by Sarah Firisen

During the height of lockdown, I was stressed. We were all stressed. We were scared of getting sick and terrified that the most vulnerable among our friends and family would get sick. We were anxious and bored, but many of us, more than anything, were lonely. Very, very lonely. My husband worked out of the house at night and slept during the day. So even though I was one of the lucky ones and did have another human presence in the house, that presence mainly manifested as a lump under the bedclothes. Many people had no one, and there was a surge in pet adoptions as people looked for anything to help cope with the day-after-day overwhelming loneliness.

Before COVID, I attended a regular kickboxing studio. A month or two before lockdown, a random group of students gathered to celebrate one woman’s birthday. I knew some of the women well, some not at all. Many I’d smiled at over the years I’d been attending the class but had never talked with. We had so much fun at that dinner that we decided to do it again and said we’d use the Facebook chat from the original dinner to coordinate. Then, COVID happened, and we started chatting as a group. First, occasionally, but as we all became lonelier and more desperate for company, it became a constant scrolling chat about parenting, marriage, TV shows, anything and everything. The one thing we all agreed on was that the connection we made to each other, through that chat, in those hard times was a lifesaver (we’re still friends, and we still use the chat even though we meet regularly now in person.) Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Widely-respected philosopher, Tufts professor, one of the “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” of the New Atheists’ movement, and an “External Professor” for the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, Daniel Dennett recently took to the very public soap box of The Atlantic to issue a dire warning.

“Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Before it’s too late (it may well be too late already) we must outlaw both the creation of counterfeit people and the ‘passing along’ of counterfeit people. The penalties for either offense should be extremely severe, given that civilization itself is at risk.”

“The most dangerous artifacts in human history?” What about gunpowder, the printing press, chemical weapons, fission bombs, fusion bombs, biological weapons, machines that burn massive amounts of fossil fuels and dump carbon into the atmosphere, Adam Sandler movies, social media in general, and TicTok in particular?

Before I say anything else I should say that Dennett is not only a brilliant philosopher, but also a charming, affable, and generous person. At public events he seems to make a special effort to seek out and spend time with students. I could say more, but you get the idea. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In March David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss announced that they discovered an “Ein Stein”. The choice of name can only be described as a tour-de-force of PR: Ein Stein translates as One Stone but also evokes a certain physicist. The Ein Stein got wide play in the media, including here at 3QD. Unfortunately, the same authors’ discovery of the “Spectre” tile two weeks ago seems to have gone under the radar. Since it is even more interesting, I thought we should take the time to talk about it.

First off, what is this all about? This research is in the area of geometry about tilings of the plane. If you have a collection of tiles of various shapes and sizes along with a set of rules about how they can be placed, then a successful tiling of the plane with those tiles and rules is exactly what you think: you cover the entire plane going to infinity in all directions using only those tiles and following those rules [1].

Sometimes this is easy. If you have a rectangular tile with no rules restricting you, you see successful tilings all around you in the brickwork. If you use a rectangle with no rules, there are infinitely many different tilings.

Sometimes tiling the plane is impossible. If you have only a circular tile, then there is no way to tile the plane without leaving gaps. Sometimes it is the rules which cause a problem. If you have a triangular tile, but the rule says you aren’t allowed to rotate the tile, then there is a triangular tiling (here on the right), but it’s forbidden by the rule [2].

One common way of enforcing rules is to color the tiles and make requirements on where colors can be placed relative to each other. We discussed these sorts of tilings ages ago here at 3QD. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait On Graffiti In The Rain. June 2023.

Digital photograph.

by Chris Horner

What should we look for in literature? And in the arts and humanities in general? It’s a large question with many answers, some better than others: entertainment, edification, elevation – and much more. A more limited question might be: what is the point of studying it?

Let’s stick with literature as our example.Think of all the students studying the novel, poetry, drama, essays and more. A multitude of students, teaching staff, departments and institutions. And an awful lot of money, much of it in the form of debt. Assuming that at least some of those who enrol and don’t go on to an academic career will want to go and read, see and listen to the things they wrote essays about in school and college, what is is it supposed to mean for them? I got to thinking about that after being present at a conversation about an author (DH Lawrence) between an academic and a reader who had obtained a degree in English and American literature over forty years ago. It went something like this:

Graduate: DH Lawrence is a very interesting writer.

Academic: I agree.

Graduate: The value of Lawrence is both in what he wants to say about life, and the way in which he says it – the art of the The Rainbow, Women in Love, the poetry – Lawrence has an urgent message for us about one’s life and how it might be more richly lived. How do your students respond to it?

Academic: Well, that’s not really what we are interested in at [well known UK university].

Reader: How can it not be?

Academic: We don’t approach any text with that kind of thing in mind. What we study  and teach is the social and historical context in which it was produced, the the social background to the text’s production, the forces that shape and mark it: political, economic, questions of gender etc are all important aspects: the discursive and ideological forces that shaped it and made it part, or not part, of the canon.

Reader: But isn’t that missing the point of what DHL has to say? I think he has something to say to me. Of course he is open to criticism – but that’s what the study of literature is about, isn’t it? The questions of value that are raised in our reading of great literature? 

Academic: it’s naive to just pick up a text and think of it as speaking to you in an unmediated way, just like that.

The conversation went on, but didn’t really get much further than the positions I’ve very roughly outlined above. The subject was literature but it could surely have been about all sorts of cultural production – the visual arts, for instance. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Eric Bies

But—let’s be honest—to me he’s Dad.

It’s just the sentence seems better how I have it up there in the title, more satisfying given its slight alliterative lilt, more interesting, rhythmically, to frustrate what otherwise would render as absolute sing-song.

My father is full of stories.

He grew up on a modest farm in a city—a town? a village?—what Wikipedia informs me is an unincorporated community, boasting “no legally defined boundaries or population statistics.”

In January of 2024, Dad’s dad will turn a hundred and three—if I were Julius Caesar I’d say CIII—a rather remarkable number and a very respectable age for a member of our species.

Dad’s dad doesn’t often figure in Dad’s stories. This is because Dad’s stories have everything to do with being five or six years old in the early sixties, running free on a modest farm in an unincorporated community whose citizenry we can’t call numberless but simply unnumbered.

Suffice to say where Dad grew up was and remains right on the perilous edge of what soft-palmed suburbanites like myself rarely shy from dubbing Nowhere.

It’s an exceedingly picturesque Nowhere—the kind of place people like me go to be turkeys, tracing the mazes and lanes of green corn to stand open-mouthed and drooping-combed beneath unassailable stretches of blue—and there’s nowhere I can picture Dad’s stories springing from but there.

When I was a boy Dad told me what it was like when he was a boy. Read more »

Glasses on a shelf in a restaurant in Brixen, South Tyrol.

by Paul Braterman

One month ago today, Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis appointed Martyn Iles, formerly director of the Australian Question Lobby, to the position of Chief Ministry Officer, ministry of course being Answers in Genesis’ core activity. Here’s why that matters.

Martyn Iles, a lawyer by training, was the managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) from 2018 until he was abruptly sacked by the ACL Board in February 2023. Accounts of his dismissal differ. Iles described it as a result of difference in strategy; the Board wanted to move in a more political direction, making him in his own words “not the right person for that vision. I have always been a preacher first and politician second (or third…)”. The Board’s chair, however, denied that there had been any such change.

Answers in Genesis (AiG) is the world’s largest Young Earth Creationist organisation. AiG has a full-time working staff of 1200 and, according to its 2021 tax declaration, assets of almost $82 million. It owns the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter in Kentucky as well as other major assets, and its massive outreach programme includes formal publications, Answers magazine, and an extremely active website.

AiG is the property of Ken Ham, like Iles a product of Australian’s extreme Christian fundamentalist community. It was set up in 1994 after complex and litigious manoeuvres involving Ham and his previous associates, Creation Ministries International based mainly in Australia, and the Institute for Creation Research (ICR). ICR itself had been set up by Henry Morris, co-author of The Genesis Flood, when disputes arose among an earlier generation of Young Earth creationists. Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

This is your sign to acknowledge that it is pride month and that pride comes from decades of unvalued work by Black and Latinx queer people and that pride month would not exist without their strength and that you should watch the film Paris is Burning because you’ve lived 23 years as a white queer person and keep hearing about it and you should listen to it now, because it’s temporarily available on the airline catalog of free movies (for pride month, to be taken away at the end of it…).

18 minutes and 20 seconds in: a voiceover.

When you’re a man and a woman, you can do ANYTHING [ANYTHING being a word enunciated and drawn out slowly, taffy-pulling, teeth-pulling]

you can- 

you can almost have sex on the streets if you want to [if you want to, why would you want to, out in the middle of the pavement? the gays cannot understand this heterosexual urge because gays find comfort in bushes and forests and dark hideyholes in parks where you have the freedom to not be seen by anyone you don’t want to see you and to run away and blend back into crowds for safety—out in the street, that is a liberation I fear & do not want]

the most somebody gonna say is “hey you gotta hump for me?” 

(clap) you know 

but when you’re gay [syntactically intertwining “but” with the word “gay”; always an exception, always an oversight, always a “but when you’re” statement to explain to those who are not, always explaining ourselves, always defending ourselves]

you uh [gay hesitation]

you monitor everything you do [overthinking your gayness and whether it’s too excessive for this day in this place] Read more »

Newton’s 2^nd Law & Uncommon Sense

3 things:

1. the future’s unknown,
2. I’ll never know what it meant till it’s past,
neither its force nor mass, nor
3. the speed with which its die is cast 

moving straight ahead in time,
if nothing’s pulling me aside
I’ll move this way forever
in an infinite line

if I’m moving neither straight nor true
I’ll know I’m being dragged by force
—in the short run this may not matter,
but still, as math & human nature shows,
swerve I will (more foolish the faster)
if I swerve from true toward lies I’m chasing after,
which I haven’t had the sense to master,
it may very well become disaster, but
I’ll never know till what comes after

Jim Culleny, © 8/8/16

by David J. Lobina

Is Ron DeSantis a fascist? Well, no, not really, and the question itself is not a little ridiculous, but I will come back to this properly next month (and, can you even pronounce his name properly?). In the meantime, I thought I would revisit some ideas of Rudolf Rocker briefly, the anarchist thinker and activist I wrote about last year – I wrote about his fascinatingly rich life as well as about his most important work, his 1937 book, Nationalism and Culture.

I must confess that I was a little gutted that the two entries I wrote in June and July last seemed to receive rather little attention, as I believe Rocker’s life experience and intellectual output have much to offer to us, not least to understand and properly situate some of the recent events on the (far) right political spectrum. Rocker lived through actually existing fascism and Nazism, after all, and what he had to say about the nationalist phenomenon then remains relevant to this day.

As the title of Rocker’s 1937 book indicates, and I stressed when I wrote about it, the study was focused on the relationship between nationalism and culture, and in particular, on the question of how cultural creativity can develop and flourish within modern nation-states, a topic Rocker devoted half of his book to. Rocker was most interested in the nature of the creative output given the pressures a nation-state imposes on individuals. Read more »

Allison Elizabeth Taylor. Only Castles Burning, 2017.

marquetry hybrid on panel.

More here, and here.

by John Allen Paulos

Raymond Queneau was a French novelist, poet, mathematician, and co-founder of the Oulipo group about which I wrote last year here. The group is primarily composed of French writers, mathematicians, and academics and explores the use of mathematical and quasi-mathematical techniques in literature. Their work is funny, experimental, weird, and thought-provoking.

A reader of my piece recently suggested I read Queneau’s 99 Exercises in Style. I’d read a lot of Oulipo’s writings, but never this collection of 99 retellings of the same simple anecdote. Each version is in a different style, if we interpret “style” loosely to encompass just about any variation in the telling. In almost all of the 99 variations the narrator gets on a bus in Paris, sees an argument between a long-necked man with an unusual hat and another passenger. Elsewhere and a while later the narrator sees the same man speaking with someone about button on his coat.

Queneau’s entries are clever, varied, and, taken in their entirety constitute a brilliant tour de force. The basic anecdote is banal, but that’s the point. Banality varied and repeated is far from banal. On a long overnight flight with nothing much to do, the entries inspired me to try my hand at writing a few of my own such short pieces rather than cite a sample of them from the book, many of which, incidentally, are only a half dozen sentences long. So here goes my comparatively feeble quota of stories a la Queneau, which are based on a different anecdote and set in Philadelphia. I hope other readers might be tempted to play with the idea as well, perhaps with the help of ChatGPT. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

In a thread on a Gen X subreddit, a poster named QueenShewolf wondered about the truth of Gen X cynicism as her own Gen X siblings seemed far less “cynical and disconnected” than herself, a millennial. Some responded that they were certainly cynical, others felt they were merely realistic. Skepticism drove some of this more cynical or realistic worldview, based on their experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s. Many expressed distrust of institutions because of growing up during Watergate and the Reagan administration. Cynicism has its uses, according to the posters in the thread. Being at least a bit cynical about the world around you can help you engage more critically for one. But is too much cynicism dangerous for making positive social change? Has Gen X adoption of cynicism meant that our generation has been less engaged in larger social and political life, leaving it to other generations to shape? While there is some truth in the charges of ironic cynicism, some of that has been imposed on us from without. I argue that Gen X has made some positive contributions to our culture that are often overlooked. Our generation might be more cynical, but we also helped to create durable non and even anti-commercial culture, despite our paucity of numbers.

The term Generation X came to describe to the generation that was born from the mid-60s to early 80s. The term was popularized by Douglas Coupland, a baby boomer. Paula Gottula Miles said that he settled on the “X” to illustrate how this generation had no great existential experiences unifying them “unlike previous generations.” Instead, “they do have as a unifying childhood experience … a phenomenal rise in the divorce rates, and a national debt that went from the millions to the billions.” Such shared experiences (which are apparently less meaningful than wars or political assassinations) meant they shared a common cynicism, as illustrated by his work.¹ But I would argue that Coupland ignored major events that had a formative impact, such as the Reagan era weapons build-up, the end of the Cold War itself, and several major conflicts that saw major acts of genocide (Yugoslavia and Rwanda). Read more »