by Rafaël Newman

Not quite 25 years ago, on September 15, 2001, I took my six-year-old daughter to the opera. Her mother had arranged the outing, in part because it was clear how much Hella was beginning to enjoy musical theater—a pleasure I had learned from my own parents—and in part because, in the final weeks of her pregnancy with our second child, Caroline simply needed a few hours to herself.

The tickets to that evening’s performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Opernhaus Zürich had been purchased at some point during the summer of 2001, well before September 11. By the time Hella and I attended the production, four days after what would soon come to be known as 9/11, everything had changed; and Mozart’s 1782 opera, which mainly concerns two pairs of lovers escaping from danger but also stages a confrontation between the Christian and Muslim worlds, had taken on a new, more urgent aspect.

When, therefore, the Swiss actor Peter Arens, in the speaking role of Bassa Selim, a convert to Islam and an Ottoman despot, made his celebrated final-act speech extolling clemency, in Zurich on September 15, 2001, he spoke directly to the audience rather than to the onstage character he was meant to be addressing. [E]s wäre ein weit grösser Vergnügen eine erlittene Ungerechtigkeit durch Wohlthaten zu vergelten, als Laster mit Lastern tilgen, Arens said as Selim: “It is a far greater pleasure to repay injustices suffered by good deeds than to compensate evil by more evil”, ostensibly renouncing vengeance on the son of his enemy and allowing him to return to Spain with the woman they both love, but in fact making an unmistakable plea for moderation in the American military campaign against Afghanistan that was gearing up that very moment. To amplify the point, in both 1782 and 2001, the four lovers respond with a quartet: “Nothing is as ugly as vengeance.”

In the event, of course, Selim’s/Arens’s implicit plea, and others more overt, in the international press and on the street, went unheard in Washington. What is more, when the US President’s thirst for revenge was ultimately unslaked in Afghanistan, George Bush Jr. would go on, in 2003, to resume and extend his father’s earlier war on Iraq with a trumped-up mission to find and destroy non-existent WMDs there. There ensued a Second Gulf War that lasted for eight years, until 2011, when US troops were withdrawn from Iraq. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

Mira remembers her third birthday party as a scene of almost extravagant happiness. There was a cream-puff cake, tier upon tier of it, which in memory has acquired the architectural grandeur of a wedding cake. Helium balloons floated close to the ceiling, their ribbons dangling into the room. She remembers presents, noise, people fussing over her—the peculiar exhilaration of being three and understanding that, for one afternoon at least, the world had arranged itself around you.

Her mother remembers the same party.

Only she remembers a miserable child.

Mira’s father had been unable to attend. According to her mother, Mira spent much of the afternoon crying for him. The celebrated cake barely interested her. Neither did the balloons. What her mother remembers is trying to coax an inconsolable three-year-old into enjoying a party in which the absence of her father seemed to eclipse everything else.

Could one of these accounts simply be wrong? That strikes me as an overly simplistic question. Memory is not generally obedient to binaries such as right and wrong, particularly when what we are remembering is not merely an event but the way that event registered in a particular consciousness: what drew our attention, what mattered to us, what delighted or wounded us, and what barely registered at all.

Facts, of course, are another matter. Mira’s father was either at the party or he wasn’t. The party took place on a particular day and at a particular place; the cake had some ascertainable number of tiers. Where and when something happened, and often what happened, are not matters of personal interpretation. This becomes especially important when memory moves beyond private life into history, crime, politics or other consequential matters, where competing recollections cannot be allowed to replace truth.

But facts occupy surprisingly little of the territory we mean when we say, I remember. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

As a child of Southern California, I knew the importance of water conservation from a young age. During my high school years, the state was experiencing one of its regular extreme droughts and we were encouraged to take five-minute showers – turning off the water to lather and shampoo.

It all made perfect sense since in fourth grade we learned about the great aqueducts that moved runoff from the Sierra Nevada snowpack to Southern California – our literal lifelines. While it isn’t true that it never rains in Southern California – and when it does it can be destructive – Los Angeles gets an average of 14.7 inches of rain per year. Hardly enough to sustain its population.

California perennially struggles with water and it seems is always trying to catch up with its needs.

Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia – just one degree north of the equator – Singapore receives an average of 85 to 95 inches of rain per year with a surge to 117.52 in 2025. With 287.4 square miles to its name – slightly smaller than the City of Los Angeles’ 469 square miles and significantly smaller than the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area’s 4853.1 square miles – it doesn’t seem like water would be one of Singapore’s issues.

But it has been – for more than 65 years. In fact, much like California, water is one of Singapore’s greatest vulnerabilities and perennial issues.

Really – Singapore’s water issues break down into two intertwined problems: independence and volume.

Volume was its original problem. Even before independence in 1965, Singapore did not have enough water to provide for its citizens and agriculture without supplementation. In 1961 and 1962 while still under British dominion, the Malayan mainland agreed to supply Singapore from two water sources under long-term agreements – one which elapsed in 2011 and the other which remains in effect until 2061 giving Singapore 250 million gallons per day (mgd).

Only, at present, Singapore operates at a baseline of 440 mgd. And as we can see, the clock on that important 250 mgs is ticking.

This is why from independence, founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew said, “Every other policy has to bend at the knees for our water survival.” Read more »

Shaft of sunlight over the mountains west of Brixen, South Tyrol.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Charles Siegel

In one of my first columns for 3 Quarks Daily, Don’t Deport Protesters, or Defund Universities, in My Name, I lamented the Trump administration’s efforts to, in its own words, “combat antisemitism” and “protect Jewish students from harassment and violence in the United States.”  The administration purported to be vindicating these goals by deporting student protesters — and protesters who weren’t students, such as our client Leqaa Kordia — and by indiscriminately cutting grant funding to universities.  I thought that such pious intonations from Trump and his henchmen were hypocritical in the extreme, given the presence of many blatant antisemites in the administration and in Republican circles generally.  I also wondered what on earth the connection was between ostensible concerns about antisemitism on the one hand, and slashing grant funding for medical, scientific and technological research on the other.  Finally, I noted that many, many Jewish organizations have denounced the funding cuts, as have thousands of Jewish professors.

Three weeks ago, a federal judge in Boston ruled in favor of Harvard, in one of the suits brought by the government against it over these feigned concerns.  This lawsuit is just one front in the larger battle between the administration and Harvard.  So far, the university is standing up to Trump, and refusing to cave by settling.  And Yale has not settled either, although it is said to be considering a settlement.

I realize, of course, that with the largest endowment of any university in the world by far, Harvard is uniquely able to stand up to Trump’s bullying.  One hopes that Yale, whose own endowment is the second-largest, will continue to resist as well.  The likes of Brown and Columbia will live in shame forever for capitulating, although they recently signed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of Harvard.

The ruling on August 13^th by Judge Richard Stearns came in a case officially entitled United States of America v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.  In this particular case, the government brought an “enforcement action” under the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.  Yes, I know — it makes my head explode, too, when I read that Trump alleges that Harvard violated the Civil Rights Act.  Such a lawsuit might more properly be entitled Pot v. Kettle. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Michael Liss

My Jefferson is a giant, but a giant trammeled in a net, and obliged (he thought) to keep repairing and strengthening the coils of that net. —Garry Wills, “Negro President”

Late in his life, uncertain in his health, but sure in his pride, rummaging through the immense library of his memories, his soaring successes, and his every-day regrets, Thomas Jefferson had cause to define the words, his words, that Americans so justly celebrated.

The Declaration of Independence, he wrote in an 1825 letter to Henry Lee, was not original in the sense of creating “new principles, or new arguments, never before thought of,” but was instead “intended to be an expression of the [A]merican mind.”

Such was his grasp of that moment in 1776, such was the reach of his ambitions half a century later, that he could claim his words conveyed just that, in “terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent.”

Maybe he was right. Maybe the place the Declaration has for itself in American historical iconography is unassailable—it, too, commands assent. Lincoln thought so, both in his public words (“[f]our score and seven years ago”) and his private correspondence, as here, in an April 1859 letter to Henry L. Pierce and others:

All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.

Of course, politicians, and people, seek validation for themselves and their ideas in the unifying principles and heroes of the past. To say, “I’m with Tom” is to connect oneself to greatness. America, at its best, is a vision that is lit from within by great ideas. Do those ideas still retain their power when the vessel that holds them is a contradiction of the principles themselves? Read more »

by Angela Starita

The state of the world, it’s understood, has led to poor sleep habits and hours of doom scrolling. My own sleep is regularly ruined by my before-bed routine of doing puzzles and then watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts, sometimes for hours. But my nighttime media consumption is rarely news–no suspects running across rooftops or deep dives on Supreme Court decisions. Instead, I’ve constructed a pre-sleep universe of private nostalgia to stanch a stream of saliva that wakes me at three, prompted by a boring list of fears, personal and universal, questions about mistakes made and life’s purpose. (The mighty limbic systems of doom scrollers is beyond my imagination.)

The most effective, most comforting, of my pre-bed listening comes from an app called LibriVox, where volunteers read books “in the public domain,” that is, books more than 80 years out of copyright. The site is driven by the premise that books should be available and free to all, with the inflated tag line “acoustical liberation of books in the public domain.”

On the face of it, the available selection is predictable: lots of Dickens and Austen, dozens of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie mysteries. The choices are made by the readers who record themselves, then upload the recordings to the site. Each episode begins with a reader announcing their name and sometimes the title of the book and publisher. Occasionally, the books are read like radio plays with the readers introducing themselves at the start. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, for one, is read by a large group (friends? aspiring voice actors?) who each adopt a nom de lisant, among them Shrimpfish, Gary O., and, to underscore the olde timey nature of reading a book for a phone app, Mr. Beeswax Candle. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Darakht. Boston, September, 2026.

Digital photograph.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Jeroen Bouterse

The Brandmauer – the political ‘firewall’ against the German far-right party Alternative für Deutschland – is under duress. It has been clear for a while that the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6^th would make government formation there without the AfD either difficult, extremely difficult, or arithmetically impossible. As I submit this column, it looks like the second.

Politicians and commentators are frantically reflecting, not just on the processes driving the electoral successes of the far right and on the future of democracy, but also on the wall metaphor. Some get technical. Asked about the durability of the Brandmauer in an interview with Der Spiegel, Saxony’s prime-minister Michael Kretschmer started lecturing on how fire-resistance is measured. “F60, for example, means that the building component can remain structurally sound for 60 minutes in the case of fire.” The journalist felt compelled to interject: “where are you going with this?”

In a volume of essays on the Brandmauer published this summer, almost all contributions happily explore the image. Some of them even refer, somewhat boldly, to that other wall that is among Germany’s core political memories. The Berlin Wall is the symbol of a failing political system, scared that its people would abandon it. It is also famous for falling at the hands of those people. Journalist Stefan Aust draws the lesson most directly: “just like the ‘anti-fascist protection wall’ did not save the GDR from the democratic collapse of socialism, the Brandmauer will not save the country from [the AfD].”

That it is imagined as a wall has now come to imply that the days of the taboo against the AfD may well be numbered. At best, its effect is temporary. That was Kretschmer’s point, of course; firewalls slow the fire down, but something else is needed to stop the actual fire. Still, this growing consensus on the limits of the Brandmauer does not answer the question of whether German politics presently needs something else in addition to the firewall, or something else instead of the firewall. Let’s try to answer that question here. Read more »

by W. Alex Foxworthy

Recently, following an assignment that required AI use, a student asked me whether it was true that every question she asks a chatbot uses up a whole bottle of water. Like so much information today, she received this claim via a social media video. The video apparently cited a newspaper article which cited a real study. She had also heard people all around her, both in real life and online, talking about the huge amounts of water these systems use. Of course, she could get more information by searching online, asking a chatbot, asking friends and teachers or listening to the many podcasts discussing the issue. In other words, my student has no shortage of information, but what she doesn’t have is a solid way to judge its accuracy, how much confidence a given claim deserves, nor which sources can be trusted. Though many students are now “digital natives,” in the sense that they have grown up with smartphones and tablets, it has been my experience that they are not skilled in navigating the bewildering and fast growing world of information available to us all. 

At the same time, there seems to be a deepening distrust in institutions and authorities as well as widespread disagreement on the factual basis of some of the most important issues in the public discourse. More than ever, I hear from students who don’t see the value of a “well-rounded” education nor in spending time in courses that aren’t directly tied to their career paths. Artificial intelligence has made the question of what an education offers even more urgent, as we now have machines that deliver confident answers on almost any subject (some right and some wrong) and produce content far faster than people can check it. Taken together, these observations have forced me to think about what my role in this educational process is really for. Particularly when it comes to teaching non-science majors, I think what science has to offer are ways of thinking that can be applied across many domains. The framework key to it all is something we now describe with the shorthand “scientific method”: how human beings have learned to test claims about the world and preserve what survives rigorous testing. Of course, most science courses already cover the scientific method: ask a question, form a hypothesis, test it, analyze the results, and draw a conclusion. But the treatment is often superficial, students don’t arrive in my classroom with an intuitive understanding of what it really means, and I think we leave out much of what makes the process work. This essay is my attempt to lay out what the five steps leave out, using my student’s question as an illustrative example. Read more »

Architecture and Light

What would architecture be without light,
or light without architecture, man-made
or that which emerged over eons:
incredible trellises of trees,
their intricate frames of chiaroscuro
on light-slanted walks under
shifting limbs while leaves flash and flutter
through the architecture within skulls,
synapse nets of Rorschach shadows,
their night-borne lightning or, for that matter,
the hidden boney structure that holds it all erect
as it steps into stairwells enriched
by radiated thought and sun?

Jim Culleny, 2/21/22

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Robert Jensen

Many of the books that shaped my work as a professor, author, and activist came into my life during my first two years of graduate school (1988-90), the most exciting period of concentrated learning I’ve ever experienced. As I write in my new book, This I Don’t Believe: A Fulfilling Life without Meaning, I got to grad school and quickly realized that I was “an undereducated person getting a second chance to learn”:

I didn’t really start thinking—in the sense of a disciplined process of trying to understand how the physical and social worlds work—until I showed up for a Ph.D. program in mass communication at the University of Minnesota in 1988 when I was thirty years old. I had graduated from a perfectly respectable public high school and public college, and I had earned a professional MA at a perfectly respectable private university. I had spent a decade working at perfectly respectable newspapers, exposed to a wide range of public officials and ordinary people. In all those endeavors, I learned a lot about the world. But I had yet to think systematically about how the world works.

Here are some of the things I’ve learned and the books that were important to me at the beginning of that education.

What I learned about being male

Letters from a War Zone: Writings 1976-1987 by Andrea Dworkin (1988)

In graduate school I studied freedom of expression, and at the time one of the key debates was over the radical feminist critique of pornography. Like many men, I assumed that the critique had to be crazy, because radical feminists were crazy, because … why? Because I had been socialized to be afraid of feminists. Reading Andrea Dworkin and other radical feminists made me realize that their movement was not a threat to men but a gift, offering us a way to resist the traps set for men by institutionalized male dominance (that is, patriarchy). “I Want a Twenty-Four-Hour Truce During Which There Is No Rape” in this volume may be the most influential essay I have ever read. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

When I interviewed the author George Saunders years ago, he told me that his work was an attempt “to figure out a way that the spiritual would not be full of shit.” A tall order in an age of spiritual materialism—where evidence in favor of actually existing religious institutions is discouraging—but it is an interest I share. Saunders is a practicing Buddhist, while I am merely a perennialist magpie, but I am always on the lookout for ways of looking at the spiritual life that are both profound and articulable. (E.g. not full of shit.)

I have already written about such attempts by René Daumal and Walker Percy, both of whom followed reason to its edge, where it spills into something larger that it is a part of, but for which it cannot account. Michael Pollan also arrives at this limit in A World Appears, which leads him to a consideration of “the view from within,” the phenomenological view, to which I am partial.

This view, of course, is anathema to neuroscientists and eliminativist philosophers. We don’t know yet how positive science can account for consciousness—and have so far lost one bet to David Chalmers about it—but this is a trivial inconvenience, according to this view. We’ll figure it out eventually, like air flight and DNA. This is the commonsense view of scientific progress today.

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head.

So begins Douglas Harding’s delightful 1961 book On Having No Head, which provides one of the strongest and most accessible—if idiosyncratic—cases for the irreducibility of first-person experience ever written. It begins with this seemingly outrageous claim. “I found I had no head.”

Harding dates this discovery to a walk in the Himalayas when he was thirty-three years old, relating it with a British straightforwardness that even Bertrand Russell might respect. Read more »

by Carlota Figueroa

Have you ever heard of a particle’s spin before? If you have, I bet that the first time you were introduced to this concept you were told to imagine a ball that spins on its axis and to take this as an analogy for what a particle’s spin really is. Now, if you’ve taken more advanced courses in quantum physics you were probably told something similar, but with a little addition to the end: “A particle’s spin is like a ball that spins… except that it isn’t a ball and that it doesn’t spin.” Yeah, not very helpful, I know. Spin is one of those buzzwords that get thrown around whenever someone starts to speak about any (and I really mean any) topic to do with quantum physics, from quantum computers to quantum entanglement and teleportation, and for good reason too: most of the coolest concepts in this area have spin as one of their building blocks. Personally, I think it’s great that these topics are being popularised. But it is a disservice to everyone taking an interest to be told about how we can make information travel almost instantly or how new generation computers will reach unimaginable levels of efficiency without explaining to them exactly what it is that makes this possible. I hope that by the time you finish reading you have a slightly better idea of what spin is, and of everything it makes possible.

The reason why the ball analogy is so popular is that spin actually is an intrinsic angular momentum characteristic of a particle. Roughly speaking, when you speak about angular momentum, you are describing the rotation of an object, and it depends on several variables, including the origin, the velocity of rotation and the moment of inertia of that object (this is simply a value that tells you how difficult it is for you to change that object’s existing rotation). Therefore, when we talk about spin, it kind of makes sense to talk about a ball that turns on its axis. However, intrinsic means there is nothing physically rotating for us to watch: no way to read a particle’s spin off its motion. A ball, by contrast, visibly turns fast or slow, clockwise or counterclockwise, and you can make it rotate however your heart desires. Its angular momentum can therefore take any value: it is continuous. Spin is the complete opposite: encoded within the particle, and only ever taking specific values.

This is where the million-dollar question comes up: if there is nothing actually rotating for us to look at, how do we know spin exists? Thanks to our friends Otto Stern and Walther Gerlach, in 1922 we finally got our answer. Their experiment used silver atoms, which are electrically neutral (a charged particle would get deflected so violently by a magnetic field that we would be incapable of appreciating this subtle quantum effect), but which still behave like tiny magnets: thanks to its single outermost electron, each silver atom is effectively a miniature compass needle flying through space.

Now, a compass needle in a uniform magnetic field (meaning, one with the same strength everywhere) only twists to align itself (it doesn’t actually go anywhere) so Stern and Gerlach deliberately built an inhomogeneous field (meaning, stronger in some places than others). In a field like this, a tiny magnet gets pulled upwards or downwards, and how hard it gets pulled depends on the direction its needle is pointing. Here is where classical physics places its bet: the atoms come flying out of a hot oven, so their needles should be pointing in every direction at random, some straight up, some straight down, most somewhere in between. Therefore, the plate at the end of the apparatus should show a continuous smear, a vertical stripe painted by every possible amount of deflection. This should make sense intuitively: if a needle is free to point any way it likes, the force on it can take any value between the two extremes. You can probably infer from the fact that I’m writing this article that this wasn’t what happened… at all. What Gerlach found on the glass plate was that the atoms had split into two distinct lines and nothing in between: half deflected upwards, half downwards, as if every compass needle in the beam had been forced to choose between exactly two settings. Read more »