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.  Read more »

by Philippe Huneman

You’re a railway worker, a teacher, an intern. You’re at a dinner somewhere and someone asks: “Why are you on strike? You reply that this project the government wants to impose on us is unfair, and another person replies: “But why isn’t it fair? Why shouldn’t we have an equal system for all, as they say?” And then we talk about hardship, life expectancy, fairness, etc.

This little word, “why“ punctuates our discussions – how many times a day do we use it? Far from being restricted to politics, it cuts across all fields, from the everyday talk – “why is the baker closed today?” – to the most obviously metaphysical – “Why is there something rather than nothing?” asked Leibniz – to the most intimate – “Why didn’t she come?” It is the question of the scientist – “why does the straight stick plunged into the water appear bent to me?” – as well as the private investigator’s phrase – “Why did the butler put on his gloves on a Sunday?“

Few questions are so common that they characterize at the same time insignificant everyday discussions, technically worded scientific questions and deep philosophical interrogations. This mere constatation should direct us to question the very possibility of asking why, the meaning it can have for so many distinct populations in various contexts, and its connection to general features of human cultures. Here, many philosophers of the past have shown the way, by raising in their own manner similar issues. I propose to directly address the meaning of ‘asking why’, by introducing a set of concepts likely to frame this questioning. Read more »

by Oliver Waters

In the final moments of the film Don’t Look Up (2021), a group of family and friends sit around a dinner table laughing together while enjoying some delicious organic produce. Leonardo DeCaprio looks up from his heirloom tomatoes with nostalgic despair.

‘We really did have everything, didn’t we?’ he laments, just before the meteor hits Earth, killing billions of its ungrateful, arrogant human guests. The same fate awaits the audience – so the cinematic metaphor goes – if we keep destroying the global ecosystem.

Many promote economic ‘degrowth’ as a way of avoiding such a calamity, notably anthropologist Jason Hickel and climate activist Naomi Klein. In his book Less is More (2020), Hickel asserts that for approximately 97% of our 300,000 years as the human species, ‘our ancestors lived in relative harmony with the Earth’s ecosystems,’ before there was any such thing as economic growth.

In This Changes Everything (2015), Klein diagnoses our existential climate crisis as starting with Sir Francis Bacon back in the 16th century, when he kicked off all that nonsense about systematically controlling natural forces for our own material wellbeing. This was apparently the beginning of a toxic, ‘extractive’ relationship with the Earth, which we need grow out of immediately.

Such critics of growth tend to believe we have collectively amassed more than enough wealth at this stage in history, and that any future growth in wealth via technological innovation will be optional and decadent by comparison. Space travel, for instance, is just a plaything for the rich. And we certainly don’t need any more energy here on Earth: we can just be more efficient with the energy we have.

In The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016), the economist Robert Gordon lends credence to this view with the historical claim that the ‘low-hanging fruit’ of technological breakthroughs have already been picked:

“In America growth slowed down after 1970 not because inventors had lost their spark or were devoid of new ideas, but because the basic elements of a modern standard of living had by then already been achieved along so many dimensions, including food, clothing, housing, transportation, entertainment, communication, health, and working conditions.”

But this supposedly empirical statement is actually a profoundly pessimistic theory of human potential in disguise. Consider first how arbitrary it is to hold this perspective at any given moment in history. A 19th century British labourer, for instance, could not have been aware that they were desperately poor by our standards today. On the contrary, many thought they were much better off than their ancestors. After all, for the first time in history, they were able to work in a lively metropolis at a coal-powered factory producing textiles, instead of toiling in the fields under the beating sun or pouring rain.

As David Deutch has compellingly argued, there are no fundamental natural plateaus or barriers on the upward journey of technological progress. Rather it’s an eternal adventure that we can simply either choose to embrace or reject. This leads one to the ‘techno-optimist’ vision: one of indefinitely and exponentially improving and expanding human civilisation. Read more »

Fundamental Disunderstanding

….—thoughts on Oct. 7^th and Gaza

everything ever written or said
everything drawn or played or sung
every headline that cried or bled
every fresco, every poem
everything wrung from our cranial sponge
every inky insult flung
every bomb that leveled a home
….and left a child to fend alone
every instrument ever made
every expletive blasted from lungs
every face on a canvas hung
every righteous canto prayed
…. that pounded the planks of heaven’s floor
every school Kalashnikov-sprayed
every smartass quote with bite
every thought of rich or poor
every Icarus grasping at height
….whose waxy wings soon came apart
every joke and laugh and snort
every misbegotten poison dart
every sentiment or thing
….that burst from brain’s well-tensioned spring
every sura, gospel or verse
every prayer that followed a hearse
every love, lost or won
every song and every hum
every murmuring merciful must
that reached the sky or bit the dust
are not of a glad or angry God
…………………..but of life that thrusts,
inside to out, evil or good, the stuff of us

 Jim Culleny

by Richard Farr

This is the second part of a three-part essay, My Drug Problem. Part one, A mere analogy, is here.

Your life is not going according to plan and you’ve started to wonder what the gods are playing at. Still, the decision to consult the Oracle at Delphi is not one you took lightly. First you tried all the usual remedies: drinking too much, blaming other people, listening to soothsayers in the agora. Only when none of this helped did you undertake weeks of travel to reach bucolic Phocis, finishing with an arduous climb to this shoulder of rock a thousand feet above a valley in the middle of nowhere. 

At least the views are nice. On a goat track that will one day be a narrow street clogged with over-fed barbarians in tour buses, you stop to ease your blisters and gaze down towards the Gulf of Corinth. Lovely — you’d take a picture if you could. Mount Parnassus looms behind you. Five minutes later you’re at your destination.

The Temple of Apollo is an important religious center, so you’re surprised to find it painted all over with self-help graffiti: Wherever you go, there you are. If life hands you lemons, make lemonade. The journey is the destination. Life is uncertain; eat dessert first. Over the main entrance, the message spray-painted on the lintel is marginally more enigmatic than the rest: Gnothi s’auton, anthro — Get to know yourself, man.*

(* Shortly after your visit, part of the lintel will fall off in an earthquake and the “man” will be lost to history.) Read more »

Sughra Raza. Fire Painting at Takht-e-Lahore, December 9, 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Mike Bendzela

I am a sort of “coincidence theorist”: I think most shit just happens, and our human duty is to be simultaneously appalled and amused by it all. The first gay man I ever met, who died of AIDS in 1985, was of the opposite temperament. He often told me “there are no coincidences” (his attempt, I think, to unnerve naive, Midwestern me). “The universe has a sway to it,” he used to say. He was a mystic who read Tarot cards and cast horoscopes for people, but I wanted nothing to do with any of that. Such a mindset suggests my friend must have died of AIDS “for a reason.” This view is repugnant to me, with its constant, cosmic vigilance bordering on paranoia.

The fact that the deaths I am about to describe all transpired during the covid years (2020-2022) is just that, coincidence. One of the benefits of writing nonfiction is you get to indulge the “you couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried” trope. It sometimes seems the more implausible events are, the more likely they are to be true. As Tim O’Brien puts it in his fictional accounting of the “true war story”:

In many cases a true war story cannot be believed. If you believe it, be skeptical. It’s a question of credibility. Often, the crazy stuff is true and the normal stuff isn’t, because the normal stuff is necessary to make you believe the truly incredible craziness.

At the outset of the pandemic in early 2020, people my husband and I knew suddenly began to die. Shortly after, I began to notice that I was losing my sense of smell. The first casualty, a favorite neighbor, was in his late 80s and had succumbed to a longtime struggle with cancer. I would bury his ashes that summer in the neighborhood cemetery I take care of. It was like burying a family member; I had known him for 35 years. As the pandemic was still pretty new and mysterious, those of us gathered at the cemetery stood around in the broad daylight crying behind surgical masks. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by David J. Lobina

Having written for 3 Quarks Daily since July 2021, with the first entry coming out around the time of my birthday (two anniversaries to celebrate in July since then for me!), it has recently dawned on me that I have tended to write long “series” of articles here at 3QD Tower – but also, that I have made quite a mess of it at times.

Depending on how you gather up the posts, two series out of seven have not been completed at all, despite assurances given and promises made, and not every series has been posted in chronological order, which doesn’t make for a very uniform reading experience (but who reads this stuff anyway?!).

Given that this is the last entry of the year, I thought it would be a good idea to bring some order to my Monday Column, tie up some loose ends, and in addition anticipate some of the topics and arguments I want to run in 2024 – a New Year’s resolution of sorts, though as I will mention below, I had already announced in the past that I would tackle some of the very issues I shall list in this post. In my defence, some of these topics can be quite controversial, so perhaps I can be forgiven for the broken promise. Read more »

At the Abu Dhabi airport.

by Rafiq Kathwari

As Fareed drove in soft rain through red lights to Maimonides, my sister-in-law Farrah, and I sat in the back seat of the sky-blue Volkswagen van.

“Kicking,” she said, placing my hand on her round belly. Shy, I gazed at her polished toes in flip-flops.

A stork dropped a boy in Brooklyn eight years to the day JFK was slain in Dallas. New alien in New York, I babysat my curly-haired nephew in a stark rental on Park Avenue where the doorman first thought of us as the move-in guys, and where our Numdha rugs, hand-made in Kashmir, screamed to come out of our walk-in closets.

“Make money fast carpeting America from sea to shining sea,” grandfather had penned in an aerogram. Fareed rode the subway to Pine Street; Farrah was a cashier at Korvettes. The boy and I together discovered Big Bird on a Zenith console, my first TV exposure at age 22.

I watched the boy dunk hoops in purturbia, his long hair swishing to Metallica’s “Disposable Heroes.” He enrolled in the local chapter of the National Rifle Association, his dad’s rifle slung across the boy’s shoulder to hunt jackrabbits upstate.

He climbed a peak one summer in Kashmir, a paradise in pathos, a heated topic at our dinner table, but on the periphery of America’s mind, rarely mentioned on the Evening News, never on “All in the Family,” a popular sitcom that dared to shake America’s somnolence even as B-52 bombers rained napalm on Vietnam, fueling our rage.

In our hearts we knew we had to do what we could with what we had to help untie the Gordian knot of the Kashmir dispute, never again to let mad men tear apart husbands from wives, siblings from siblings, sons and daughters from mothers and fathers across the Line of Control since 1947 when India divided herself.

I can imagine how our family history seized my nephew’s receptive mind as he and his mates chilled every Sunday at the Islamic Cultural Center on California Road in Eastchester, once a Greek Orthodox Church, now embraced as a house of worship by a fresh wave of immigrants anxiously learning new ways of seeing and thinking.

Eager to impart their native cultural heritage to American-born kids, parents seemed unconcerned as weekday shop owners moonlighted as Sunday school teachers who were seemingly unable to equate the paradox of America’s ample prosperity at home with its wanton militarism abroad. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

It all began about 4.5 billion years ago, give or take a few millennia.  The earth was still young, having been formed by the accretion of material that orbited around the sun. It was a young, moderate-sized planet, and, like the other planets in the solar system, it spun like a top as it rotated around the sun, with an axis that was parallel to the sun’s rotational axis. This configuration was the most stable for the planets in the solar system, though today only Mercury and Jupiter still have an axis that is parallel to the sun’s.

On that day, 4.5 billion years ago, an erratic planet about the size of Mars, called Theia, came crashing through the solar system and collided with the young Earth. This was not the same collision that killed most of the dinosaurs, which happened about 66 million years ago. The collision of the two planets resulted in the formation of the moon. But there was another significant result of this collision – the Earth’s axis shifted, from a position parallel to the sun’s, to one that is off by 23°! This tilt is the reason we have seasons.

The change in the earth’s axis away from parallel to the sun means that during the year, with Earth’s rotation around the Sun, the northern hemisphere will be pointing toward the Sun for about half the year, warming the earth and giving us summer.  In the other half of the year it will be pointing away from the Sun, giving us cooler temperatures, or winter.  The transitional seasons, spring and fall, are accompanied by more neutral temperatures. Read more »

 by Martin Butler 

Given the increasing ubiquity of technology in all our lives, it’s surely time to consider what may sound like an obvious, even stupid question but one that is actually vitally important: What is technology for?

At its simplest, technology can be understood as a tool which enables us to reach a particular end; a chimp using a stick to extract honey from a tree trunk, for example, a means to an end. That approach is crucial to our perception of the place of technology in the modern world.  I visit a shop (means) to buy something (end).  I get on a train (means) to arrive at a destination(end). To be able to engage in means-ends activity of any complexity is surely a sign of intelligence, showing purpose and imagination in that it seems necessary to imagine a state-of-affairs in the future that has not as yet come to pass, and of conceiving a way to achieving it. The end would be unattainable without the technology, just as the internet enables working from home in a way that would be impossible without it. On this model much technological innovation is about devising more efficient means of achieving particular ends, even though the ends were still achievable prior to the innovation. By ‘more efficient’ we mean meeting ends more quickly, doing it in a way that requires less human effort and often on an increased scale. The key innovations that were pivotal in the Industrial revolution were, for example, the machines that allowed spinning and weaving to take place on an unprecedented scale.

The main features of this model are that the means and the end are distinct, and the end is something we have identified as desirable. On these assumptions technology will always seem positive simply because it allows us to access something desirable that was previously unattainable, or, to access something desirable more efficiently than was previously the case. This model is taken as common sense in the modern world and it at least partly explains why technology is given pride of place within our culture.

But this is a misrepresentation of the place of technology in human life, principally because the relation between means and ends is not as simple as the above model suggests. Read more »

No Joke

Regarding quantum chance, why
(or more simply) does the world exist,
and if it does, is it funny?

There might just as well be nothing
instead of the risible sun which makes me laugh
when it comes up coincidentally
with the punch line of a joke
that also could never have existed
had some unknown condition
not brought a comedian to the point
of standing up during the cascading series
of events of a million million millennia
and, imagining the humorous potential of bars,
created stories of characters who might
walk into one:

tales of lives, fictional yes,
but which in consciousness ring clear and true
because they touch and plumb the essence of our
inexplicably absurd existence evoking laughter
as we continue our desperate mining of the void
which in a universe without mind would have been
forever cloaked, forever unknown to anyone,
leading to some nada impossibly mysterious
or moot
…………..   —no joke

Jim Culleny

by Rebecca Baumgartner

I’m currently reading The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in translation, and it’s got me thinking about how much we rely on translators to bring us literature from around the world, and how important it is to be able to trust what they tell us. I can only imagine the patience and creativity, the erudition and intuition, required to be a good translator. I’m deeply beholden to every translator who has enriched my life by unlocking the magic of Anna Karenina, Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, War and Peace, A Young Doctor’s Notebook, the novels of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, the novels of Anna Gavalda, The Three Musketeers, Beowulf, the haiku of Issa and Basho, all the stories of Greek mythology, and now – The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

The duty of a translator assumes outsize importance once you get invested in a story. It’s crucial they get it right; you have to be able to trust their interpretation and sense of style. You want them to be faithful to the spirit and letter of the original, but if you had to prioritize one over the other, you want the spirit to come first. Most of all you want the impossible: To borrow their French- or Italian-speaking brain for a few hundred pages, to see into the soul of Victor Hugo or Leo Tolstoy, however briefly, with as little mediation as possible, to be able to believe that this text was written in English all along, that you are drinking from the original source. When done well, this is a gift that can never be adequately appreciated or repaid.

The flip side of this weighty responsibility is an equally weighty disappointment if it’s handled poorly. Even in the best translations, I’ve stumbled on phrasings that are simply too clunky or awkward to be the best possible rendering, and it grates like a pebble in my shoe. I’ve read novels translated from Russian that persist in translating “bored” as “dull” – words that might seem interchangeable, until you read a sentence saying that someone is dull, when it’s obvious from context that what they really mean is that they’re bored. I’ve seen the word “explanation” used to describe what should have been translated as “argument” (characters having violent explanations in the next room, for example).

One of the most cringe-inducing examples of a mistranslation came to my attention recently when a character referenced the Latin motto “Sapere aude,” which was the Enlightenment-era rallying cry meaning “Dare to be wise” or “Dare to know.” Unfortunately, the translator rendered this as “To learn, listen,” mistakenly confusing the verbs audere (to dare) and audire (to listen). I only knew this was a mistake because of my rusty Latin. But other readers have no choice but to take that mistranslation at face value.  Read more »

by Barry Goldman

There is a controversy about whether Section 3 of the 14^th Amendment to the US Constitution disqualifies Donald Trump from serving as president. Different people have different opinions. Some people have different opinions at different times. But whatever their position on the question, everyone seems to agree that the question itself is a sensible one, and it has a correct answer. I don’t think so.

Let’s review.

Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says this:

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

In August of 2023 law professors William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulson published a 126-page article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review called “The Sweep and Force of Section Three.” Their conclusion was that Trump is ineligible.

Steven Calabresi, a professor at Northwestern University and one of the founders of the Federalist Society, read the article and posted on his blog:

Trump is ineligible to be on the ballot, and each of the 50 state secretaries of state has an obligation to print ballots without his name on them.

Subsequently, Michael Mukasey, Attorney General under George W. Bush, wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he reached the opposite conclusion. “Officer of the United States” he wrote, “refers only to appointed officials, not to elected ones.” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Night Seagulls at Karachi Harbor, Dec 7, 2023.

Digital photograph.