From Project Syndicate:

Over the past decade, Ruth Ben-Ghiat has emerged as one of the English-speaking world’s leading experts on, and chroniclers of, authoritarian leaders in the twenty-first century. A professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present, she warns against complacency in the face of growing threats to democracy around the world.

Project Syndicate: What is your working definition of a twenty-first-century “strongman”? Or more specifically, which contemporary political leaders do you include in this category, and what features do they share?

Ruth Ben-Ghiat: I use the term strongman for authoritarian leaders who damage or destroy democracy using a combination of corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo (masculinity as a tool of political legitimacy). A strongman’s personality cult elevates him as both a “man of the people” and “a man above all other men.” Authoritarianism is about reorganizing government to remove constraints on the leader – which in turn allows him to commit crimes with impunity – and machismo is essential to personality cults that present the head of state as omnipotent and infallible.

Strongmen, as I define them, also exercise a form of governance known as “personalist rule.”

More here.

Jamie Ducharmie in Time Magazine:

You take a vacation day, but get distracted by the thought of your work inbox filling up. Or you sit down to watch a movie and immediately feel guilty about all the tasks still on your to-do list. Or perhaps you splurge on a massage, but barely enjoy it because your thoughts are racing the entire time. If any of these sound familiar, you’re not alone. Relaxing may sound like the easiest thing in the world, but for many people it’s anything but.

Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, learned that a decade ago, when she helped design a study to test the effects of letting people do nothing but sit with their thoughts for a few minutes. “We had this idea that if we gave people a few moments in their busy days to just sit and slow down and be alone with their thoughts, that they’d find it really enjoyable and it would be relaxing and increase well-being,” Westgate says. The opposite happened: people were so uncomfortable doing nothing that many opted to give themselves small electric shocks instead.

Doing nothing, as Westgate’s study illustrated, can be difficult because most of us aren’t used to thinking without turning those thoughts into actions—a disconnect that can be “incredibly cognitively intense,” she says.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Humans and bacteria are in a perpetual war.

For most of history, bacteria won. Before 1928, a simple scrape on the knee, a cut when cooking dinner, or giving birth could lead to death from infection. The discovery of penicillin, a molecule secreted from mold, changed the balance. For the first time, humans had a way to fight back. Since then, generations of antibiotics have targeted different phases of bacterial growth and spread inside the body, efficiently eliminating them before they can infect other people. But bacteria have an evolutionary upper hand. Their DNA readily adapts to evolutionary pressures—including from antibiotics—so they can mutate over generations to escape the drugs. They also have a “phone line” of sorts that transmits adapted DNA to other nearby bacteria, giving them the power to resist an antibiotic too. Rinse and repeat: Soon an entire population of bacteria gains the ability to fight back.

We might be slowly losing the war. Antibiotic resistance is now a public health threat that caused roughly 1.27 million deaths around the globe in 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) and others say that without newer generations of antibiotics, surgery, cancer chemotherapy, and other life-saving treatments face increasing risk of death due to infection. Traditionally, a new antibiotic takes roughly a decade to develop, test, and finally reach patients. “There is an urgent need for new methods for antibiotic discovery,” Dr. Luis Pedro Coelho, a computational biologist and author of a new study on the topic, said in a press release. Coelho and team tapped into AI to speed up the whole process. Analyzing huge databases of genetic material from the environment, they uncovered nearly one million potential antibiotics.

More here.

Small Song of Seville

It was dawning
in the orange trees.
Tiny golden bees
were looking for honey.

… Where could it be . . .
that honey?

… It is in the blue flower,
Isabel.
In the rosemary flower
there.

… (Small golden chair
for the Moor.
Chair of tinsel
for his wife.)

… It was dawning
in the orange trees.

by Federico García Lorca
from The Cricket Sings
New Directions Books, 1980

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Cancioncilla Sevillana

Amanecia
en el naranjel.
Abejitas de oro
buscaban la miel.

…¿Dónde estará
la miel?

Está en la flor azul
Isabel.
En la flor,
del romero aquel.

…(Sillita de oro
para el moro.
Silla de oropel
para su mujer.)

Amanecia
en el naranjel.

Mairead Small Staid at The New England Review:

Madame M. had been married to more than eighty men. They looked identical: had they ever gathered in the same place, she could have lined them up like paper dolls, holding hands, cut oh-so-carefully from a single folded sheet—but they never did. Instead, each replaced the last, as he had replaced the man before him, and he the man before him, and on and on until there had been one man, her husband, the real one, long since lost to the distant haze of memory. She could hardly recall his face—though, of course, the same face peered at her now, its mouth frowning, its eyes concerned. The same face, and yet she knew—she knew!—that it wasn’t his. Wasn’t him. He had been abducted, murdered, who knew.

Who knew? She did.

“If this person is my husband, he is more than unrecognizable, he is a completely transformed person,” Madame M. told the doctor—and why was this doctor bothering her?

more here.

Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Ed Hotchkiss was born in Denver in 1956 and remained thereabouts in the middle of the country through college at the University of Colorado, which is hardly to say that he stayed put. Already by age 21 he’d hitchhiked through all 48 states in the mainland United States. After college he enrolled in the graduate business school at Columbia, somehow managing to get into International Student Housing (they must have been accepting aspirational globalists as well at the time), which is how it happened that, on a trip to the UN with one of his International Student friends, he met Khadija Musa, a fetchingly vivid Somali woman from Kenya who was working as a guide there at the time but would go on to a far-flung wide-ranging career in the UN system, and the two of them have been together, on and off, ever since. I say, “on and off” only in the sense that both would soon begin ranging wide and flunging far. Ed, in the meantime, having achieved his business degree and presently a CPA certification, had drifted into banking risk and credit management, moving from company to company, eventually culminating at AIG, where he served as chief credit officer in the international division for ten years.

more here.

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

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George Salis at The Collidescope:

George Salis: Your latest book is Burma Sahib, a novel about a young Eric Blair (aka George Orwell) in India. What attracted you to this part of Blair’s life?

Paul Theroux: A line in Orwell’s Burmese Days goes this way: “There’s a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever.” Although Blair (Orwell’s real name) does not appear in that book, nor does anyone resembling him, it struck me that Burma was that period for him, his five years as a policeman. Imagine the culture shock: a schoolboy at Eton one year, and the next year a colonial policeman (aged 19) in the Raj. Afterwards he spent the rest of his life atoning—at first becoming a dishwasher in Paris. I might also add that I could relate somewhat, having started my working life as a teacher in the British territory of Nyasaland—later Malawi.

GS: I’m now thinking of Christopher Hitchens’ book, Why Orwell Matters. Overall, why does Orwell matter to you?

PT: He matters to me in ways greatly different from Hitchens and many others.

More here.

Max Kozlov in Nature:

A small, unassuming fern-like plant has something massive lurking within: the largest genome ever discovered, outstripping the human genome by more than 50 times¹.

The plant (Tmesipteris oblanceolata) contains a whopping 160 billion base pairs, the units that make up a strand of DNA. That’s 11 billion more than the previous record holder, the flowering plant Paris japonica, and 30 billion more than the marbled lungfish (Protopterus aethiopicus), which has the largest animal genome. The findings were published today in iScience.

Study co-author Jaume Pellicer, an evolutionary biologist at the Botanical Institute of Barcelona in Spain, who also co-discovered P. japonica’s gargantuan genome², had thought that the earlier discovery was close to the genome size limit. “But the evidence has once again surpassed our expectations,” he says.

More here.

James Ley in the Sydney Review of Books:

It is a matter of being able to identify the true conspiracies, recognise genuine injustices and abuses of power, distinguish between credible and dubious information, plausible and implausible explanations. Klein makes a point of acknowledging that the irrational theories she examines in Doppelganger often arise from a justified sense that something is wrong – large pharmaceutical companies, for example, have real histories of unethical conduct and they really did make out like bandits during the pandemic. The question she confronts is how, and why, the valid instinct to distrust the powerful ends up being rerouted into bizarre fantasies.

More here.

Amos Barshad at The Lever:

For the most part, Bowlero doesn’t build its own centers. Instead, it purchases existing ones and makes them over in the Bowlero style: dim lights, loud music, expensive cocktails. At Bowleros, bowling isn’t bowling. It’s “upscale entertainment.”

But for serious bowlers, the lived experience of Bowlero’s rise has come with a marked deterioration in conditions. Someone in Big Mike’s crew warns that lane 26 tonight is sticky right where you step up to bowl: “The approach! The actual approach!”

Someone else says it’s no surprise: “They spend a couple million dollars putting in screens but can’t clean the place.”

The bowlers say prices have gone up. They say the pinsetters keep breaking down, and since there are no mechanics on site, “then you’re just fucked.” They say all the bowling centers within reasonable driving distance are also owned by Bowlero, so “you’re just gonna have to put up with how they do things.”

It all feels thoroughly American: In the interest of short-term profit, a corporation goes about methodically worsening a beloved national pastime.

More here.

Ernst Coppejans in lensculture:

A new documentary portrait series, From the Streets to the Heart, focuses on homeless LGBTQIA+ youth and young adults in New York City. The project was initiated and created by Dutch photographer Ernst Coppejans, who also interviewed each of the 30 subjects to get their background stories and current situations. The combination of dignified portraits and the often harrowing stories (including audio clips allowing us to hear each person’s own voice) creates a palpable and empathetic understanding of how these people came to be who and where they are in the present moment. The project is a testament to the courage and resilience of people who are compelled to take very difficult steps in their lives to be true to themselves — despite tremendous emotional and financial challenges, physical danger and everyday prejudice.

Lily, 36. “I’m from a small town called Taunton, Massachusetts. I am trans.”

More here.

A Litany For Survival

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children’s mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours;

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.

by Andre Lorde
from Poetic Outlaws

Jeremy Waldron in Political Philosophy:

What makes something a damned lie? It’s an odd question, but I want to use the phrase as a lens for examining the wrongness (and variations in the wrongness) of lying in a number of different areas of public life.

Towards the end of his (first) presidency, headlines in several op-ed pieces talked about the “damned lies” of President Trump. Paul Krugman had a column in the New York Times titled “Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Rallies.” John Nichols wrote that “The President’s Damned Lies Are Killing Us.” And way back in 2018, the National Catholic Reporter headlined an opinion piece “Lies, Damned Lies, and Presidential Tweets.”¹ It’s a familiar phrase, and it sounded good. But what were they getting at? Is “damned lies” anything more than rhetoric? Our authors offered no insight into what they meant. The phrase “damned lies,” which appears only in titles but not in texts, is evidently just an expression—a way to denounce the former President’s lying.² The phrase looks like it’s meant to pick out a particularly egregious kind of lie—qualitatively different from ordinary lies. But Krugman et al. didn’t tell us what a lie horrendous enough to be damned would consist in.

Donald Trump, we know, is a liar—not just in the sense that he has told lies (which most of us do sometimes), but in the sense of being an inveterate lie-teller, thousands upon thousands of lies, a man whose propensity to falsehood is one of the leading hallmarks of his character. Here too, terminology is interesting…

More here.