by Carol A Westbrook

Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones,…so lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by —Howard Nemerov, The Makers

In this poem, Howard Nemerov, Poet Laureate from 1988-1990, reminds us that we have no idea when poetry—that is speech—began. The origin of speech is lost in the depths of prehistory, but archaeologists are working hard to get a better understanding of how speech began, because it is one of the few things that makes us unique as human beings.

Social animals communicate in order to coordinate activities, share resources, and improve their chance of survival. There are many examples of animals communicatio: bees, for example, do an elaborate dance to tell others where they found food; whales and elephants also exchange information and coordinate activities. But humans are the only animals that communicate by speech.

At one time it was thought that closely related animals like the great apes, chimps and bonobos would be capable of speech if only they were raised like human babies. There were several attempts to do this by raising young chimps in human families and monitoring their acquisition of language. But while these chimps learned to understand some human speech, they fell far behind their human brothers and sisters in vocalizing more than a word or two. They never learned to speak properly more than a few words, and it soon became apparent that these apes must have been lacking certain anatomic features that were present only in humans.

Scientists have a fairly comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the human species, supported by the fossil record and DNA studies.

As seen on the picture on the right, our likely earliest ancestor is called Australopithecus, and is thought to have existed about 3.4 million years ago (mya).. The term Hominid (Family Hominidae) includes all great apes including humans (orangutans, gorillas, chimps, bonobos, and us) while hominim (Tribe Hominim) is a narrow group within hominids, referring specifically to modern humans, our extinct ancestors, and all species more closely related to us than the chimpanzees, after our evolutionary split from chimpanzees.  After Australopithecus came homo habilis, the maker, who made and used stone tools. Next came homo erectus, who used fire; then came Neanderthal and Homo sapiens, two species who evolved from a common ancestor. At what point did speech arise? Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

On a stargazing trip between September 19 and September 23 this year, I spied a supernova.

Well, not quite. I took plenty of photographs of a spectacular night sky through the four nights I spent out in the open. Then I came home and looked through them, still filled with wonder at what I had captured. Then I read some astronomy news. Then I returned to my photographs and looked through again, this time in some frantic urgency.

Then I had to (figuratively) sit down. For there it was. The supernova. In my photograph.

That is: On September 23, there was news that an amateur astronomer in Australia, John Seach, had discovered a supernova in Sagittarius two days earlier. In fact, and astonishingly, he had discovered two supernovae on successive days. The brighter of the two was only visible in the Southern hemisphere. But the other one was in the constellation of Sagittarius. Because I had pointed my camera at the Milky Way so often through my trip, Sagittarius was in several of my photographs.

I pored over all of them. I had several images from before September 21, and several more from after. All I needed to do was find a dot in a post-September 21 photograph that wasn’t there in a pre-September 21 photograph. You might wonder how, in images with thousands of dots – that’s how spectacular the night sky was – I could even think of finding a specific one. But the report from Australia had an image locating the supernova just “below” Sagittarius. So I knew pretty much exactly where in my photographs to look for it.

And to my amazed delight, I actually did find such a dot, precisely where I expected it. There on September 22. Not there on September 20. The supernova, on my laptop. Read more »

by David J. Lobina

‘…a los gritos de «¡Viva España!» «¡Viva La Legión!» muere a nuestros pies lo más florido de nuestra compañías…’ —Franco, Diario de una Bandera [i]

In these times in which the term ‘fascism’ is forever abused, especially in the English-speaking world, and more specifically in the US, where large swathes of the liberal intelligentsia have convinced themselves that they are living through actual fascism,[ii] it is perhaps inevitable for the hispanist historian Paul Preston to be asked, on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of Francisco Franco’s death, why he is not so keen to call Franco a fascist (and, by extension, Francoist Spain a fascist state). And a historian’s answer he provides (not my own translation, because I am lazy, though I have edited it; my emphasis):

The use of the word “fascist” is a problem for me. If you ask me what a fascist is, I would say that the clearest example is Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista. Everything else is different. The problem with the word is that it is used as an insult. Today we say that Trump is a fascist. But of course, I am a university professor, and when I was at Queen Mary, University of London, I taught a course on the nature of fascism where I always asked to what extent Nazism was a case of fascism, because the problem is that it is something much worse. And Francoism, in many ways, was also worse.

Furthermore, [Italian] fascism had a rhetoric of doing away with everything old, something that Franco did not have, as he supported large landowners and the aristocracy. The part about the violence, which many associate with fascism, comes in Franco’s case from being a colonialist military man, an Africanist. Without Africa, I don’t understand myself, he said. Just like the Belgian or British military of the time. That’s why I’m uncomfortable using the word fascist with Franco.

This is par the course for a historian, as I have stressed many times before at 3QD (see, for instance, this piece) – most historians of Fascism, Nazism or Francoism have always kept them quite apart conceptually, despite some prima facie clear commonalities, which seem to me to be overemphasised in general anyway.[iii] But no more of this argumentative line now.

More to the point of this series, and as the Preston’s quote alludes to, it is Franco’s experiences in North Africa that explain a great deal of both his own outlook and that of the milieu he surrounded himself with – and this is a better foundation to understand Francoism than any analogies to Italian Fascism, let alone Nazism. Read more »

by Mike Bendzela

In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville’s effusive review of the Massachusetts writer’s collection of short tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, Melville utters, under a cloak of anonymity (“a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”) one the most homo-erotic bits of praise imaginable for another male writer: “[He] shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul”! Reclining in his Vermont “hay-mow” with Hawthorne’s volume, the smitten Virginian notes “how magically stole over me this Mossy Man!” Indeed! Melville knew of what he spoke — of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories, that is, many of which have become classics, such as “The Birth-Mark” and “Young Goodman Brown.”

I mention all this not just because it’s awesome but because I want to pilfer Melville’s torrid statement to say this of Southern old time music:

“It shoots its strong Appalachian roots into the chilly soil of my Northern soul”!

I use Clifftop here as an avatar for this last essay excursion into how the culture of the American South has had a life-changing effect on me: Its myriad old time tunes have possessed me for about twenty-five years now. Clifftop, West Virginia is the location of Camp Washington-Carver, site of a yearly festival of old time fiddle and banjo music, the Appalachian String Band Music Festival. This festival is rustic, acoustic, genuine, low-tech, and — happily — takes place on top of an actual doggone 2500-foot hilltop, surrounded by dense deciduous forest. I’ve been to this mecca of old time only twice, the two trips twenty-two years apart, for a total of about seventy hours of non-stop jamming; but it’s effect on me has been profound, sort of like Saul of Tarsus seeing the Risen Christ, or something like that. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Before the violence in the movie Bugonia moves center screen—and the narrative takes a not completely unexpected left turn—it’s made clear Teddy’s paranoia and consuming conspiracism and violent nature all have roots in childhood trauma. Things like child molestation and the hospitalization of his drug addled mother.

Oh gawd, you think, another movie explaining away awful behavior with a hellish upbringing. Seen it a million times, it’s boring already.

Boring in a movie, maybe, but that’s real life. Except it’s not only trauma that explains rotten behavior. Everything up to this moment in time explains everything about you, everything you’ve done, you’re about to do, and ever will do. This according to Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist and author of Determined. You have no free will, your actions are determined by your genes, your environment, and your experiences. You have control over none of them.

His book, a couple years old now, has been well reviewed and discussed right here on 3 Quarks Daily, and there’s no need to do so again. The book feels like a mess at times, but an enjoyable one. And the choices—yes choices—Sapolsky made while writing the book are fascinating, the details of the science both enlightening and staggering, his purpose for writing it never more vital. And the implications are a trip. There’s no reason to carry on with this, but I have no choice but to go on, no more choice than I had to stop reading Determined, no more choice than Sapolsky had writing it.

Did he write it? Read more »

Car in a parking lot with frost on the ground.

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by TJ Price

I came to Andrés Barba as I come to many authors—via recommendation. A very good friend was the first to mention Barba’s work—specifically, Such Small Hands—during the course of a fun back-and-forth of “Have You Read?” My friend proposed Such Small Hands at first assuming I was familiar, but when I admitted ignorance, she was surprised, and exhorted me most adamantly that I would love it; that it was one of her very favorites. It is hard to turn down a recommendation like this, especially when my friend’s taste in fiction is as varied as it is impeccable.

Such Small Hands, for quite awhile, however, was just a slim, neatly labeled spine tucked between others on the shelf—those of much more imposing measurement. The book was quite tidily printed—had a handsome cover and a very aesthetically pleasing presentation—and the title itself instantly evoked for me the closing line of one of the more famous E. E. Cummings poems: not even the rain / has such small hands. 

Thankfully, my friend is not one of those people who will take offense to delay—a blessing in any relationship for which mutual taste in reading is foundational. Months passed. Maybe a year. But in a fit of pique one night, having endured a drought of uninspiring genre fare, I picked out the book and opened it. In a matter of an hour, I’d read the book, closed it, turned out the light, and went to sleep, as I so often do after reading.

I have not had such howling terrors populate my dreams as I did that evening. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Scott Samuelson

When I turned fifty, I went through the usual crisis of facing that my life was—so to speak—more than half drunk. After moping a while, one of the more productive things I started to do was to write letters to people living and dead, people known to me and unknown, sometimes people who simply caught my eye on the street, sometimes even animals or plants. Except in rare cases, I haven’t sent the letters or shown them to anyone.

Writing personal letters without any designs has been psychologically helpful. After venting any rage or confusion, I’ve found that what I have to say generally boils down to two things: I love you and I’m sorry. In the face of my mortality, it’s been good to be reminded of the strength of those two sentences and the connections built on their foundation. There’s something more than proper or quaint in addressing someone at the start of a letter as “Dear.”

Because our current president occupies more of my mental space than I’d prefer, he’s one of the people I’ve written a letter to. Dear Donald Trump. Then I ticked off a laundry list of grievances, going all the way back to the 80s.

When it finally dawned on me that I was addressing him as a figure rather than as a person, I began to wonder if I could talk to him human to human. Here’s a snippet of what I went on to write:

I’m having real troubles believing that you think of similar things as I do when you think about what makes life worth living. Am I wrong? For instance, that cry inside John Coltrane’s tone and Dolly Parton’s voice—do any songs at all break your heart with their beauty? Or what about friendship? When I recently visited a dear old friend of mine who lives in Brussels, my whole being flooded with joy when I saw his face at the airport. Do you have any such friends? What about a first love, a sweet pure love before puberty, before you even longed to kiss her (much less grab her by the pussy)—do you still dream of her? When you see, say, the first little daffodil after what has felt like three straight months of February, do you feel glad to be alive?

I continued like that in search of how we might connect over a fundamental good, away from the political shitshow that he’s in part responsible for. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In the natural world, predation may mark the end of life, but it doesn’t signal the end of ecological interactions. The hunt, with all its challenges and shifting interactions, is not an end in itself, it only creates the opportunity to feed. O    nce the kill is made, two main strategies emerge: feeding quickly and leaving, or holding on to the remains for a few days to draw multiple meals from them. The carcass, meanwhile, becomes a contested prize, attracting stronger competitors seeking a free meal, blurring the line between hunter and scavenger. Solitary cheetahs, for instance, lose nearly half their kills to lions and hyenas. After this struggle, as time and heat accelerate decomposition, the remaining flesh soon turns inedible to most animals. From that inedibility emerges an opportunity for species able to thrive on what others must abandon. Scavenging, in this sense, occupies a shifting niche, rich in energy but scarce and unpredictable, a prize that few species can afford to rely on.

Among vertebrates, vultures stand alone as obligate scavengers, living almost entirely on the flesh of the dead. This diet exposes them to hazards that most animals evolved to avoid through evolutionary adaptations: pathogens, toxins, and chemical byproducts from decaying tissue. Humans, too, evolved pathogen avoidance, a behavioral response that manifests as disgust toward bodily fluids, rotting meat, or anything in contact with them. By association with the unclean, vultures are generally portrayed as vicious and malevolent, or simply ignored, despite their endangered state:  11 of the 16 species of African and Eurasian vultures are classified as Critically Endangered or Endangered, according to the IUCN Red List. Observing vultures challenges both our innate disgust response and our understanding of how scavengers adapt to extreme diets.

When we think of vultures, we imagine a single bird, when in fact they encompass a surprising diversity. There are two distinct vulture lineages that diverged 69 million years ago: New World vultures in the Americas and Old-World vultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Old-World vultures tend to eat larger carcasses, including large ungulates such as hippopotami, horses, and buffalo. New World vultures, in contrast, feed on smaller prey, such as monkeys, rodents, and birds. Read more »

Sughra Raza. First Snow. Dec 14, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Bill Murray

One Monday in 1883 Southeast Asia woke to “the firing of heavy guns” heard from Batavia to Alice Springs to Singapore, and maybe as far as Mauritius, near Africa.

“So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered,” one ship’s captain wrote. “I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.”

Barometers traced a pressure wave that circled the earth. Not for days or weeks did people understand the cause: that the Krakatoa volcano had erupted from the sea. Now in our own time, political shock waves have been sent out. Western democracies must interpret their impact urgently.

During the lifetimes of everyone born this year, the world will surely become a harder place to live. The main causes are two: ever faltering human politics, and even longer-term human climate tampering.

The climate part grows so gradually that it’s hard to rouse people to the ramparts. The politics part comes from a new cycle of populist nationalism. We saw how that worked out in Europe last century. It’s hard to believe we’re already at it again, but here we are.

It’s tragedy but truth that the climate part only goads the politics part. Climate disruption leads to refugee flows, and they reinforce xenophobia.

Which sets up the mid-2020s as a 1968 or a 1989, the end of a time of complacent stability, of relative governability, and the beginning of churning disruption. The mid-2020s are a tinderbox, and Donald Trump was elected by people who enjoy playing with matches.

If Krakatoa was a natural catastrophe, Trump’s presidency is a political one, the trigger of America’s current fit of government-by-destruction. An accelerant, releasing long-gathering American political decay and imperial overreach. Read more »

Until the Night Drops

Fog lifting off of the river
Frogs in a chorus of croaks
Moon lit up —just a sliver
A fire that the unknown has stoked

Chuck Berry singing Johnny be Good
his guitar lighting fires in our heads
greenhorns working out would-could-should
fresh ones a sunbeam had fed

Look at how she climbs
Look at how she shines
Look at how when she shows up
She makes the dark stop

Look at how she blooms
Look at her at noon
She makes the heart pump
She makes the buds pop

Men standing under a lamppost
waiting there for Godot
—someone who may just be a ghost
for all a mere mortal may know

—but lying here in the morning
light seeping over the hill
Sun-God riding her big bright horse
early when the chatter is nil

Look at how she rides
Look at how she glides
Look at how she rises
over the treetops

Look at how she burns
Look at how she turns
overhead all day
until the night drops
—until the night drops

by Jim Culleny
March 1, 2011
Song rendition link:
Stream Song: Until the Night Drops-1st Take by Jim Culleny | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

(Songs that immediately follow Jim’s recording
are not associated with it)

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by Malcolm Murray

As I discussed AI with my cabdriver on a recent trip to Vienna, I was reminded of the fact that the German word for AI is Künstliche Intelligenz. This shares an etymological root with the word Kunst, German for Art. This made me realize that of course we have that in English too, the “Art” is right there in Artificial Intelligence, we have just overlooked it.

The words have diverged over time, from their common Proto-Germanic root, but I think their commonality is an interesting perspective to consider. Given the breadth of likely impact of AI on society, we need to analyze it from many different lenses and perspectives. So apply the “art lens” and being more cognizant of the “Art” in Artificial Intelligence could be helpful for making sense of some of the dissonant patterns AI presents us with.

First, we have the strange and somewhat discombobulating fact that AI is, as Ethan Mollick famously pointed out, neither software nor people. It is something else, a third category, with elements of both. We are used to people, and Kahneman and others have taught us how the ways in which they are fallible and make mistakes. They are flexible, but have many biases. We are used to software and we know its strengths and weaknesses. It delivers predictable performance, but with a limited range. What we have not yet encountered is fallible software. Like Ethan says, this is a new category which will take time to get used to. This partly explains enterprise adoption which is still slow, since that third category does not have a natural home in an organization. Processes will have to be changed drastically to allow this third category to fully come to its right. Seeing AI as more as of an art than a science helps put this in the right perspective. Read more »

by Derek Neal

If one on the goals of art is to wake us up, to remind us what it is to be alive, one of the main ways of doing this is by bringing us as close to death as possible. This is why suicide is such a fruitful and, paradoxically, invigorating artistic subject. For the suicidal character approaching death, sensations are heightened, and life becomes fecund and tactile. One scene that captures this is in Francois Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000), just before Charlotte Rampling’s husband (Bruno Cremer) disappears into the ocean while she naps on the beach. The film never explains the husband’s disappearance—never confirms that it’s suicide—but the evening prior, the camera follows Cremer as he gathers firewood in the forest surrounding their vacation home.

He picks up a few sticks, then pauses at a tree and feels its bark, runs his hand down its trunk, as if he wants to feel the rough surface one more time before dying. The camera follows him as he passes behind another tree, then something unexpected happens: the shot stops on the tree while Cremer passes out of view, lingering in sharp focus on the nooks and crannies of the tree bark, showing the viewer just how wondrous a tree is, if only we could stop to see it. This is also a great example of Deleuze’s concept of “time-image,” when a film emphasizes time or duration rather than the movement of characters and plot. We then return to Cremer, who has crouched down and turned over a rotting log. Hundreds of ants scurry around—so much life, right there!—in juxtaposition to Cremer, alone in the forest.

This contrast of the isolated individual and the group is a recurring theme in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) as well. Paul Schrader famously imagined a man in a yellow cab as a symbol of loneliness and alienation, but Kiarostami took this idea even further—what if an entire movie was just a man in a car, driving around? That’s Taste of Cherry. The film is a series of vignettes as the main character (Homayoun Ershadi) motors around the outskirts of Tehran picking up one passenger after another, not as a taxi driver, but in search of a person he can convince to do a special job. Read more »