by Robert Jensen

Wes Jackson’s career demonstrates that sometimes the race goes not to the swift but to the unconventional, that the battle can be won not only by the strong but by the stubborn. Straight-A students don’t always lead the way.

Jackson, one of the last half-century’s most innovative thinkers about regenerative agriculture, has won a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called “genius grant.” He also received the Right Livelihood Award, often called the “alternative Nobel Prize,” in addition to dozens of other awards from various philanthropic, academic and agricultural organizations. Life Magazine tagged him one of the “100 Important Americans of the 20th Century.”

But mention any of those accolades to Jackson—who was one of the first people to use the term “sustainable agriculture” in print—and he likely will tell the story of almost getting a D in a botany course and describe himself as a misfit.

Not the top of his class

Jackson’s education started in a two-room school near his family’s farm in North Topeka, Kansas, where classes met for only eight months because students were needed for planting and harvest. He was an uneven student whose classroom performance varied depending on the quality of the teacher and his interests at the moment. He went to nearby Kansas Wesleyan University in Salina, focusing as much on football and track as on academics. “I wasn’t what you would call a top student,” Jackson said. “I had a lot of Cs and Bs, an A here and there, but also my share of Ds.” Read more »

Jacob Lawrence. Migration Series (Panel 52).

Casein tempera on hardboard.

“…

Spring, 1968. All my students were black, and I wasn’t. Jacob Lawrence, who was teaching a course down the hall from me at Pratt Institute, was a famous artist and a real teacher; I wasn’t either of those things.

When I introduced myself as a third-year undergrad at Pratt and told him about the Life Drawing class I was offering, Mr. Lawrence smiled. I explained that the college was providing a free model and drawing lessons for low-income adults in the area as part of a program I had helped initiate. “Drawing from a live model is important,” he said.

This highly accomplished man, older and far wiser than me, represented a different kind of model. When I asked if he’d say a few words to my class, his smile broadened. Not surprisingly, he made a big hit that evening, and every evening session thereafter, spending almost as much time in my classroom as he did in his. His eye and mind and storytelling skills were always spot-on. Though I remember him as being too kind to say anything too critical about anyone’s work, my students and I learned a great deal.

…

Lawrence’s series of 60 small, unpretentious panels illustrate the journey of the approximately six million African Americans who migrated from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West in the first half of the 20th century. The dream before them: to secure better opportunities for their families and themselves. They would leave segregation and Jim Crow behind. In Lawrence’s paintings, people work, walk, wait, and die. They gather at train stations, school blackboards, and voting machines, as well as in courts, jails, and funerals. At MoMA, I felt the tensions of the arduous exodus he had heard and read about since he was a child. I felt the artist’s great big ambition to tell a great big story in a way that would allow 8- and 80-year-olds alike to understand and experience it. I felt a peoples’ desperation. I felt Black History in my gut.

The Migration Series (1940-41) was originally shown the year it was completed (under the title Migration of the Negro) at the prestigious Downtown Gallery in New York, marking the first time a New York gallery represented an African American artist. Another first: When MoMA bought half the series (all the even-numbered panels; the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. bought all the odd numbers), Jacob Lawrence became the first African American to have work included in the Modern’s permanent collection.

From: “Mud Above Sky Below: Love and Death in Jacob Lawrence’s ‘Migration Series'”.

Barry Nemett, July 18, 2015.

More here and here.

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by Sherman J. Clark

We do not need philosophers to tell us that human beings matter. Various versions of that conviction is already at work everywhere we look. A sense that people are worthwhile shapes our law, which punishes cruelty and demands equal treatment. It animates our medicine, which labors to preserve lives that might seem, by some external measure, not worth the cost. It structures our families, where we care for the very young and the very old without calculating returns. It haunts our politics, where arguments about justice presuppose that citizens possess a standing that power must respect. But what does it mean to say human beings are worthwhile? And why might it be worthwhile to ask what me mean when we say we matter?

When we speak of dignity, worth, or the respect owed to persons, we are not engaging in idle abstraction. These concepts do real work. They justify constraints on what the powerful may do to the vulnerable. They ground claims to equality that might otherwise seem like mere sentiment. They explain both our moral outrage when persons are degraded and our moral hesitation when we are tempted to treat others as mere instruments.

It is true, then, that we do not need philosophy to tell us that human beings have value. But it is equally true that we are remarkably adept at forgetting this in our actions. We affirm, often sincerely, that all human lives matter, while behaving as though some lives matter far more than others—some kinds of suffering are urgent while others are tolerable, some deaths tragic while others barely register. The conviction is present, but it is unevenly applied, easily displaced by fear, convenience, habit, or interest.

One reason to reflect on the nature and source of human worth, then, is not to discover that worth exists, but to see more clearly how our practices fall short of what we already claim to believe. Thinking about dignity is a way of making our commitments explicit, of exposing the quiet hierarchies we smuggle into our moral lives while insisting, in the abstract, on equality. Philosophy here does not supply a new value; it sharpens our awareness of how badly we sometimes honor the one we already profess.

There is another reason to think carefully about human worth. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Not long ago I wrote for 3 Quarks Daily about R. K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets. In Narayan’s 1962 novel, a young man comes home to India from studies in the United States of America with an apparently preposterous ambition. Now back in South Asia, he wants to manufacture ‘story-writing machines’ like those that, in this text, already exist in the USA. His father Jagan is horrified; to him, authorship is sacred and human. Furthermore, to this ageing Gandhian, the writing machines sound like just another instance of American ‘Coca-colonization’. Jagan contrasts the machines’ fluent but bloodless writing with what he genders (and ages) as the ‘granny’ oral storyteller of Indian village life.

Yet here we are in 2026, and this machine isn’t just a twentieth-century satire – it is fast becoming the very air that we breathe in our research and our imaginative endeavours. Being disembodied it may not be able to replace oral storytellers easily, but many other kinds of writers, artists, and creatives are worried about robots taking over their jobs. Generative artificial intelligence entails similar questions about tradition, modernity, global north and global south, colonialism and gender to those Narayan was pondering more than sixty years ago. I will consider all of these questions in this blog post and the sequel(s) which I envision, although I won’t head in a linear trajectory but will instead zigzag. From the outset it needs to be said I am a conflicted doubter in all this, and thus haven’t been able to resolve the conflict. What single individual could?

Anyway, I’ve been following the heated debate on generative AI, and I find myself not only conflicted but in two minds – a for and against I’ll try to sketch in these linked posts. Neither am I sold on the hype, nor am I rejecting the technology out of hand. But I’m fascinated and alarmed by what AI is doing to us. By ‘us’, I mean people who are creative writers, arts and humanities professionals, or simply trying to survive on a combative, burning planet. In other words, what is the impact of the story-writing machines, and how can human beings adapt or resist? Read more »

“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts do is attempt
to find a language to come to terms with the contingency
of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri; Storytelling & Forgetfullness
________________________________________

A Skeptic on Stories of Whoknowswhat?

A story’s a trip through landscapes of malleable things,
or characters bent by other characters, shoehorned into imaginations
or pulled as a potter does a pot, drawing up water and clay,
the stuff of earth, forming it into free-standing somethings
into which we place or pitch our day’s most pressing dreams,
new bouquets set upon tables in rooms we inhabit among stars

A story is a universe skewed by future disharmonies no matter
how religiously we arrange their notes on staffs to create harmonies
appropriate to the moments of the day they were first sung, parcels
of hopelessness and hope, foresights, recollections, Jenga game blocks
assembled or razed as our needs see fit to salve a wound, raise a god, or
to twist instants into forms convenient to the top-dogs of an age, or
shaped sometimes into the tales of losers, yarns whose top billing
among surviving texts skewed by coincidence, or a thing even more
mysterious which bends the arc of future tales in the peculiar direction ofwhoknowswhat?

Jim Culleny
9/22/19,  rev: 2/14/2026

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by Katalin Balog

Winners and losers

It might seem that the idea that one should remain indifferent to success is for losers. Yes, it is my own professional and personal setbacks that all of a sudden so sharpened my insights into the downsides of success. But actually, I am not new to this idea. I am not a virtuoso of failure and decay like Emil Cioran, but I come from a part of the world, East-Central Europe, where there is a venerable tradition of looking with suspicion at the ambition to succeed, to be a winner at life. The tradition, vaguely defined as it is, stretches from Russia through East-Central Europe to Germany and north to Scandinavia. In this tradition, we venerate martyrs and hopeless causes, the heroic individual who dares ignore received opinion, whereas our Western counterparts celebrate achievement and lionize winners.

The collapse of the Hungarian regime in 1989 – and, ironically, the rise of one of today’s most successful strivers, Viktor Orbán – started with the ceremonial reburial of five of the martyrs of the 1956 revolution against communism. Hundreds of thousands showed up for the reburial in Budapest, and millions more watched it on television. During the revolution, the Soviet army invaded the country and put down any resistance, installing a puppet government that went on to rule the country for another 30 years. The Prime Minister of the revolution and four of his closest associates were executed in a special secret trial, their bodies dumped in an unmarked mass grave one early morning in June 1958. Their families learned of their deaths from the newspaper the next day. Hungarians’ collective psyche was very much attuned to these facts at the time of the reburial.  That being a hero might preclude success; that it might get you to suffer much indignity.

Those in the Hungarian Communist Party who made peace with Moscow and carried out the imprisonment and execution of thousands might have had their years of success. But members of the democratic opposition of the 1970s and 1980s, people whom the Western press liked to call “dissidents,” looked askance at this so-called success. I didn’t know anyone in Budapest at the time who wouldn’t have been disgusted by the suggestion that they should be caring about their ‘career’. Though an exaggeration, we believed that only the most craven opportunists were supposed to have a career. Most of my friends either didn’t have jobs because the regime deemed them unreliable or hostile, and so worked in the gig economy (as translators, research assistants, sometimes as pump attendants at gas stations, etc.) or had jobs, but their center of gravity lay elsewhere. Dissidents in Czechoslovakia had it worse; many of them ended up, upon the collapse of the regime in 1989, in the straight-from-prison-to-government pipeline. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

The recently passed American holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas are decidedly irreligious affairs in our starkly secular, two-person household. The tall tales and deeply rutted customs reduplicated and reenacted by the general population barely register with my spouse and me — except for the notion of ritual sacrifice. Every year we enact one sacrifice for each holiday, of our own free will (if such exists), even though it disturbs me a little. It feels at times as if I’m harrying myself rather than satisfying my curiosity for hands-on experience procuring food, but in the end there is something cleansing about it. I’m able to look squarely at the central fact of our existence as heterotrophs on Planet Earth: Life consumes life. Not just that, sentient lives must consume other sentient lives. The rest are just algae of one sort or another (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Ritual sacrifice. Nobody escapes this essential detail of life on the planet, but most simply farm out the detail out to someone else. They have to, for it is impossible for the N-and-a-half million citizens of a large eastern city to have poultry houses or pig pens in their backyards, just as it is impossible they should have neighbors who raise cattle from whom they can buy half a side of grass-fed beef. Because of the sheer magnitude of the human enterprise, we must have feedlots, which have become modern necessities. It follows that antibiotics are necessities as well (to stem mass animal plagues in addition to fortifying growth), and pesticides are necessities (to keep square miles of feed grain unmolested by arthropods), and genetically modified organisms are necessities (to outpace natural selection, which produces antagonists that happily exploit every weak spot in our domesticated stock, given the chance).

One reason why I engage in a hands-on sacrifice of a couple of turkeys every year is that it forces me to think about these issues, as overwhelming as they are. And after the holidays, when the mass slaughter of 46 million turkeys in the US is over, it looks less like thanks being given than appetites being indulged. But there is no way out of this feeding frenzy, not for any of us. . . . And so I rub my own face in it every fall. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

Nearly six years ago, I lost a good friend to cancer. It was tragedy compounded, because he had lost his wife to cancer a few years earlier. That left their two daughters, orphaned in their 20s. More recently, another good friend has been struck with the disease. I know others too, as I’m sure you do as well.

What’s clear to me by now is that this is a relentless disease, not often defeated. With my friend and his wife, both were first diagnosed all the way back in 2004, within months of each other, when their girls were under ten years old. Both went through treatment and lived several happy, fulfilling lives, raising their daughters. But then the disease struck back with menace and intensity, showing up unpredictably in different parts of their bodies. They fought hard, but the cancer finally won.

Wrenching times for them, the daughters and for all of us who knew them, yes. Through it all, and in the years since, I often found myself musing about what it all meant, or came down to. Every time my friend went through a particular procedure, he’d tell me something about what the chances were of its success. Though he knew, and I knew, that “success” was really a euphemism for his survival. It’s 75 percent if nothing else comes up, he’d say, or some other such number. Presumably he had been told so by his doctors. Whatever the number, it was invariably hard to hear. Because each time, it hammered home the full import of that word “survival”. Because each time, it made me conscious of how these odds are calculated at all: by accounting for the people the disease takes from us. One of every four gone? There’s your 75 percent figure. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Having invisible friends is not necessarily a bad thing. What matters is how you handle it. You could, like the engineer Emmanuel Swedenborg or the poet William Blake, spin whole theologies out of your visions. Or you could try and ignore your invisible companions, like the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, and hope they’ll go away (they won’t. Not for a while at least). Here we’ll see that the best thing to do is to learn to live with the darn things. That’s how Calvin Stowe, the husband of American author Harriet Beecher Stowe, handled his teeming world of invisible companions, setting an example of savoir faire from which we can all take heart.

For much of his young life, Calvin Stowe believed that the Bible sanctioned slavery. He was in a good position to know this, being among the most erudite biblical scholars of his day and able to read scripture in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin. He knew every square inch of holy writ the way a bored student knows the top of his desk. And as far as he could see the Bible was okay with human bondage. Then, in 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act, a law that required Northern citizens to help capture runaway slaves. Sickened by this mad injustice, Stowe flipped his beliefs, and where he once saw scripture justifying slavery, he now saw its opposite. In a letter to his wife, he wrote:

“Hattie, if I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”

Harriet, then a modestly successful author, responded by writing the powerful anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin – which whipped up sentiments leading to the American Civil War, played a key role in the abolition of slavery and indirectly led to the deaths of some 600,000 people. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

Writer Joseph Roth noted that the period after World War I thrived on “the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.” This was just as true for people. People who had great, popular dreams about the future before the war were thrown into obscurity afterward. One such person was author and lawyer Paul Otlet.

Otlet was definitely an idealist. In 1910, him and lawyer Henri La Fontaine sought to create a “city of knowledge” which they called Mendaneum. Housed in Brussels, Belgium, it would store and categorize all the world’s information into nine categories with tens of thousands of subdivisions. Otlet hoped that someday it would be accessible in the comfort of one’s home.

In what eerily resembles today’s internet, he wrote:

Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of [its] memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation, in whole or in certain parts.

The idea began in 1895 by developing what is arguably the world’s first “search engine.” Rather than organize information by books, cards would mark bits of information which would be easily indexable. Users could “search” by asking questions to assistants (for a fee) and then be given query responses of up to fifty.

The entire bibliography of searchable information eventually consisted of over fifteen million entries. However, being all on paper, it was tedious to transport and largely stayed put in Brussels. Even worse, the labor took a painstakingly long amount of time. Workers would sometimes take days to complete just one query.

Otlet’s approach is considered one of the first, workable network-based knowledge systems. It was thought it could someday approach something of a “global brain.” The idea also pioneered the hyperlink—and Otlet went even further, envisioning bonds between documents by how they conceptually relate to one another and their disagreements. Not even today’s internet has fully realized this kind of semantic web yet. Read more »

by TJ Price

It’s been one year since I’ve been writing this monthly column here at 3 Quarks Daily. I think the temptation on such an occasion is to look backward—for evidence to support this, we have phenomena like the “clip show,” the “greatest hits,” the summation at the end of the textbook’s chapter. Further—the milestone and the benchmark; the rest area; the place where one sits down for a moment to catch one’s breath on the hike. Where there is usually a vista over which one may see the distance traveled, but from a new perspective—altered not only by altitude but also by time. That moment on the trail when the sun is going down and one makes camp to take stock of the road behind; the leagues between “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” and “Our Princess is in another castle!” Odysseus; the Lotus-Eaters.

On and on and on.

One does this not only to reminisce, but also to pass the time as one’s body catches up with one’s soul, which has long-since struck out ahead of the body; a fleet-footed Ariel, scouting, doing reconnaissance, it has waited impatiently at this station for the body to catch up. It lazes in the tree branches, chews thoughtfully on long blades of grass. From time to time, it soars heavenward and looks down on the body as it, too, looks out on the past. The body is patient, but plagued by reminders of its fallibility, of its inherent weakness. (This type of pain—fatigue, discomfort—is something the body eventually only vaguely remembers; but the type of pain that the soul feels, neither can ever forget.)

And so we enter the way station, manned by they who rebel from Beckett’s old pronouncement; they who can’t go on but also who do not go on, those condemned to the moment between Just Having Arrived and Ready to Go. Sad-faced and shuffling, they hand out the tickets at the counter for those departing, but never depart themselves (for though purgatory is empty, it must never be empty).

—{ In my childhood, I once wrote a poem about barbershops called “way station.” I will not include it here, suffice to say it included a simile regarding the sweetly silver shearing of the scissors like birds so close to my ear; snipping and singing, snipping and singing. I remember it was a poem about contentment, involving some imagery about the other men waiting, leafing through magazines. A reference to Ol’ Blue Eyes playing on the speakers, a vocal blooming of regret; the astringent tang of witch hazel in the air. The stinging sensation on the nape of my neck and the first cool spring zephyr over my scalp, a strap of bells still chiming behind me on the exit. }—

And so, the look back (Orpheus craning his neck around again; Lot’s wife tasting the tang of a sharply brackish breeze); the publishing of the yearbook; the commemoration and anniversary. A line, bent by the pressure of time, becomes a circle, joining itself again to repeat the same track. It is either this, or, bent by an entirely different force—the quickening dread one feels upon seeing one’s beginnings on the horizon—a line becomes a spiral. Read more »

Two construction cranes in Brixen, South Tyrol.

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by Thomas Fernandes

This series began with the desire to share a more diverse and lifelike account of biodiversity than the more mediatized utilitarian framing used in reporting, awareness campaigns, or pleas for conservation. This position is far from unique; the philosopher Arne Naess articulated the  deep ecology movement more than 30 years ago, in which the first two principles are:

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves. These inherent values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life-forms are also values in themselves.

Valuing life for its own sake is something few would oppose in principle. Yet the reality of this value is tested only when choices must be made, at which points commitment to abstract principles often dissolves first. But these principles don’t have to remain abstract. Writing these essays made me care more about biodiversity than when I started. Not through moral argument, but through familiarity. Learning about vultures did more to make me care about their extinction than any reasonable arguments. Closeness came from spending time in their world, not from being told they matter. It is hard to care for the alien.

Yet valuing life for its sake does not mean it does not have value for us. Yes, ecological value, but also in enabling a change in perspective. We get stuck in perceptual ruts so deep we cannot imagine alternatives. We assume our way of seeing is simply how things are.

This is the core of Donald Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception, in which he challenges the idea that perception reconstructs the objective properties of the world as they really are. Instead, he argues that perception actively constructs the perceptual world of an organism. What we experience are not faithful renderings of reality, but species-specific solutions shaped by evolution. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Peter Topolewski

Most of us haven’t smoked or snorted crystal meth. Not in meaningful quantities. Same goes for heroin and fentanyl.

But by now, no matter where we live, most of us have stepped over or around someone who has. Someone who is, if not dead, smoking or snorting or shooting up again right now. Or is desperate to.

Probably, as we walked by—giving the meth user his space, wondering if we check that the facedown fentanyl user is breathing—we thought we couldn’t relate to that person, that predicament. Not to the tipped over bag of worldly possessions. Not to the permanent hunch, the swollen ankles, the open sores.

With a little effort, though, we could relate. For whom among us hasn’t smoked dope? Or popped pills, or chewed mushrooms, or dropped acid, or drank too much booze? We know, in a way, a little something about chasing a feeling, getting a rush, smoothing the edges, escaping ourselves and our predicaments.

Turns out each of us have more in common with people severely addicted to drugs than not. Read more »

by Bill Murray

An era of worldwide illiberal governance approaches. If the Trump administration has its way, future illiberal leaders will face fewer opponents. Aspiring autocrats will lose the constraint of the United States as a potential opponent. Autocracy will spread.

We speculated for years about how the unipolar moment would end. With the rise of China, would the United States fall into a Thucydides Trap? Would it stretch itself too thin? Would we fall victim to “imperial overstretch?”

How would the United States handle the rise of the rest? The debate was usually about what the US would do to keep things steady – to maintain equilibrium. No one saw the US as the disruptor. But as it turns out, it’s the chief enforcer who is changing the script.

The US is not riding the crest of some mass upwelling of worldwide ‘illiberal’ spirit. In leading the world toward a ‘spheres of influence’ (SOI) model, the Trump administration is making a considered choice, and it is tragic. Spheres of influence is a terrible idea for the United States.

It will squander the accumulated work of eighty years of American statecraft for no strategic gain. It will take down a framework that has on balance benefitted millions since World War II. *

Abandoning the rules-based international order would be a ham-fisted, unforced mistake. It would affirm the authoritarian models of the two other powers with whom the Trump administration proposes to split the world, and they wouldn’t even need to ask.

SOIs violate a principle which has stood (with obvious exceptions) since the mid-17th century. Rising from a series of agreements collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia (which ended the Thirty Years’ War), they codified the sovereignty of individual states and sought to tell meddling would-be hegemons to stop it and respect sovereign borders. Read more »

Alia Farid. From the series “Elsewhere”. Produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery; Passerelle Centre d’art contemporain, Brest.

” … Whether working with Samawa weavers in Iraq, fountain fabricators in Kuwait, or young residents of the Chibayish marshlands, Farid says, ‘Much of the process is developing the craft together.’

Elsewhere (1 December 2023–4 February 2024), Alia Farid’s solo show at Chisenhale Gallery in London, was the first presentation of a research project tracing Arab and South Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean.

In this iteration, Farid focused on the Palestinian diaspora in Puerto Rico, where she grew up. Opening the show was Gastronomía platos (Tierra Santa)(2023), a screenprinted photograph showing a tray of dishes on a table in Tierra Santa, a Palestinian-owned restaurant in San Juan, framed in the gallery’s entrance.

Tierra Santa is depicted in one of the 16 hand-woven and embroidered rugs with earthy, red-scale tones that hang side by side, varying in length and width, in two parallel rows from the ceiling. Each rug draws on spaces defining Puerto Rico’s Palestinian communities, including a mosque in Fajardo with a silhouette that echoes Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, forming a cityscape in the main gallery.”

More here, and here.

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