Monday, August 14, 2017

We need your help to go on and we wouldn't ask if we didn't

Dear Reader,

I am happy to say that we are in the process of making major design changes to the site which will make it easier to use and add new features. The new design will also be ads-free for subscribers and donors. Once the beta site is ready (sometime this fall), you will have a chance to give us feedback before we finalize the new design. But all of this costs money!

As you know, we are able to run the site only because our regular readers support us through subscriptions or one-time payments.

Whichever you'd like to do, please take a couple of minutes and use the appropriate button near the top of the left-hand column to make a generous contribution.

Please do it now! If YOU don't help us, who will?

Also, if you missed it, read this great profile of 3QD by Thomas Manuel in The Wire.

Thank you!

New posts below.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Wednesday, August 16, 2017

Trump set them free

Adam Shatz in LRB:

The ‘Unite the Right’ protest was a reminder that the dream of the Confederacy has never died: the vision of Herrenvolk democracy has continued to smoulder since Union troops left the vanquished but still defiant South, scarcely a decade after the end of the war. Eric Foner has described the Reconstruction era, when ex-slaves became citizens and the first biracial southern governments were elected to power, as America’s ‘unfinished revolution’. The battle over Reconstruction never ended; it has simply changed forms. And the struggle to achieve full enfranchisement for black people in the South has produced many martyrs: Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King; James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman. And now Heather Heyer, the 32-year-old paralegal killed in Emancipation Park. 

It is true, as some have sanctimoniously pointed out on Twitter, that even in her death, Heyer was a beneficiary of white privilege, remembered as a ‘strong woman’, rather than subjected to the invasive background check typically meted out to unarmed black people killed by the police. But her biography suggests that she would have been the first to object to any special treatment. ‘If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,’ she wrote in her last Facebook post. She broke up with a boyfriend who expressed unease over her friendship with a black man, her manager at work. White supremacists have reserved a particular loathing for white women in the civil rights struggle: ‘nigger lovers’, they call them. One white woman at the counter-demonstration reported a jeering fascist as saying to her: ‘I hope you are raped by a nigger’; Heyer is likely to have heard similar things. For white supremacists, the end of white rule has always meant the conquest of white women by men of colour, from the rapacious emancipated slaves in Birth of a Nation to Trump’s immigrant ‘rapists’.

The man charged with Heyer’s murder, James Alex Fields Jr, a 20-year-old from Ohio, fits the usual terrorist profile: a radical loser without a father, intelligent but semi-educated and isolated, drunk on visions of grandeur on the stage of history. His murder weapon was a car, rather than a gun, but he was cut from the same cloth as Dylann Roof, who shot dead nine worshippers at a church in Charleston two years ago. Fields wrote school papers celebrating the Third Reich and shouted racist curses at home, but neither his teacher nor his mother thought to report on his ‘radicalisation’. Even if they had, the government is unlikely to have cared. 

More here.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:55 PM | Permalink | Comments

FIRE, FURY, AND AMERICA’S FAILURE TO LEARN FROM THE PAST

David L. Ulin at Literary Hub:

What Hiroshima has to tell us is that words make a difference, that they can not only illuminate our situation, but also help us frame a response. For that to happen, though, we need to be clear about what we are facing, clear about what we see.

I didn’t awaken on Wednesday intending to re-read Hersey’s book, and I wouldn’t describe the experience as a consoling one. But then, consolation is not what we need. More important is inevitability, the notion that certain acts, certain decisions, once undertaken, can never be undone. Despite (or perhaps because of) all our rhetoric, we remain the only nation ever to use atomic weapons on another; the morning I spent with Hiroshima was the 72nd anniversary of the second bomb to fall on Japan, the Nagasaki bomb, which killed another 80,000, a third of the people who lived there. Think about that, wherever you are standing: Look to your right and to your left and do the human math.

I live in Los Angeles, one of the cities said to be targeted if the situation with North Korea escalates. As to what this means, who’s to say? Hersey, for his part, suggests the only answer that matters: the human answer. Fire and fury? There’s nothing heroic about a nuclear strike; even the survivors are condemned. “A year after the bomb was dropped,” 

more here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments

Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa

Peter Moore at Literary Review:

Many Europeans who had ventured to the South Seas before Stevenson had come to find ‘those elusive and imprecise factors termed exoticism, charm, mystique, glamour’. But by the time of Stevenson’s arrival, Samoa had been caught in powerful historical currents. Germany, Britain and the USA were all vying for colonial primacy, buying up the land and stripping the island of natural resources such as the coconut palm, which was converted into ‘a piece of productive machinery from which a profit could be extracted’.

From the beginning of his time in Samoa, Stevenson took the side of the local people, whom he considered ‘misunderstood, maltreated, and exploited’. He did so in his politically charged non-fiction work Footnote to History (1892), and also in a series of letters to The Times. Farrell writes illuminatingly about the reaction these letters elicited. The editors at The Times were perplexed by them. They openly wondered whether passion had warped his judgement and counselled Stevenson to return to his romances. Others agreed that he was squandering his talents on hopeless causes and that he should restrict his attention to imagined worlds.

But Stevenson emerges well from the episode, coming across as a man of fibre, unwavering in his support of the Samoan people and his condemnation of the ‘nincompoops’ who malevolently ran their affairs. Farrell frames his account of Stevenson’s activism with his famous statement, ‘I believe in the ultimate decency of things.’ 

more here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments

The Work of the Dead

Marina Warner at the LRB:

Yet, entertaining as all this is, in a macabre key, the dead are hard to think about – and, in many ways, to read about. Unlike animals, which Lévi-Strauss declared were not only good to eat but bon à penser, too, I found that I averted my eyes, so to speak, several times as I was reading this book. Not because of the infinite and irreversible sadness of mortality, or because of the grue, the fetor, the decay, the pervasive morbidity – though Laqueur’s gallows humour about scientific successes in the calcination of corpses can be a bit strong – but because the dead present an enigma that can’t be grasped: they are always there in mind, they come back in dreams, live in memory, and if they don’t, if they’re forgotten as so many millions of them must be, that is even more disturbing, somehow reprehensible. The disappeared are the unquietest ghosts. Simone Weil writes that the Iliad is a poem that shows how ‘force … turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him.’ But Laqueur is surely right to inquire why that thing, the ‘disenchanted corpse … bereft, vulnerable, abject’, is a very different kind of thing from the cushion I am sitting on or even my iPad (which keeps giving signs of a mind of its own). I have always liked Mme du Deffand’s comment, when asked if she believed in ghosts. A philosopher and a free thinker, she even so replied: ‘Non, mais j’en ai peur.’ (‘No, but I am frightened of them.’)

The book keeps returning to the conundrum perfectly set by Diogenes, when he said that after his death, his body should be tossed over a wall for dogs to eat. This is logical, rational, perhaps even ecological (Laqueur discusses many suggestions about using mortal remains for compost and fertiliser), but no society has taken the Cynic philosopher’s advice (the Parsee towers are a place apart), and when the dead are left in the street, the sight – the neglect – rightly inspires horror and shame in all who know of it.

more here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 10:15 AM | Permalink | Comments

Wednesday Poem

Reassurance

I must love the questions
themselves
as Rilke said
like locked rooms
full of treasure
to which my blind
and groping key
does not yet fit.

and await the answers
as unsealed
letters
mailed with dubious intent
and written in a very foreign
tongue

and in the hourly making
of myself
no thought of Time
to force, to squeeze
the space
I grow into.
.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991
.

Posted by Jim Culleny at 07:14 AM | Permalink | Comments

White supreme

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 07:06 AM | Permalink | Comments

No, You Can’t Feel Sorry for Everyone

Adam Waytz in Nautilus:

The world seems to be getting more empathetic. Americans donate to charity at record rates. People feel the pain of suffering in geographically distant countries brought to our attention by advances in communications and transportation. Violence, seen on historical timescales, is decreasing. The great modern humanitarian project of expanding the scope of our empathy to include the entire human race seems to be working. Our in-group (those we choose to include in our inner circle and to spend our energies on) is growing, and our out-group (everybody else) shrinking. But there’s a wrinkle in this perfect picture: Our instinctive tendency to categorize the world into “us” and “them” is difficult to overcome. It is in our nature to favor helping in-group members like friends, family, or fellow citizens, and to neglect or even punish out-group members. Even as some moral circles expand, others remain stubbornly fixed, or even contract: Just think of Democrats and Republicans, Sunnis and Shiites, Duke and North Carolina basketball fans. The endpoint of the liberal humanitarian project, which is universal empathy, would mean no boundary between in-group and out-group. In aiming for this goal, we must fight our instincts. That is possible, to a degree. Research confirms that people can strengthen their moral muscles and blur the divide between in-group and out-group. Practicing meditation, for example, can increase empathy, improving people’s ability to decode emotions from people’s facial expressions¹ and making them more likely to offer a chair² to someone with crutches. Simply increasing people’s beliefs in the malleability of empathy increases the empathy they express toward ideologically and racially dissimilar others.³ And when all else fails, people respond to financial gain. My co-authors and I have shown that introducing monetary incentives for accurate perspective-taking increased Democrats’ and Republicans’ ability to understand each other and to believe that political resolutions were possible.⁴

But these exercises can take us only so far. In fact, there is a terrible irony in the assumption that we can ever transcend our parochial tendencies entirely. Social scientists have found that in-group love and out-group hate originate from the same neurobiological basis, are mutually reinforcing, and co-evolved—because loyalty to the in-group provided a survival advantage by helping our ancestors to combat a threatening out-group. That means that, in principle, if we eliminate out-group hate completely, we may also undermine in-group love. Empathy is a zero-sum game.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 06:58 AM | Permalink | Comments

Tuesday, August 15, 2017

The First Morning

Yesterday and today were the 70th Independence days of Pakistan and India. This is another story of that time. Intizaar Hussain, translated from the Urdu by Basharat Peer, in Words Without Borders:

The train chugged on, indifferent to the ruined towns. Before we had crossed Saharanpur, the train stopped at the routine stops. The stationmaster would blow the whistle, the guard would wave the green flag, the train would slowly begin to move, and the passengers on the platform would take a few steps back. Then, something changed. The train would not make any more stops; it sped past every station on the way.

A little later, it suddenly stopped. Armed guards patrolled the platform, forbidding the people walking on the platform from coming near the train. Sikhs with scimitars hanging by their sides stared at us from a distance and kept on walking. Refugees from the other side of the border hung about the platform in groups. Their tired eyes would meet ours and then turn away. A train full of refugees from Pakistan stopped on a parallel track. My heart seemed to stop beating. My eyes met many terrorized, angry eyes. The train felt claustrophobic. Many others were sitting on the roof. How did they hold on to the speeding train? Maybe desperate flights for life teach you how. Our train does not move. I want to get away from the angry, burning eyes staring at me. The train does not move.

Somehow night fell—a very dark night. The lights on the train engine were switched off. It was running like a blind man, past the stations dotting our path. The passengers in my coach seemed to have turned into ghosts. Heartbeats competed with the sound of the train and anxiety invaded the mind. Then the train stopped again. Nobody spoke.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:18 PM | Permalink | Comments

Two Recumbent Male Figures Wrestling on a Sidewalk

A story about Eqbal Ahmed and partition by John Berger, in Indian Cultural Forum:

It began in 1947. Eqbal was thirteen years old. His voice had begun to break. Sometimes he spoke as gruffly as a man, at other times he spoke in a boy's falsetto. He couldn't control it. But he already had a man's decisiveness, he was already at risk like a man. I imagine the knowledge of that risk was in his eyes but I didn't know him then.

With independence, India was being partitioned. Twelve million people were on the roads, going in both directions, seeking safety. Eqbal's family had lived as Muslims for generations in India but now his elder brother decided to take the family to the newly created Pakistan.

The boy's mother refused to leave. Only mothers who are widows can become as immovable as she did. The rest of the family took the train for Lahore. In Delhi they learnt that the train would go no further: the fighting of the civil war was too dangerous. Everybody was lodged in a refugee camp. Eqbal's brother, who was a senior civil servant, telegraphed for a plane to come and rescue them. A whining man, begging for opium in the camp, caught Eqbal's attention. Misery importuning misery, he thought. Some youngsters pushed the man aside. Ay! Charsi! they mocked. Ay! Charsi! Opium-eater who lives in a cloud of smoke!

Finally the plane from Pakistan arrived. It was an ex-RAF Fokker. At the airport the two brothers were the last to embark. Every place was already taken.

You can fly in the cockpit with me, sir, the pilot shouted to his brother.

No, we're two, there's also Eqbal.

Then would you like me to tell somebody to get down, sir?

No, take Eqbal.
It was then that the thirteen year old revolted. He ran across the tarmac away from the plane.
Go, he shouted, go! I'm going to walk.

More here.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments

Czesław Miłosz's border-crossing genius

James Hopkin in The Guardian:

In Poland, many consider Miłosz's essays to be finer than his poetry, for he was a border-crosser, too, in terms of genres, always on the look out for the next form to carry his abundant ideas (his hybrid prose-poem-quotation collection, Unattainable Earth; the alphabet endeavour of Roadside Dog). Then there's his History of Polish Literature (which he updated in 1993 and which remains a seminal work in English) as well as his anthology, Postwar Polish Poets, in which he introduced a western readership to the work of Zbigniew Herbert, Tadeusz Rozewicz and Wisława Szymborska who went on to win the Nobel in 1993. Miłosz himself translated Walt Whitman, and several Chinese poets into Polish, and published a book on the art of translation.

Miłosz's novel The Issa Valley describes the beauty and cruelty of nature and nascent spirituality as conjured by recollections of childhood, while The Land of Ulro probes history, philosophy, politics and religion, to discover a language that can speak of exile or belonging, a sense of oneself against an ever-changing background.

Steadfastly "against a sentimental mythology and a national morality", the poet wonders, "If nature's law is murder, if the strong survive and the weak perish ... where is there room for God's goodness?" Despite believing that one's real moral duty is towards people, and confessing to "wandering on the edge of heresy", he could not give up on God because "I am unable to speak to clouds or rocks". 

More here.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:09 PM | Permalink | Comments

Partition Changed India’s Food Cultures Forever

Anoothi Vishal in The Wire:

At the far end of a crammed Daryaganj gulli, bustling with all manner of trade, is a heavy wrought iron gate. Push it ajar and you step into an overgrown garden defining its central courtyard. The Terrace is an old sprawling home that takes you back in time. It’s the last intact kayasth haveli in “Shahar” – “The City” – the once magnificent Shahjahanabad, the only city that really mattered for its residents.

Two years ago, on a peaceful winter afternoon, the sun streaming on to our armchairs in the garden, I met Mrs Rajesh Dayal here for the last time. She had lived here since the 1930s. I was interviewing her for my book on Kayasth cuisine and culture.

“I remember Booby,” she had said earnestly at one point in our rambling conversation. Booby, the cook from the Muslim quarters of Ballimaran, had been quite in demand back then. The Kayasths, great epicures and fond meat-eaters, called him home for family weddings, sangeets, Holi and Diwali gatherings. Booby would get to work, digging up the soft ground in a clearing by the Yamuna, lining the pit with hot charcoal, placing a big, fat degh of meat, spices and vegetables inside this pit and then covering it with earth. It was in this craftily assembled indigenous oven that he would let fabulous dishes like the shabdegh stew overnight – till the meat and turnips that went into the smoky curry were of the same texture, splitting at the touch of a spoon.

“I have never had that kind of shabdegh again. It’s a dish that disappeared,” Dayal’s voice had trembled. Dayal died before the book, Mrs LC’s Table, saw the light of the day. Along with her what passed away were memories of those elusive stews and treats and the men who had cooked these. As for Booby, like many others of his ilk, had been swallowed up by Partition, never to be seen again.

More here.

Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments

Siberian Ice Drummers Use Frozen Lake Baikal As A Musical Instrument

Video length: 4:26

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments

The Enduring, Gloriously Déclassé Style of Barbara Windsor

Laura Bannister at The Paris Review:

In 1969, the English actress Barbara (Babs) Windsor costarred in her fourth motion picture in the Carry On franchise, a succession of low-budget, campy comedies that dominated national cinemas for two decades. For Carry On Again Doctor, she assumed the role of a walking trope named Goldie Locks: a comely but rattlebrained blonde who’d fallen while modeling for a baby-food commercial, and thus required a checkup. In a now cult scene, a stern hospital matron peels back a blanket to reveal Windsor’s milky, bruised flesh, privates obscured only by heart-shaped nipple pasties and a matching glitter G-string. A male doctor gawps and splutters and spins around at the sight of her. The matron shoots him a censorious glance. Windsor, or Goldie Locks—all alabaster skin and towering, curly beehive—asks, “What’s wrong?” with Gorblimey cockney intonation. A clichéd comedy of errors ensues.

Since its inception in the late fifties, Carry On was an easy, if surprising, cash cow for its founders: deliberately slapstick, smutty and formulaic in plot, expert in recycling themes and motifs to engineer maximum audience delight. It internalized a then-lowbrow English attitude to sex; scripts were carnivalesque, replete with all the bawdy innuendo, double entendre, and wheezy wisecracks of a seaside postcard. (A writer for the Telegraph would later opine that Carry On adopted “innocent smut that plays Grandma’s footsteps with its subject, furtively creeping up on it, then freezing and corpsing when it comes face to face.”)

more here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Comments

tough broads

Elaine Showalter at the TLS:

When a female politician’s worst crime is to be unlikeable and uncompassionate, how much ration­ality and coldness is acceptable for women intel­lectuals and artists? Just how tough is tough enough? Deborah Nelson, a professor of English at the University of Chicago, con­siders the politics, psychology and philosophy of toughness in her study of six modern women: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus and Joan Didion. Nelson originally titled her book “Tough Broads”; it would be more idiomatic to call them “Tough Cookies”. But neither of these admiring monikers for the fast-talking dames in 1930s screwball comedy would suit the austere, aloof, serious, resolutely (if self-deludingly) unglamorous heroines of her book, and they would surely have been insulted to be linked with Katharine Hepburn, or even labelled as women at all.

These writers, intellectuals and artists insisted on the aesthetic, political and moral obligation to face the painful reality of the twentieth century head-on. Their toughness was a premeditated “lifelong project . . . worked out with a great deal of self-consciousness”. But they all faced anger and hostility for their insistence on confronting suffering and pain without emotion. Their tone of unemotional clarity on the most traumatic events of their time made them respected and feared; but crossing the fine line between detachment and heartlessness also made them seem “out of step with their times”. On some subjects – the Holocaust, the Eichmann trials, civil rights, Vietnam, 9/11 – their detached refusal of empathy and solidarity shocked even their close friends and allies.

more here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:24 AM | Permalink | Comments

A Childhood of Laughter and Forgetting

Jana Prikryl at n+1:

One day in Czechoslovakia, not long after I was born, during the gray decade that was the ’70s, my 6-year-old brother came home from school and shared what he’d learned: “Lenin was a kind person. He liked children.” Those words have acquired the force of a proverb in our family: we assure each other that Lenin liked children whenever one of us lets fly with a statement that seems dangerously optimistic. The following may fall into that category: Czechoslovakia before 1989, when the Communist regime fell, was not a bad place to be a child. For my parents, who spent a large part of their adulthoods in the country, it wasn’t all free health care and underground rock ‘n’ roll. As everyone knows by now, most people had to keep their opinions to themselves, do without traveling abroad, wait in line for bananas, accept overt and subtle limitations in their lives. As soon as kids started going to school, they too slipped under the arm of the state—witness my brother’s first-grade indoctrination. In general, though, a political system that thwarted the better instincts and ambitions of adults seems, perversely, to have been mostly congenial and comfortable for children.

I was 5 years old and my brother was 12 when my family fled the country. Instead of driving to the Dalmatian Coast with our camping gear in the trunk as we did for a few weeks every other summer, we made our way to Zagreb. My parents had heard that Czechs bound for Yugoslavia sometimes disappeared and resurfaced in more attractive countries like Italy, Germany, and France, and without quite knowing how, they hoped to do the same.

more here.

Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:20 AM | Permalink | Comments

During an Eclipse, Darkness Falls and Wonder Rises

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

 

Some people scream. Some people cry. Some do both.

The regular movements of the heavens are the oldest and deepest intimations of order in the universe. So it is hard, no matter how enlightened you consider yourself to be, not to feel a primordial lurch in your gut when the sun suddenly disappears from the sky. On Aug. 21, the Great American Eclipse, as it has been branded by astronomers and trip promoters, will begin off the coast of Oregon and barrel across the country for an hour and a half before exiting off the coast of Charleston, S.C. A total solar eclipse happens about twice a year somewhere on the globe, but this is the first time since 1918 that the continental United States has had an exclusive on the spectacle, one of the true rare treasures of nature. Here’s our chance to see the shy corona, a pale sheath of energy the color of moonlight, wisping its tendrils into interplanetary space, and to stand in what feels like the Eye of Sauron as the winds rise, distant darkness spreads over the hills, and an eerie coolness invades the day. About 100 million people live within a day’s drive of the path of totality, a band about 70 miles wide. The State of Oregon is treating the eclipse as a rehearsal for a future civil defense disaster, like an earthquake or a tsunami. If the forecasts are correct, many of us are likely to be viewing the eclipse from a traffic jam.

More here.

Posted by Azra Raza at 08:16 AM | Permalink | Comments

Tuesday Poem

In Broken Images
.

He is quick, thinking in clear images;
I am slow, thinking in broken images. 

He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images;
I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images. 

Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance;
Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance. 

Assuming their relevance, he assumes the fact;
Questioning their relevance, I question the fact. 

When the fact fails him, he questions his senses;
When the fact fails me, I approve my senses. 

He continues quick and dull in his clear images;
I continue slow and sharp in my broken images. 

He in a new confusion of his understanding;
I in a new understanding of my confusion.

.
by Robert Graves
from To Read a Poem
Harcourt Brace, 1982
.

Posted by Jim Culleny at 06:20 AM | Permalink | Comments

Monday, August 14, 2017

How Does the Imaginary Square Root of -1 Earn its Dinner?

by Jessica Collins

This is an attempt to recapture a feeling of queasiness I felt in my early teens, when I was already captivated by mathematics, but didn't yet know much about mathematics. It's an attempt to recapture that feeling of queasiness and then to resolve it in a way that it might have found resolution at the time, had I been asked the right questions.

Puzzle

I'm going to proceed somewhat indirectly and begin with a rather cute little geometrical problem. If you've got a few minutes to spare I encourage you to spend that time with pencil and paper trying to solve this puzzle before proceeding to read the rest of this piece, in which I'll describe three different ways of solving it. Here is the problem:

What is the sum of the three angles that the x-axis makes with the lines joining the origin to the points (1,1), (2,1), and (3,1) respectively?

The three angles are those shown in the following diagrams:

The first angle α is obviously 45°. If you know some trigonometry you'll recall that given a right triangle one of whose other angles is θ, the tangent of the angle θ, tan(θ) for short, is the ratio of the length of the side of the triangle opposite the angle θ to the length of the side adjacent to the angle. Thus we can see from the diagram above that β, the angle that the line joining the origin to the point (2,1) makes with the x-axis, is the angle whose tangent is 1/2, and that the angle γ is the angle whose tangent is 1/3.

This means you could use the arctan or inverse tan (tan^-1) function of a scientific calculator to find the answer to the question above. The question was asking in effect:

What is:   tan^-1(1) + tan^-1(1/2) + tan^-1(1/3) ?

If you do this on a calculator, you'll find that the three values are:

α = 45°
β = 26.565051177077989 . . . °
γ = 18.434948822922011 . . . °

and that these three angles sum exactly to 90°, which was not immediately obvious, at least for me, from looking at the diagram.

But, without recourse to the calculator, can you explain why this is so? Can you find a simple proof that α + β + γ = 90°? We may restate the problem:

Show that the three angles the x-axis make with the points (1,1), (1,2), and (1,3) respectively sum to a right angle.

This is the point at which you might pause for a few minutes with pencil and paper before proceeding to read what follows.

Continue reading "How Does the Imaginary Square Root of -1 Earn its Dinner?"

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 01:00 AM | Permalink | Comments

Deep Disagreements and the Rhetoric of Red Pills

 by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

1. Deep Disagreement

It is a common enough occurrence. In arguing with someone, as a controversial view is supported, even more controversial reasons are given, to be followed by more and more controversial commitments. A regular strategy in what might be called normal argument is that arguing parties trace their reasons to a shared ground of agreed-upon premises and rules of support, and then they test which of their sides is favored by these reasons. But disagreements one might call deep are those wherein shared reasons are not easily found. And consequently, it seems that under these conditions, argumentative exchange is doomed to failure. Robert Fogelin famously argued that "the possibility of a genuine argumentative exchange depends … on the fact that together we accept many things." Deep disagreements, consequently, "cannot be resolved through the use of argument, for they undercut the conditions essential to arguing."

Of late, our interest in deep disagreement has not been purely academic. With Donald J. Trump winning the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election and the rise of the alt-right movement in American politics, we found that we faced very real cases of what had seemed a sheer theoretical posit. In particular, the intellectual movement of the self-styled "neo-reactionary right" and the "Dark Enlightenment" seemed to be exemplary. We have been on record as what we've called Argumentative Optimists in the face of deep disagreement, so our theory now has a test case.

2. The Dark Enlightenment and the Cathedral

When we started reading around in the neo-reactionary corpus, we found ourselves in what felt like an upside-down world – all the dialectical elements of the argument were familiar, but none of the premises presented as truisms seemed remotely plausible. The journalist James Duesterberg captures his experience first reading the literature of the Dark Enlightenment:

Wading in, one finds oneself quickly immersed, and soon unmoored. All the values that have guided center-left, post-war consensus … are inverted. The moral landmarks by which we were accustomed to get are bearings aren't gone: they're on fire.

This Alice through the looking glass experience is something that those in the literature expect. But the writers in this genre have no plans on showing their readers the way back to the world they'd left behind. In fact, this break with the world of liberal norms is one of the core commitments of the neo-reactionary program. Importantly, we, all those who have not stepped out of it, have been brainwashed by a quasi-religious political superstructural institution ruling the Western world – what those in the neoreactionary movement call The Cathedral.

Continue reading "Deep Disagreements and the Rhetoric of Red Pills"

Posted by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse at 12:55 AM | Permalink | Comments

Monday Poem

Learn That First

I've wondered if dawn is like birth
and dusk like death
and if we're given these metaphors
to pique our curiosity
as if to say nothing in this world
is real. You are so naive,
you think this is a dream?

Yes, these are shadows.
Socrates said as much in the agora
trying to spread some light
but this is always difficult among men.
Men prefer to grasp at shades.

Child, this is not a dream,
that is misapprehension—
what Socrates suggests is that
life shelters in shadows
in this desert
............... learn that first
.

Jim Culleny
8/11/17.

Posted by Jim Culleny at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Comments

Alternative Facts and Realities: How the Brain Anticipates Perception

by Jalees Rehman

The Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov is best known for his studies on classical conditioning showing that dogs repeatedly presented with a combination of food and a sound would subsequently salivate upon hearing the sound alone, in anticipation of the meal. The combination of the two stimuli – food and sound – over time "conditioned" the dogs' brains to link these two stimuli. A variation of this experiment was performed on human subjects by Ellson and published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 1941. In Ellson's study, 40 subjects were "conditioned" over time by hearing a sound and seeing a light. Ellson later on exposed the subjects to only the light, yet 32 of 40 subjects claimed to have also heard the sound. Ellson concluded that such conditioning could lead to hallucinations – the hearing of sounds which, objectively speaking, are not present.

Recently, the Yale University psychiatrist Philip Corlett and his colleagues conducted a very interesting variation on this earlier study by asking whether some people are especially vulnerable to having auditory hallucinations induced by conditioning. The researchers recruited four groups of study subjects: 1) Fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who also regularly heard voices (an auditory hallucination), 2) fifteen patients with severe mental illnesses who did not hear voices, 3) fifteen individuals without any evidence of mental illnesses who also claimed to hear voices and 4) fourteen healthy individuals who did not hear voices. Group 3 consisted of voice-hearing psychics ("clairaudient psychics") who identified themselves as such via their own websites, at psychic meetings, or referrals from other psychics. Another important innovation in Corlett's study was the inclusion of brain imaging studies on all subjects, thus allowing the researchers to study functional brain responses when exposing them to auditory and visual stimuli. The researchers then repeatedly exposed the study subjects to a checkerboard image and 1 kHz tone while they were lying in the brain scanner. The subjects were asked to press one button to indicate that they heard the tone, and a second button if they did not. They were also instructed to press down the button longer, the more confident they were in having heard the tone.

After conditioning the subjects, the researchers then intermittently began to show them images of the checkerboard without playing the tone. As expected, many subjects indicated having heard the tone even when it had not been played. However, patients with severe mental illness and a history of hearing voices (group 1) as well as healthy psychics with a history of hearing voices (group 3) were significantly more likely to wrongly indicate that they had heard the non-existing tone. Members of these two groups were also more confident that their hallucination was actually real, since they pressed down the button for longer. Healthy subjects and patients with mental illness who did not have a history of hearing voices were comparatively more correct in identifying whether or not the tone was present. Importantly, when the researchers repeatedly showed the image without the tone, voice-hearing, mentally ill patients were unable to "update" their beliefs when compared to the other groups, whereas the psychics gradually recognized that the tone was non-existent.

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Posted by Jalees Rehman at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Comments

A Matter of Scale

by Brooks Riley

According to a biologist who studies the properties of dirt, a single teaspoon of the stuff contains more living organisms than there are people on earth. Not a particularly salient fact, but enough to launch the imagination toward other epic notions and distortions of scale: What if our whole world is just a tiny microcosm in someone else's teaspoon out there in the ether, no more than a microbiome in the belly of a beast so vast it swallows whole universes from a teaspoon into its black hole of a maw, itself a spoonful in a nest of universes, like Russian nesting dolls, their own spoons poised over a bottomless bowl of Beta borscht along a belt of milky ways that go on forever?

Infinity doesn't bear thinking. ‘Do I matter' always leads to ‘do we matter', and along this precarious train of thought the ‘we' keeps getting bigger, from our person to our species to our planet to our solar system to our universe and beyond. Where does it all end? That we'll never know doesn't diminish the question. If there's only one universe, what is outside of it? If it has boundaries, can it be a universe? These are secular thoughts leading to the contemplation of unimaginable insignificance, and are best left to astronomers or philosophers to figure out, if we survive that long.

The notion of scale has insinuated itself of late into my sleeping life as unpopulated dreams go in search of miniscule changes in a grid pattern, or the perfect word to correct an imperfect song, or a secret combination of colors out of a staggering number of variants. Sometimes I am scaled down to the size of Thumbelina, ready to crawl up the back of a peregrine falcon before takeoff. 

Awake, I feared I was slouching toward early autism, which is how I imagined the early autumn stage of my life, or as Gustav Mahler so sublimely echoed Friedrich Rückert's words: ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.' Or ‘I am lost to the world'.

But that's not entirely true. I'm more interested in the world than I've ever been, but from a safe distance. I may be ‘lost to the world' but it isn't lost to me.

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Posted by Brooks Riley at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Comments

Perceptions

John Wentz. Passages Series; No.25.

More here, here, and here.

Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments

Writing and Ashes

by Tamuira Reid

There is something about the light in Tuscany. That is what I will remember the most. Not the pasta and the prosciutto that made my pants split open, the drop-jaw architecture, the art dripping from the walls of the Uffizi. No. It's all about the light. It's golden and strong and covers everything in an otherworldly glow. Makes sense why the Renaissance painters were so inspired. And why my father saved pennies (literally) just to stand in front of the Ponte Vecchio as a young man. These photos don't really do it any justice, he'd tell me, spreading the proof between us.

My son and I just left Italy, where I was teaching for NYU Florence. Our campus was a collection of villas dotting acre after acre of olive trees. Ollie went to Italian Catholic school and learned words like "ciao" and "grazie" and some bad ones that he laugh-whispered to me at night before bed. I spent hours wondering what it was, exactly, that made gelato taste so unbelievably good. Life was rich and simple, even if we were dirty and complicated at heart.

We've now traded the cobbled, crooked streets and statues of naked men for the A train and car alarms. The Duomo for Times Square. Peace for chaos. And the thinking of writing to the doing of writing. Summer.    

Professors make fast work of the summer months. It's the time we set aside to build our masterpiece, commit ourselves to making that work, the one piece we've dreamt about our entire lives. The one that potentially defines who and what we are.

Back in my college days, I always imagined professors having these fabulously indulgent summers, shuttling off to some exotic tropical island, barefoot and sipping on margaritas, wearing ugly shorts on a golf course. Old, smart people getting laid. I never thought that they might actually, like, work.

I am a creative nonfiction writer turned screenwriter who is currently writing a novel. (I wrote a screenplay, based on a personal essay, and now I am rewriting it as fiction.)

Writing takes time. Lots of it. Insane amounts of it. Hours upon hours until you have no idea what day it is or what the weather is like or when the last time you ate something other than coffee was.  When I became a mother, my world shifted entirely. Days became longer, better, harder. Time wasn't something I took for granted anymore.

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Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Comments

A Sad Concurrence

by Jonathan Kujawa

As we know from the Law of Small Numbers, coincidences happen. Indeed, Ramsey's Theorem tells us they are downright unavoidable. Unfortunately, not all can be happy coincidences. In the first two weeks of July we lost three remarkable women of mathematics: Maryam Mirzakhani, Marina Ratner, and Marjorie Rice.

The most famous was Maryam Mirzakhani. She passed away on July 14th. This was reported in the New York Times, the Economist, and across the internet (including, of course, here at 3QD). Her widespread fame was in large part due to the fact that she was both the first woman and the first Iranianian to earn the Fields Medal. As we discussed at the time, Mirzakhani worked in geometry. More specifically, she worked with moduli spaces: these are geometric spaces where each individual point is itself a rich geometric object.

That is, imagine you are interested in studying geometric objects of a certain type (say, circles). Rather than study them one by one, you could study them as a collection. If you say two circles are "close" to each other when their radii are close in size, then you have a way of measuring distances in the space of circles and this lets you unleash 2000 years of geometric tools on the problem of circles. Of course, Mirzakhani studied moduli spaces of much more complicated gadgets than circles, but the principle remains the same.

Loyal 3QD readers saw this approach in action a few months ago. Thanks to the work of Canterella, Needham, Shonkweiler, and Stewart, we know it is possible to match the points on the sphere with triangles in a way where nearby points on the sphere match up to nearby triangles in Triangle Space. If we wanted to be fancy (say, at a geometers' cocktail party), we could have said that they showed that the moduli space of triangles can be identified with the sphere.

Their primary motivation was to give an answer to one of Lewis Carroll's bedtime problems [1]. But thinking geometrically also gives us entirely new insights. A big one is that with geometry we have the ability to talk about the shortest path between two points. But the shortest path depends on the ambient geometry. As we all know, the shortest distance between two points in the plane is given by a straight line. However, on a sphere, the shortest path is given by a "great circle".

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Posted by Jon Kujawa at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Comments