrical intimation of JFK’s death makes innate sense. Read more »

Some friends gave me a “sauce dispenser gun” and I am dispensing sauce.

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by Nils Peterson

I used to tell my creative writing classes the artistic form that came the closest to depicting the lives we lead was the soap opera – because, as in the soap opera, we all have many stories going on at the same time. Some are short, some are like lyrics in tone and length, some go on and on, drop into the background, and are revived later when some necessity draws them forth – Uncle Ned goes off to explore the Amazon Jungle and comes back three years later just in time to make the wedding legal. This story of mine is long in years, short in hours.

Small Kentucky college. 25th Reunion. I gave a reading of poems and stories about love. Peterson Pontificates on Love trumpeted the college paper. Many old friends came and came up on to the stage afterwards. So, up comes this beautiful woman, catches my eye, says “Hi.” I say, “Hi.” She says, “Hi . Do you remember me?” and in the silence – “Do you remember me? I’m Patsy.” Indeed it was. I said “Hi,” kissed her on the cheek, turned to cut off my other conversations so we could really talk, turn back, and she’s gone. “Patsy,” I holler into the cavernous auditorium, “Patsy,” but she really is gone. To myself I say, “Peterson, you’ve done it again.”

I got her phone number from the alumni office and called and called, even at 5:30 in the morning, but she was never in. I finally did connect and she explained that she was off fox hunting the morning I called so early. We made a date for that night to meet for dinner and went to a restaurant where her son was a waiter (she had had two sons from a marriage that didn’t last). He raised an eyebrow as he shook my hand. We went back to her place and talked for a long time. Here’s from a poem I wrote about the experience,

What the young offer each other 
is the marvelous future, all that can happen, 
all that will be. Older, suspicious of promises, 
we learn to offer what we have lived. 
It is a smaller, harder gift, yet beautiful like fact.

We wrote back and forth and then lost touch again, but 10 years later I went back to my 35th reunion and we reconnected, the talk as easy and as good as it had been the decade before. It was convenient for me to spend the night at her house, but I had to get up early. She was going fox hunting again. So, October dark, five in the morning, she in her hunting outfit and a dungareed helper got her horse into its trailer and set off. I followed in my rental car. Read more »

by X. Muller

Lyon, France, Croix Rousse University Hospital, 1 AM, February 10, 2023. *

Three hours into the surgery, I placed the surgical clamp on the upper part of the vena cava, the large vein carrying the deoxygenated blood from the lower body to the right atrium of the heart. This was the last mandatory step before the veins of the liver could be safely divided just above the clamp in order to remove the diseased organ from the abdominal cavity of the patient. The role of the clamp was to firmly close the large hole left in the vena cava after the liver was removed, hereby preventing the occurrence of a fatal bleeding. This allowed to move on to the implantation of the liver graft, which had been procured from a deceased organ donor several hours ago. The implantation is the final phase of a liver transplantation where the three major blood vessels and the bile duct of the graft are reconnected to those of the recipient by manual sutures.

Liver transplantation has come a long way since the first successful procedure in 1963.¹ From a technical point of view, the procedure is now well standardized and offers patients with end-stage liver disease the only live saving treatment.² In addition, recent scientific advances have allowed more patients to gain access to liver transplantation, for example the use of immunotherapy for advanced liver tumors. Technically and scientifically speaking, liver transplantation, it always occurred to me, has been a success story, and the procedure on that given day in February was part of that story.

Until the clamp on the vena cava slipped! Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Sander Van de Cruys

If there’s one motive governing all our behavior, supervening and bringing about all our other goals or desires, what would it be? Some might say ‘survival’, pointing to Darwin’s theory of evolution. But in practice, this motive is hard to implement: It is impossible to predict or compute what, at any specific instance in time, would increase your fitness or chances of survival. It is impossible to adapt your life choices and goals to expected fitness, without getting paralyzed completely by the sheer complexity of the task —which obviously is detrimental for fitness. And if we do consider it, the motive clearly underdetermines the ways in which we pick goals and ways of life. Should I be a doctor, a lawyer, or a fricking scientist to be as ‘fit’ as I can be? The very question is absurd. Worse yet, there seem to be plenty of ways of life that blatantly go against this principle. Think about hunger strikes, vows of chastity, extremely risky occupations, or merely spending hours in computer games.

One cynical solution to this is that these are all status games. The idea is that we all want to boost our reputation in our group,  and will do what gets us the rewards and recognition of our peers. Given our social nature, our fitness is closely linked to our status in our community, so we have evolved to use it as proxy that we can evaluate in the moment. I can’t help but see the current popularity of this status ‘motive’ in academic and popular-science circles as an exponent of the current online culture, prodding us to amass likes and reputation points. The message of the account is that our activities are basically empty, it is only their results that count: The reinforcements or punishments afflicted by others, who in turn have only learned to reward or punish what people like them have rewarded/punished.

The cynicism is appealing but I can’t get me to buy the content, in the wholesale way it is intended. More to the point, you know this reasoning misses something essential about our motivation, when the supposedly core target doesn’t actually feel rewarding. Any sign of an increase in status shakes me up badly, it gives me stress, instead of rewarding me to my core. Now, I acknowledge I may be atypical. I started out as a researcher of autism, and to describe that work as self-justifying would only be partly mistaken (Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t dare to accuse reputationalists of self-justification through science).

Still, if this reverse effect of status is a quirk, I don’t think it is that quirky. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

How do we regulate a revolutionary new technology with great potential for harm and good? A 380-year-old polemic provides guidance.

In 1644, John Milton sat down to give a speech to the English parliament arguing in favor of the unlicensed printing of books and against a proposed bill to restrict their contents. Published as “Areopagitica”, Milton’s speech became one of the most brilliant defenses of free expression.

Milton rightly recognized the great potential books had and the dangers of smothering that potential before they were published. He did not mince words:

“For books are not absolutely dead things, but …do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragon’s teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men….Yet on the other hand unless wariness be used, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, God’s Image; but he who destroys a good Book, kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth; but a good Book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.”

Apart from stifling free expression, the fundamental problem of regulation as Milton presciently recognized is that the good effects of any technology cannot be cleanly separated from the bad effects; every technology is what we call dual-use. Referring back all the way to Genesis and original sin, Milton said:

“Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world.”

In important ways, “Areopagitica” is a blueprint for controlling potentially destructive modern technologies. Freeman Dyson applied the argument to propose commonsense legislation in the field of recombinant DNA technology. And today, I think, the argument applies cogently to AI. Read more »

Firelei Báez. Sans-Souci, (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body), 2015.

Collection Pérez Art Museum, Miami.

“The premise of the show is to bring out subaltern histories, things that are not taught in our textbooks, that exist but haven’t been always named.” – Firelei Báez

More here and here.

Current show.

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by Tim Sommers

Donald Trump is not running for President. He is running to be, as he openly says, “a dictator on day one.” He sometimes implies he will give up these dictatorial powers at some later point. But given that he fomented a coup to prevent the peaceful exchange of power the last time he lost an election, given that his Supreme Court has recently granted him sweeping immunity from prosecution for criminal conduct, and given that he has told Christian Nationalist supporters that if they elect him they would never have to vote again, Trump peacefully giving up dictatorial powers doesn’t seem likely. So, Trump is running for dictator. But it is equally important to be clear about what Trump is running against. It’s usually called liberalism.

Liberalism is the view that the most fundamental principle of justice is that everyone has certain basic rights, liberties, and freedoms. These freedoms are not arbitrary. These rights are the liberties required for people to pursue their own good in their own way (as John Stuart Mill put it) – including having some input on the political system as a whole (via democracy, for example).

The rule of law is one of those basic liberties – the oldest, in fact. It makes possible the rest by mandating that everyone, including the president or king, must obey the law – and that no one is above or beneath the law.

There’s also an epistemic side to liberalism. There are facts. These facts are often knowable. There are reliable, though fallible, procedures for arriving at them. These procedures and these facts are potentially available to everyone directly, via reasoning and empirical investigation, or indirectly from reliable sources. So, in addition to respecting the rights and liberties of everyone, our social institutions must be responsive to facts and expertise and avoid being overly political. Read more »

by Jeroen van Baar

Now that I live in Washington DC, I take every opportunity I get to sample the seafood sold at a floating market down by the wharf. It’s the oldest open-air fish market in continuous operation in the United States, dating back to 1805. But while the market is a local feature, the fish itself is not. This is partly due to globalization: tilapia is farm-grown in countries like China and Indonesia, frozen, shipped, and sold defrosted at the wharf. But even the cod, a fish historically abundant in the Atlantic Ocean, is rarely caught nearby. As it turns out, the reason for this is not economical, it’s ecological. And it provides a valuable view into the weaknesses of science and mathematical modeling.

The story starts about five hundred years ago, when Spanish and Portuguese fishermen sailed West to find huge populations of Atlantic cod swimming around what we now call the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The fishing was good and the fishermen hauled home barrel upon barrel of Basque-style salted bacalao, roughly 150 metric tons per year. This became a staple protein in Europe for centuries and for a while, all was well.

Enter modernity. By the middle of the twentieth century, engineers had developed such powerful bottom-scraping nets and fish-finding sonar systems that cod landings shot up to over 1,000,000 tons in 1968 (see figure). European freezer trawlers took home a big share of this pie, which upset local fishermen who had started seeing sub-par yields. The Canadian government therefore claimed an exclusive economic zone not 3 but 200 miles off the coast, which contained about 90% of the Grand Banks area. The locals then deployed massive trawlers of their own. This led to a decrease in overall cod landing but a recovery in Canadian cod production, and for a while, all was well.

Soon, however, the yearly yield of cod stagnated again. This is when fishermen and policymakers got worried. Could it be that there was something wrong with the cod population itself? Clever ecological modelers came up with a way of calculating a ‘maximum sustainable yield’ (MSY), set at 16% of the total population, which should theoretically leave enough fish to repopulate each year. For a while, all was well, as this mathematical might settled everyone’s nerves. But fishing floundered further and the Grand Banks cod population collapsed almost entirely in 1992. The government quickly called a moratorium on cod fishing, which was renewed indefinitely in 1993. It marked the end of what was once the greatest fishery on Earth. Read more »

I Crane My Neck

My view is of nothing
other than the black dot of Icarus
hung beneath the canopy of a
wax wing in a field of grey,
a boy suspended by invisible
filaments thinner than human
hairs strung (I must assume)
from the canopy above
now caught in an updraft
drawing the careless boy
close enough to the sun
to melt wax and ruin
his last day

Jim Culleny, 8/4/24
Photo by Abbas Raza