Richard Marshall interviews Fiona Wollard in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Why don’t you think we could just take it as a basic fact that doing harm is ethically worse than allowing harm but not acting oneself? And if we don’t like that, why not just accept there is no distinction and outside of our prejudiced intuitions? I guess the question is: why philosophise it and seek reasons?

FW: Both those options seem really odd to me. On the one hand, the fact that doing harm is worse than allowing harm doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that could be a basic moral fact. I couldn’t take it as a basic moral fact that it is worse to perform harmful actions on Thursdays rather than Wednesday or to harm people with my left hand rather than my right hand. These suggests seem absurd. How could that difference matter morally? I think the doing/allowing distinction faces a similar challenge: when it is a we’re talking serious harm, when it might be a matter of life and death, how can the doing/allowing distinction make a difference? On the other hand, I think it would be overreacting to immediately retreat to simply accepting that there is no difference. Given the important role the doing/allowing distinction plays in common sense morality, we have to try to see if we can understand and defend it.

3:AM: You defend the notion that the distinction is morally relevant and you do this by introducing the idea of imposition. What is this notion and how does it help make the distinction play the role you defend?

FW: My use of imposition is inspired by Frances Kamm. She notes that the difference between doing and allowing seems to be connected to a difference in order of imposition. She says: ‘If the same efforts had to be made to avoid killing as have to be made in order to save a life, they would be made to prevent the killer from imposing first on an innocent person. In contrast, the efforts made in saving would, in a sense, involve the innocent bystander being imposed on first for the dying person.’

More here.

Adrian Tomine in The New York Times:

The provocatively upbeat title of Akhil Sharma’s first collection of short stories, “A Life of Adventure and Delight,” raises some questions. Is it an earnest declaration of tone and content? Is it ironic? The answer, like the book itself, is complicated, debatable and subjective. When the title appears within the text, it’s a fragment of the thoughts of Gautama, an Indian immigrant in New York, who has called a prostitute to his apartment. The encounter is a personal triumph for the frustrated, conflicted young man, both a fulfillment of a long-held wish and a rebellion against cultural expectations. At his request, the prostitute has undressed and is jumping up and down as Gautama gleefully grasps her breasts. It’s an unexpected scene, simultaneously unsettling and lighthearted: “His hands on her breasts, Gautama became happier and happier.” A life of adventure and delight, indeed, for one character. But for the other? Maybe not so much. This slippery tone — at once amused and critical, resigned and outraged — infuses each of these eight haunting, revelatory stories. As in so much of contemporary American fiction, the attention here is on the conflicts and consolations between couples and family members in a naturalistic present day. Throughout, Sharma adheres unwaveringly to Raymond Carver’s dictum of “no tricks,” telling his stories with bracingly direct, unassuming language. The dialogue is equally spare but true. But where some writers choose to obfuscate or minimize their ethnic background, Sharma is boldly forthright and probing. Focusing exclusively on Indian characters, both in Delhi and in the New York metropolitan area, he brings a keen cultural awareness to each of these stories. In some instances, this ethnologic insight is played for laughs — as in the story “Cosmopolitan,” in which an Indian man in New Jersey studies magazines like Mademoiselle as research in his quest to date American women. Perusing articles on topics like “what makes a woman a good lover,” the man is “reminded how easily one can learn anything in America.” In the same story, the protagonist, attending a party, “improvised on jokes he had read in ‘1,001 Polish Jokes.’ The Poles became Sikhs, but the rest remained the same.” In the story “Surrounded by Sleep,” a teenager begins to converse with God, whom he envisions as Clark Kent. “Originally,” the narrator explains, “God had appeared to Ajay as Krishna, but Ajay had felt foolish discussing brain damage with a blue God who held a flute and wore a dhoti.”

…In the final lines of the story (and the book), Sharma arrives at a moment that all the previous stories have been leading toward: “We were on Route 27 when my mother reached over my shoulder and slapped me, hard. Her hand hit my face and ear. Her breath was loud. She reached over and hit me again. I thought, Good, I should be hit.” It’s a small, beautifully underplayed moment, and perhaps a first step for a character who might one day write a book as perceptive, humane and pointed as this.

More here. (Note" Congratulations to dear friend Akhil!)

Dmitri Levitin at Literary Review:

A historical anniversary can be something of a false god. Convinced – rightly or wrongly – of the reading public’s numerical obsession, publishers race to churn out their own ‘definitive’ accounts of the event being commemorated. This year has been particularly notable for this, witnessing as it has not only the centenary of the Russian Revolution, but also the quincentenary of the event that supposedly began the Reformation: 31 October will mark the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing to the door of the church attached to Wittenberg Castle his ninety-five theses against papal teaching on indulgences.

Or, at least, so we are told. One of the central claims of Peter Marshall’s lovely 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation is that this event probably never happened. In claiming this, he is following a well-trodden path, as he readily admits: the German Catholic historian Erwin Iserloh already suggested in the early 1960s that the historical evidence for the ‘theses-posting’ (the German, Thesenanschlag, conveys far better the force of the supposed event), which allegedly occurred on All Saints’ Eve 1517, was very dubious. But Marshall also has a new story to tell, one that is concerned with anniversaries and is often far more interesting than the many repetitive accounts of Luther and the Reformation that have appeared this year. That is the story of how the Thesenanschlaggradually came to assume such a central role in European and American cultural memory, generating the modern idea of the ‘Reformation’.

more here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

Thomas Gainsborough’s early masterpiece, Mr and Mrs Andrews (c1750), has long been read as a celebration of that pivotal moment in mid-Georgian Britain when man managed to wrestle nature to its knees and tell it what to do. To one side of the painting are the recently married Robert and Frances Andrews, a lucky young couple handsomely dressed in a rustle of linen, satin and soft leather. Significantly, though, the pair are posing not in the library or hall of their manor house but out in the grounds, in the well-worked, wheat-covered bit of Suffolk’s loamy Stour valley that provides the capital on which their combined fortune depends. In the far distance you can just make out the tower of All Saints’ Church where this alliance between two local landowning families – one gentry, one trade – has recently been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

Gainsborough painted the happy couple, not to mention their happy acres, with such a zesty freshness that it’s a shock to learn that, until the picture was bought by the National Gallery in 1960, Mr and Mrs Andrews was kept hidden away by the family, like some mad aunt in the attic. James Hamilton, the author of this richly humane biography of the artist, thinks he knows why. Hamilton suggests that, far from being a servile recorder of other people’s good fortune, young Tom Gainsborough was never afraid to blurt out inconvenient truths, much in the manner of his great hero William Hogarth.

more here.

Ryan Gilbey at The New Statesman:

The last time Geoffrey Rush was cooped up on screen in a tatty grey room with a well-spoken man, the result was The King’s Speech, not so much a film as a machine for winning Oscars. Final Portrait, in which Rush plays Alberto Giacometti during the weeks in 1964 that he spent drawing the writer James Lord (Armie Hammer), is a subtler, warmer piece that has few of the earlier one’s imploring, manipulative tendencies. Anyone familiar with movies about artists toiling over their canvases may be minded to bring a cushion to the cinema: Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse ran for four hours, Victor Erice’s leisurely documentary The Quince Tree Sun for nearly two-and-a-half. At 90 minutes, Final Portrait is scarcely more than a doodle by comparison, but that briskness suits its philosophical points.

It begins with a casual request by Giacometti to Lord. Would he consider sitting for a portrait? It should only take a few hours at the artist’s studio in Paris. An afternoon at most. Arriving at the cluttered studio, Lord finds an artist whose idea of an ice-breaker is to tell him he has the head of a brute. He tries to remain chirpy even as Giacometti offers the first hint that the project may be doomed. “I’ll never be able to paint you as I see you,” he grumbles. “It’s impossible.”

more here.

Sam Leith in The Spectator:

How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the authors of literary nonfiction go about their work is interesting. If, as Kingsley Amis argued, most of a writer’s work is the application of the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of the chair, it’s legitimate to ask: what trousers, what chair, sexuality where and when? In my experience the answers are wildly different from writer to writer; an experience borne out by our sampling — 400 words a day, or 15,000? A bath for inspiration, or exercise? Endless redrafting or first thought, best thought?

Kamila Shamsie:

For years I tried to avoid building up ‘writing habits’. They quickly become writing tics that get in the way of just sitting down and getting on with putting words on a page. When working on my first novel, I wrote in the daytime as well as the night, wrote by longhand as well as on my computer, wrote in one continent or another, just so long as I had a quiet space.

But at a certain point, habits creep in. Sometimes for your own good: though I’m nocturnal I force myself to write during the day, so that I can be done by the evening. Sometimes for the sake of convenience: it’s been years since I wrote longhand — editing is so much easier on a laptop. Sometimes for no good reason except that every writer needs to have something to be irrational about: while I can still shift from one continent to the next as I write, I can no longer — as I did with my first three novels — write while looking at a wall. I need a window to look out of, or better yet, a table and chair outdoors so I’m unenclosed.

I could pretend that lack of enclosure is necessary for the imagination to feel unbound, or some such hooey. Truth is, I let down my guard, I allowed in a tic, and now it’s taken up residence and won’t be shifted.

More here.

Cynthia Haven in The Book Haven:

A month ago, I received a package from Berlin with a note from Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One. Our point of connection was the French theorist René Girard: “In a pivotal scene, one character discusses an interpretation of Dostoevsky‘s Demons in terms that were largely influenced by Girard’s reading of that book in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.” According to the book jacket, Ruby’s novel about a friendship at Oxford that takes a dark turn, and considers “the power of dangerous ideas.” From the book itself:

From the earliest days of our friendship, Zach and I sought out philosophers whose names would never have appeared on the reading lists we received before the beginning of each term. To our tutors, such thinkers did not merit serious consideration. Our tutors were training us to weigh evidence, parse logic, and refuse counter-examples; they encouraged us to but more stock in the rule than the exception and to put our trust in modest truths that could be easily verified and plainly expressed. Whereas the philosophers who interested us were the ones who would step right to the edge of the abyss – and jump to conclusions; the ones who wagered their sanity when they spun the wheel of thought; the ones, in short, who wrote in blood. In counter-intuitiveness we saw profundity and in obfuscation, poetry. With wide eyes, we plucked paperback after paperback from the shelves at Reservoir, the used bookshop opposite the entrance to Christ Church Meadow, our own personal Nag Hammadi, hunting for insights into the hermetic nature of the universe and ourselves.

I used to frequent that bookshop, though my visits were too brief to consider the place a hotbed of a “dangerous ideas.” And I’m not sure that René’s ideas can be considered “dangerous” ones – we’ll see what you think next spring when my Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard is out with Michigan State University Press. But Hans Abendroth?

More here.

From Phys.org:

At the center of our galaxy, roughly 26,000 light years from Earth, lies the supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A*. Measuring 44 million km across, this object is roughly 4 million times as massive as our Sun and exerts a tremendous gravitational pull. Since astronomers cannot detect black holes directly, its existence has been determined largely from the effect it has on the small group of stars orbiting it.

In this respect, scientists have found that observing Sagittarius A* is an effective way of testing the physics of gravity. For instance, in the course of observing these stars, a team of German and Czech astronomers noted subtle effects caused by the black hole's gravity. In so doing, they were able to yet again confirm some of the predictions made by Einstein's famous Theory of General Relativity.

Their study, titled "Investigating the Relativistic Motion of the Stars Near the Supermassive Black Hole in the Galactic Center", was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal. As is indicated in the course of it, the team applied new analysis techniques to existing observations that were made by European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other telescopes over the course of the past 20 years.

From this, they measured the orbits of the stars that orbit Sagittarius A* to test predictions made by classical Newtonian physics (i.e. universal gravitation), as well as predictions based on general relativity. What they found was that one of the stars (S2) showed deviations in its orbit which were defied the former, but were consistent with the latter.

More here.

Video length: 6:35

This is another of my posts with which I attempt to bring our readers opinions usually outside their comfort zone. Please read it charitably and if you respond, do so in a civil and thoughtful manner or risk getting banned from commenting on 3QD. If nothing else, let it be a way to understand how almost half of America thinks. This is Scott Adams in his own blog:

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

More here.

Leon Neyfakh in Slate:

From Phys.Org:

A mutation that helps make cells immortal is critical to the development of a tumor, but new research at the University of California, Berkeley suggests that becoming immortal is a more complicated process than originally thought. The key to immortalization is an enzyme called telomerase, which keeps chromosomes healthy in cells that divide frequently. The enzyme lengthens the caps, or telomeres, on the ends of chromosomes, which wear off during each cell division.

…Hockemeyer and his UC Berkeley colleagues, in collaboration with dermatopathologistBoris Bastian and his colleagues at UCSF, found that immortalization is a two-step process, driven initially by a mutation that turns telomerase on, but at a very low level. That mutation is in a promoter, a region upstream of the telomerase gene – referred to as TERT – that regulates how much telomerase is produced. Four years ago, researchers reported that some 70 percent of malignant melanomas have this identical mutation in the TERT promoter. The TERT promoter mutation does not generate enough telomerase to immortalize the pre-cancerous cells, but does delay normal cellular aging, Hockemeyer said, allowing more time for additional changes that turns telomerase up. He suspects that the telomerase levels are sufficient to lengthen the shortest telomeres, but not keep them all long and healthy. If cells fail to turn up telomerase, they also fail to immortalize, and eventually die from short telomeres because chromosomes stick together and then shatter when the cell divides. Cells with the TERT promoter mutation are more likely to up-regulate telomerase, which allows them to continue to grow despite very short telomeres. Yet, Hockemeyer says, telomerase levels are marginal, resulting is some unprotected chromosome ends in the surviving mutant cells, which could cause mutations and further fuel tumor formation. "Before our paper, people could have assumed that the acquisition of just this one mutation in the TERT promoter was sufficient to immortalize a cell; that any time when that happens, the telomere shortening is taken out of the equation," Hockemeyer said. "We are showing that the TERT promoter mutation is not immediately sufficient to stop telomeres from shortening." It is still unclear, however, what causes the eventual up-regulation of telomerase that immortalizes the cell. Hockemeyer says that it's unlikely to be another mutation, but rather an epigenetic change that affects expression of the telomerase gene, or a change in the expression of a transcription factor or other regulatory proteins that binds to the promoter upstream of the telomerase gene.

More here.

Daniel Judt in The Point:

Before my dad died in August 2010, he had begun work on his next book. “The time has come,” he had decided, “to write about more than just the things one understands; it is just as important if not more so to write about the things one cares about.” The thing my dad understood was twentieth-century European history. The thing he cared about—more than almost anything or anyone—was trains. His next book would be titled Locomotion: a history of the railway.

He spent his Putney, London childhood riding trains to nowhere in particular, just for the sake of riding. On summer days, he took the quaint suburban electric railway around suburbs and lumpy British hills, then back to Clapham Junction, where he picked his ride home from a row of grunting diesels and majestic old steamers that shuffled along nineteen different platforms. I spent my childhood listening to these wistful remembrances, trying to imagine eight-year-old Tony peering out onto a dark and smoggy London.^[1]

Whenever he could, Dad took us railroading through Europe. We would board at the Gare du Nord, with its serpentine TGVs, or the Gare du Midi, with its blue and yellow boxy Belgian locals, or Paddington, with its rows of channel-hopping Eurostars. We always arrived early so Dad could sip a double-espresso in the main hall.

If stations were his “cathedrals,” as my dad once wrote, timetables were his Bible.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

Strike a billiard ball on a frictionless table with no pockets so that it never stops bouncing off the table walls. If you returned years later, what would you find? Would the ball have settled into some repeating orbit, like a planet circling the sun, or would it be continually tracing new paths in a ceaseless exploration of its felt-covered plane?

These kinds of questions occurred to mathematical minds centuries ago, in relation to the long-term trajectories of real objects in outer space, and for nearly that long they’ve seemed impossible to determine exactly. What will a bouncing ball be up to a billion years from now? It’s as hard to answer as it sounds.

More recently, though, mathematicians have achieved a succession of stunning breakthroughs. One of the latest results, yet to be published, describes a new category of what are known as “optimal” billiard tables — shapes whose particular angles make it possible to understand every billiard path that could occur within them. The newfound shapes are among a handful of optimal billiard tables ever discovered, and part of an even more select group of quadrilaterals with that property.

More here.

James Hamblin in The Atlantic:

The scientists are all talking like it’s a sure thing.

On August 21, the “moon” will pass between the Earth and the sun, obscuring the light of the latter. The government agency NASA says this will result in “one of nature’s most awe-inspiring sights.” The astronomers there claim to have calculated down to the minute exactly when and where this will happen, and for how long. They have reportedly known about this eclipse for years, just by virtue of some sort of complex math.

This seems extremely unlikely. I can’t even find these eclipse calculations on their website to check them for myself.

Meanwhile the scientists tell us we can’t look at it without special glasses because “looking directly at the sun is unsafe.”

That is, of course, unless we wear glasses that are on a list issued by these very same scientists. Meanwhile, corporations like Amazon are profiting from the sale of these eclipse glasses. Is anyone asking how many of these astronomers also, conveniently, belong to Amazon Prime?

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci at the Institute of Art and Ideas:

Before reading this essay, you may want to watch this short BBC cartoon, aimed at an audience of children, and explaining basic facts about Ancient Roman life in Britain. Done? Okay, what did you think of it?

This 5’30” video sparked a really nasty Twitter war (okay, “nasty” and “Twitter” may be slightly redundant, but still) involving two high caliber academics: historian Mary Beard (author of the highly readable and engaging SPQR) and statistician Nassim Taleb (author of the best selling and controversial The Black Swan). We’ll take a look at the exchange in a moment, but first — if you can stomach it — check out this “commentary” (I’m using the word very generously) by alt-right celebrity Alex Jones, who rails against the BBC for having succumbed to political correctness, on the grounds that one of the characters in the video is a young boy with a darker-than-white skin.

The kerfuffle began in earnest when Beard tweeted that the video was “indeed pretty accurate, there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.” Which I would have imagined is uncontroversially the case, since it is well known that the Roman Empire as a whole was highly diverse, and we have direct historical record of, for instance, one Governor of Britannia — Quintus Lollius Urbicus — who likely was a Berber from North Africa (specifically, modern Algeria). And Urbicus, based again on historical documents, was not an isolated case.

(As a side note, I did find the BBC video just slightly too informed by modern sensibilities, as for instance in the scene, at 1'50", where a Patrician girl expresses the desire to one day become a military commander, only to be rebuked by her mother who explains that women are not allowed in the Roman military. Then again, it is a video meant to teach an audience of modern children. And if one wishes to be picky then one would also have to point out that the Ancient Romans did not speak modern English with a British accent either…)

More here.