by Cannon Schmitt, guest columnist

“Everyone in my program is queer, neurodivergent, or both.” A soft ding interrupted the conversation, the elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out into a hallway full of people wearing name tags and carrying identical tote bags. I can’t remember anything about “Texts Under Pressure,” the panel we were on our way to see. But the overheard remark from one English lit doctoral student to another stuck because it reminded me of vampires, and of the value of the humanities

Vampires first. They are misfits. In this and nearly every other way—the crosses and the garlic, the stake through the heart, the homoeroticism barely concealed beneath the overblown heteroeroticism—Bram Stoker’s Dracula set the pattern.

Whatever else may be said about Count Dracula, the main thing is that he doesn’t belong. Why should the Ur-vampire be an Eastern European in London, speaking nearly fluent but accented English, or an aristocrat negotiating a middle-class world? Why should vampiric immortality register, not as the triumphant conquest of death, but as a curse that forces you to live on until you find yourself stranded somewhen unrecognizable, alone of your kind? Then there’s the blood. As vegans and the gluten-free can testify, special dietary requirements turn you into a curiosity, the person who gets a sad little labelled side plate at gatherings, a monumental bother even if politeness demands pretending otherwise.

Most fiction tells the story of an outsider—that’s what makes the novel the genre of modernity. But Dracula stands out by giving us a displaced, maladjusted title character with whom it’s impossible to empathize. Think Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, or Jane Eyre but with Anna, Emma, or Jane spending most of her time offstage, her inner world out of reach, her motivations opaque. Stoker pieces his plot together from diary entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, even excerpts from a ship’s log. Everyone involved in hunting down the vampire, regardless of how minor or peripheral, has their say. But the voice of the vampire himself is almost absent. Read more »

Rocky cliff with a dusting of snow (and more snow falling) in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Part of the winter Olympics will be in South Tyrol, starting next week, so this is good.

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by Rafaël Newman

One hundred and sixty years ago this month, in a national referendum held on January 14, 1866, Jews were given the official right to reside throughout Switzerland. Jewish people, whether of foreign provenance or Swiss-born and already living on Swiss territory, had been explicitly forbidden to establish residency in Switzerland in its constitution of 1848, the year modern Switzerland was founded. Since the Middle Ages, when they were re-admitted following the pogroms and expulsions of the 14th century, such permanent domicile as was permitted to Jews among the Swiss had been confined to the two villages of Endingen and Lengnau, in the canton of Argovia. It was only under economic pressure from its main trading partners, the US and France, which threatened the young state with punitive tariffs, that Switzerland—in the form of contemporary Swiss suffrage: in other words, exclusively Christian men—agreed to make the change. Even so, rates of approval in 1866 were drastically unequal across the country, with 93.9% of voters in the populous canton of Zurich favoring Jewish residency, and the tiny, remote half-canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden, which would continue to deny women, whether Christian or otherwise, the right to vote until the late 20th century, rejecting the measure by 98%.

Seventy-five years later, with World War encroaching on its frontiers, the Swiss establishment saw this enforced tolerance tested anew, as Jews fled the Third Reich for asylum within Switzerland’s neutral borders. Although they accepted some of these refugees, Swiss officials notoriously sent many back, their passports marked with a “J”, and placed restrictions on the professional and political activities of those they did admit (such as the poet and philosopher Margarete Susman, on whom see here and here), both to protect “native” Swiss from competition, and to avoid provoking the Nazi authorities, with whom clandestine relations were being maintained.

Nevertheless, in January 1941, a group of Jewish residents in Zurich, several foreign-born, was able to join the musician Marko Rothmüller in founding Omanut, an association for the promotion of Jewish art. The Swiss organization was created in memory of the original Omanut, which Rothmüller, a Yugoslav immigrant, had founded in 1935 in Zagreb, but which had since vanished under the Nazi occupation of Croatia. Read more »

by Charles Siegel

Sun went down in honey
And the moon came up in wine
You know the stars were spinning dizzy
Lord the band kept us so busy
We forgot about the time

That is a verse from “The Music Never Stopped,” a song written by Bob Weir and John Barlow, and recorded on the Grateful Dead’s 1975 album “Blues for Allah.” Weir, the rhythm guitarist and one of the two principal composers for the band, died earlier this month at 78. His obituary appeared in the New York Times and everywhere else. I can add nothing to all the tributes and encomia, or the descriptions of his life and music. But one aspect of his career that seems to have gotten little attention is fascinating to me: he may very well have played before more people than any other musician ever.

I do not remotely qualify as a Deadhead. I saw the Grateful Dead seven times, albeit in seven different cities. I’ve seen Dead and Company, the most recent successor band, a few times, including last year at the Sphere in Las Vegas.

But I’ve been listening to their music for most of my life. I had some of their albums, though by no means all of them, and I had a few other albums on which one or more of the members played. I wore out “Old and In the Way,” for example, a great collaboration between Jerry Garcia and some bluegrass masters, during college. In law school I wore out the live album “Dead Set.” So while there are legions of people, some of whom are good friends, who saw the band many more times, I have spent a fair amount of time listening to and thinking about them. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by William Benzon

This article has three main sections. Immediately following the image (created by ChatGPT) is an article by me, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5: The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself. Claude came up with that title. After that there’s a much shorter section in which I explain how the three of us created that article. I conclude by I taking the question of how to properly credit such writing. That issue is one aspect of the institutionalization discussed in what I will call the “included article.”

The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself

William Benzon, assisted by ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5

In the 1980s, when the linguist Daniel Everett went to live with the Pirahã people of the Amazon, he had a mission: to translate the Bible into their language and convert them to Christianity. What he discovered, however, was something he hadn’t anticipated. The Pirahã didn’t exactly reject his religious message. They just couldn’t take him seriously.

The problem, as Everett eventually came to understand, was grammatical. Pirahã requires speakers to mark the source of their knowledge. When you make a claim about something, you have to indicate whether you witnessed it directly, heard it from someone else, or learned it in a dream. This isn’t an optional rhetorical flourish. It’s as obligatory as verb tense in English. Everett had not seen Jesus himself. He knew no one who had. And he wasn’t reporting a dream. By the grammatical standards of Pirahã discourse, he had no business speaking at all.

This grammatical feature—what linguists call evidentiality—turns out to be far more than a curiosity about an Amazonian language. It opens a window onto something fundamental about how human societies organize knowledge. And, as we’ll see, it ultimately reveals why the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT represents not just a technological achievement but a conceptual rupture that forces us to rethink what language itself is. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

I have put off reading G.H. Hardy’s Mathematician’s Apology (1940) to the end for too long. Now that I have, I can say with conviction that if you ever find yourself needing to justify why people should learn at least some mathematics, then this is the text to avoid, and Hardy provides the arguments you should stay away from furthest. And yet, it grew on me as an honest presentation of Hardy’s perspective on why anything is worth doing.

Hardy doubted that composing his Apology was one of those things. In the first paragraph, he apologizes for it: writing about mathematics is the business of second-rate minds, unable to do innovative math themselves. He assures us that he is only embarking on it because past sixty, he is now too old to do the real thing. This sets the tone for an essay full of quick and haughty judgments. Compliments paid with authority to the greats, confident generalizations based on personal or historical anecdote, and a great deal of dismissive hand-waving towards people or things beneath Hardy’s attention. “Newton made a quite competent Master of the Mint”, Hardy knows; and on we go, to the next item of an enumeration illustrating that mathematicians past their prime rarely excel in anything else. In a footnote, he is generous enough to add: “Pascal seems the best.”

The Apology still constitutes an interesting argument, though a structural weakness lies in the stress Hardy puts on what Ian Hacking would call ‘elevator words’: terms such as real, beautiful, or serious do most of the work separating mathematics from everything else, and the worthwhile kind of mathematics from the rest. Throughout his essay, we can see Hardy alternating between throwing those terms around as if their meaning is self-evident, and feeling pressed to prop them up with some kind of clarification. Between chess problems and certain mathematical theorems, for example, there is “an unmistakable difference of class. [The theorems] are much more serious, and also much more beautiful; can we define, a little more closely, where their superiority lies?” Read more »

Sughra Raza. Blood.  August 2024.

Digital Photograph.

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Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was very hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. John Ambrosio
2. Anton Cebalo
3. Jim Hanas
4. Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
5. David Hoyt
6. Robert Jensen
7. River Lerner
8. Herbert Lui

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “3QD Magazine” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers on or before the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new writers!

Best wishes,

Abbas

by Michael Liss

A picture may be worth 1000 words, but this picture, the centerpiece of Christine Roussel’s engaging Lunch on a Beam: The Making of an American Photograph, shows a beam that sits atop 60,000 tons of structural steel, hoisted, positioned, and riveted into place in by as many as 400 ironworkers at a time in 102 working days in 1932.

That’s not an optical illusion you see, unless you think more than 800 feet is just a hop, skip, and jump. It’s a long way down from the top of what popular culture now calls 30 Rock—the building that was first named the RCA Building, then the GE building, and finally (perhaps finally) the somewhat less majestic “Comcast Building.” For simplicity’s sake, let’s call it 30 Rock, not just because that’s what everyone else does, but also because its original values derived from John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s vision for a retail and cultural center in the middle of Manhattan.

Roussel is the Rockefeller Center’s archivist, a job which has afforded her access to voluminous documentary evidence. It has also given her legitimacy as she has hunted down leads to determine just exactly who were those guys so high in the air, and what intrepid photographer (or photographers) scaled the same iron they did to reach the top and get the view. That she consulted so many documents and spoke to so many people—everyone from family members with old photographs thinking they were a match, to members of the Mohawk community, apparently impervious to acrophobia, to union halls, and was still unable to gain certainty is both disappointing and oddly satisfying. These ironworkers were part of a larger brotherhood—men whose grit, strength, agility, and skill built 30 Rock as they built New York. Perhaps they are best seen not as individuals, but as a team, reliant on one another, focused on the same goals, sharing the same risks.

Telling their story is part of her mission, and she does it well. The second part is telling the story of how Rockefeller Center was conceived, how the parcel was assembled, how the design, building, and decor of 30 Rock itself was created and selected, and even how it was staffed. While I have some quibbles about the book’s organization, and, occasionally, Roussel’s choices of emphasis, her retelling of the efforts of men, management, and machines is worth the read. Read more »

Somewhere along the line I developed this thing
about Ekphrastic poetry, exploring in word what
a visual artist might have intended when he or she
created their expressions, their work, their vision of
understanding that invited me to look, to see, and think——

…………………………………………   .

As if About A Painting

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by Christopher Hall

“The essence of repression lies simply in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.” –Freud, “Repression”

“Time and again, in conversation with friends, some of who have lost family members in this killing spree, there is a sense that one must be going mad: to see so plainly the destruction, the murdered children filmed and presented for the world to look upon and then to hear the leaders of virtually every Western nation contend that this is not happening, that whatever is happening is good and righteous and should continue and that in fact the well-bring of the Palestinian people demands this continue – it’s enough to feel like you’re losing your mind.”  –Omar El Akkad, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

The characters in Kasuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go are living in the midst of an atrocity, but they certainly don’t act like it. They go through their lives in much the way we expect characters to do in realist novels; there’s fallings in love and out of it, slight and major misunderstandings, a bit of sex here and there, etc. But the jarring difference (spoiler ahead) is that the main characters are all clones, and their destiny is to have their organs harvested until the point that they “complete” – die, in other words. This is not, it is to be emphasised, a novel of resistance. It is a story about people immersed in a system which treats them reasonably well until the time comes to fulfill a purpose which will mean their destruction. In tone and plot, Ishiguro’s work is not really much different from a Thomas Hardy novel; the characters are locked within a social structure which is crushing them and will eventually destroy them, but from which they can see no means of escape. But if we shake our heads at the confines of 19^th century social standards in one instance, that becomes (or at least it did my case) a yelp of rage once we come to Ishiguro’s heartbreaking conclusion. Do something! It’s right there and it’s wrong, don’t you see it? I shouted at the characters. Fight back! Protest! Run Away! But this is nonsense; the characters, and everyone else they encounter, clone or not, are caught within the matrix of “It’s just the way it is” and, as of course it is implied, so are we.

The triad of victim, perpetrator, and bystander presents itself oddly in Ishiguro’s novel, and the boundaries of each begin to blur. The protagonists are unquestionably victims, but their general stasis also presents them as near bystanders. They seem unable to adopt the cognitive tools necessary to escape their plight. They see, but do not see, the atrocity all around them. The perpetrators are, for the most part, distant entities, and themselves can play the role of the bystanders – they participate in a system they might disagree with, and perhaps try to mitigate its worst effects – but they participate all the same. Ishiguro does not seem to be making an overt political point here, but the sense of inevitability and helplessness everywhere in the novel, again as in a Hardy novel, either fills one with existential dread or a level of hope for some kind of speculative redemption. Read more »

by Chris Horner

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say. —Hannah Arendt

A book should be an ice axe for the frozen sea within us. —Franz Kafka

…for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life. —Rainer Maria Rilke

Here’s a view I’ve heard or read many times: art is entertainment, its purpose is to provide pleasure and diversion. I think this is mainly wrong. While it contains a grain of truth, it overlooks the profound ways in which art can challenge and transform us. Art’s  value lies beyond pleasure, in its capacity to question who we are and what we do. It may even say to us that we must change our lives.

Fun

Entertainment, at its core, is about diversion and pleasure. Fun. It occupies our attention, distracts us from boredom, and amuses. But many things in life can do that: food, games, conversation, idle distractions. If we define art solely as entertainment, we risk conflating it with any activity that gives pleasure, and end up with nothing distinctive about art. After all, I like to eat ice cream, have a hot shower, go for a walk and listen to Mozart. I enjoy all those things, but I’ve surely missed something about the specificity of the experiences if I just call them all just pleasure. That approach is ‘utilitarian flattening’: everything is about pleasure, and so anything one does is just for that goal: art as a tool for pleasure, a means to an end, a pleasant way to pass the time.

Passing the time: diverting, distracting: that entertainment? But passing the time isn’t always pleasurable. Anyone who has scrolled on their smart phone or flipped through videos on YouTube knows that diversion can be form of bored unpleasure, a way to pass time that leaves us emptier than when we started. If Art is to be entertaining it had better do more than that. Read more »

by Lei Wang

The world is scary right now. I know this to be true, and yet from 14 years of meditation exposure I also know to ask: is it scary… here and now? Here, where I’m writing, in the library of the campus music building, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking a Zen garden (there was a big donor a while back), surrounded by books on the loves of Mozart and the many intricacies of the art of singing?

In Beyond Anxiety, sociologist and self-help author Martha Beck said she became free of anxiety once she realized most of her fears were based on things that were not actually in the room with her—things that were imagined. In an interview with Big Think, she said, “I remember one time, terrible things were happening in the world, as they always are, and I was sitting in meditation. I thought, ‘How could I be expected to feel calm under these circumstances?’ Another part of me said, ‘You mean the circumstances of your bedroom?’”

It’s true: my bedroom, my café, my music library is not in Minneapolis, or Gaza, or Tehran. The predator is not in the room with me. The predator is imagined, and yet at the same time, it is very real. In “A Brief for the Defense,” the poet Jack Gilbert writes:

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.

I’ve attended several world peace group meditations over the last few weeks: to transform human ego consciousness, to send love to all beings—is this what God wants? Read more »