Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

I recently saw an estimate that if you took all the novel coronaviruses in the world (the actual viruses, not patients), you could fit them into a bucket no more than a couple of liters in volume. A huge impact has been wrought by a very small amount of stuff. The world of viruses is vast and complicated, and we’re still learning some of its basic features. Today’s guest David Baltimore won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that genetic information in viruses could flow from RNA to DNA, establishing an exception to the Central Dogma of Biology. He is the author of the Baltimore Classification scheme for viruses, and has done important research in the role of viruses in diseases from AIDS to cancer. We talk about what viruses are, how they work, and the status of the novel coronavirus we are currently battling. David also has some strong opinions about public health and how we should be preparing for future outbreaks.

More here.

Christie Wilcox in Quanta:

One of the most obvious physical differences between men and women are their average sizes. Men are, on the whole, taller. The standard explanation found in textbooks — sexual selection and male competition — goes all the way back to Charles Darwin: “There can be little doubt that the greater size and strength of man, in comparison with woman, together with his broader shoulders, more developed muscles, rugged outline of body, his greater courage and pugnacity … have been preserved or even augmented during the long ages of man’s savagery, by the success of the strongest and boldest men, both in the general struggle for life and in their contests for wives,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.

Essentially, were it not for men’s fiercely physical infighting for access to mates, all people would presumably be equally sized. Evolutionary psychology extends that argument to say that these biological directives underlie our behaviors; men can’t help but be aggressive and competitive, while women are by nature sneaky, conniving and choosy.

“There’s a lot of importance put on our differences in body size, as if that’s the keystone fundamental sex difference,” said Holly Dunsworth, a biological anthropologist at the University of Rhode Island. “This is what people think is fact, and if you don’t agree, they think you’re denying science.”

But in a recent paper in Evolutionary Anthropology, Dunsworth showed that the science points another way.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_Flxxs_uCY

Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review:

It was these writers in other genres who opened up possibilities for biography with a shift of focus from public to private. Chekhov invites this with his sense that “every individual existence is a mystery.” The title of Eliot’s verse drama, Murder in the Cathedral, teases us with the popular genre of the murder mystery, yet there is no mystery of the usual sort: Archbishop Thomas à Becket’s murder in 1170 takes place onstage, and the murderers are visible: four identifiable knights who are hit men for the king, Henry II. The real mystery lies in the inner life: Becket’s capacity for self-transformation. This is a biographical play about a twelfth-century saint in the making, as he readies himself for martyrdom by sloughing off his public life together with the outlived temptations of his former worldliness and ambition.

more here.

Lavinia Greenlaw at the LRB:

In​ Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, David Farrier reaches into the past in order to envisage the deep future. This can only ever be an extrapolation of the present – our knowledge, experience, language and ideas – but Farrier is relaxed about this. His focus is on the way life has been recorded in the substance of the world, the ways we can trace human impact and the ways we, in turn, might be traced in time to come. He wrote this book before the pandemic struck, when past, present and future were relatively sturdy propositions. Now, the past has been uncoupled from a present that refuses to form. It’s not so pleasing to think of a mountain as a ripple in geological time when we feel like a ripple ourselves.

In looking to the deep future, Farrier considers ‘how we will appear to the people who may live in that world’. I wonder if the concept of fossils will mean anything to them.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in Baffler:

THE FIRST TIME MOHANDAS GANDHI, the leader of nonviolent protest against British rule in India, wrote to Adolf Hitler was in July of 1939. Gandhi was almost seventy. The world was, as it appears to be today, on the cusp of some huge transformation, although then, as now, the complete price of the change was unknown. “Dear friend,” Gandhi implored Hitler from behind a typewritten page, “friends have been urging me to write to you for the sake of humanity.” Hitler, the letter goes on to say, is the only “person in the world who can prevent a war which may reduce humanity to a savage state.”

I can imagine Gandhi writing the letter, the humid air of an Indian July hanging heavy and oppressive, like the threat of war over the world. That first letter was barely over a hundred words, and it was never delivered. The British colonists who ruled India at the time minded Gandhi’s correspondence; they intercepted it well before it had any chance to reach Hitler. It is unknown whether Gandhi, an astute political strategist, knew this would be the case when he wrote the letter. He may have known that his audience was his own oppressors rather than the oppressors of European Jews. Whatever Gandhi’s motives, the appeal to Hitler was not new. The year before, American missionaries meeting with Gandhi pleaded with him to condemn Hitler and Mussolini, but he refused, insisting that no one, even these two fascists clearly uninterested in human dignity, was “beyond redemption.” Czechs and Jews were told to engage only in passive resistance, a sacrifice that would redeem them. Passive resistance failed to deliver either group, but Gandhi, for his part, never quite acknowledged this. (It was also not the only strategy they employed: consider the Warsaw Uprising of 1943, or the revolt at Auschwitz-Birkenau the following year.) Gandhi did write another, more vehement letter to Hitler, but this, too, was never delivered.

Gandhi got many things wrong about World War II. But in the days after George Floyd’s death, with protest ascendant, many reached for his prescriptions and other histories of nonviolent resistance, which present crucial questions about methods of opposition and defense. While there is much talk of the passive nonviolent resisters of old—Gandhi and his eventual disciple Martin Luther King Jr.—there is physical, psychic, and emotional violence being deliberately inflicted on the oppressed.

More here.

Smriti Malapaty in Nature:

One of the most crucial questions about an emerging infectious disease such as the new coronavirus is how deadly it is. After months of collecting data, scientists are getting closer to an answer. Researchers use a metric called infection fatality rate (IFR) to calculate how deadly a new disease is. It is the proportion of infected people who will die as a result, including those who don’t get tested or show symptoms. “The IFR is one of the important numbers alongside the herd immunity threshold, and has implications for the scale of an epidemic and how seriously we should take a new disease,” says Robert Verity, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London.

Calculating an accurate IFR is challenging in the midst of any outbreak because it relies on knowing the total number of people infected — not just those who are confirmed through testing. But the fatality rate is especially difficult to pin down for COVID-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, says Timothy Russell, a mathematical epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. That’s partly because there are many people with mild or no symptoms, whose infection has gone undetected, and also because the time between infection and death can be as long as two months. Many countries are also struggling to count all their virus-related deaths, he says. Death records suggest that some of those are being missed in official counts.

Data from early in the pandemic overestimated how deadly the virus was, and then later analyses underestimated its lethality. Now, numerous studies — using a range of methods — estimate that in many countries some 5 to 10 people will die for every 1,000 people with COVID-19. “The studies I have any faith in are tending to converge around 0.5–1%,” says Russell.

More here.

Bread

Each night, in a space he’d make
between waking and purpose,
my grandfather donned his one
suit, in our still dark house, and drove
through Brooklyn’s deserted streets
following trolley tracks to the bakery.

There he’d change into white
linen work clothes and cap,
and in the absence of women,
his hands were both loving, well
into dawn and throughout the day—
kneading, rolling out, shaping

each astonishing moment
of yeasty predictability
in that windowless world lit
by slightly swaying naked bulbs,
where the shadows staggered, woozy
with the aromatic warmth of the work.

Then, the suit and drive, again.
At our table, graced by a loaf
that steamed when we sliced it,
softened the butter and leavened
the very air we’d breathe,
he’d count us blessed.

by Richard Levine
from A Tide of a Hundred Mountains
Bright Hill Press, 2012

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?

You would have a column published at 3QD every fourth Monday. It should generally be between 1000 and 2500 words and can be about any subject at all. To qualify for a Monday slot, please submit a short resume or at least a one or two paragraph bio and a sample column to me by email (s.abbas.raza.1 at gmail.com) as an MS Word-compatible document, or a URL if what you want us to look at is available online, which I will then circulate to the other editors and we will let you know our decision by around mid-July. If you are given a slot on the 3QD schedule, your sample can also serve as your first column if it has never been published anywhere in print or online before. Feel free to use pictures, graphs, or other illustrations in your column. You will retain full copyright over your writing.

Please DO NOT submit more than one piece of writing, and also do not send the URL for a whole blog or website. I do not have the time to look through multiple postings. Select one piece of writing that you think is representative of the kinds of things you’d like to do at 3QD and just send that please. Also, please don’t send a good prose essay and then switch to writing poetry after we take you, or some other such thing. We are not looking for poets or fiction writers.

Several of the people who started writing at 3QD have gone on to get regular paid gigs at well-known magazines, others have written well-received books. Even those who have not, have written to us saying that it has been a uniquely rewarding experience.

The strict deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM New York City time, Friday, June 19, 2020.

Yours,

Abbas

Matt Taibbi in Substack:

Sometimes it seems life can’t get any worse in this country. Already in terror of a pandemic, Americans have lately been bombarded with images of grotesque state-sponsored violence, from the murder of George Floyd to countless scenes of police clubbing and brutalizing protesters.

Our president, Donald Trump, is a clown who makes a great reality-show villain but is uniquely toolless as the leader of a superpower nation. Watching him try to think through two society-imperiling crises is like waiting for a gerbil to solve Fermat’s theorem. Calls to “dominate” marchers and ad-libbed speculations about Floyd’s “great day” looking down from heaven at Trump’s crisis management and new unemployment numbers (“only” 21 million out of work!) were pure gasoline at a tinderbox moment. The man seems determined to talk us into civil war.

But police violence, and Trump’s daily assaults on the presidential competence standard, are only part of the disaster. On the other side of the political aisle, among self-described liberals, we’re watching an intellectual revolution. It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

More here.

Stephen Hsu in Nautilus:

Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists, from 1 to 5. A physicist in the first class had ten times the impact of someone in the second class, and so on. He modestly ranked himself as 2.5 until late in life, when he became a 2. In the first class were Heisenberg, Bohr, and Dirac among a few others. Einstein was a 0.5!

My friends in the humanities, or other areas of science like biology, are astonished and disturbed that physicists and mathematicians (substitute the polymathic von Neumann for Einstein) might think in this essentially hierarchical way. Apparently, differences in ability are not manifested so clearly in those fields. But I find Landau’s scheme appropriate: There are many physicists whose contributions I cannot imagine having made.

I have even come to believe that Landau’s scale could, in principle, be extended well below Einstein’s 0.5. The genetic study of cognitive ability suggests that there exist today variations in human DNA which, if combined in an ideal fashion, could lead to individuals with intelligence that is qualitatively higher than has ever existed on Earth: Crudely speaking, IQs of order 1,000, if the scale were to continue to have meaning.

More here.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Incerto:

Six errors: 1) missing the compounding effects of masks, 2) missing the nonlinearity of the probability of infection to viral exposures, 3) missing absence of evidence (of benefits of mask wearing) for evidence of absence (of benefits of mask wearing), 4) missing the point that people do not need governments to produce facial covering: they can make their own, 5) missing the compounding effects of statistical signals, 6) ignoring the Non-Aggression Principle by pseudolibertarians (masks are also to protect others from you; it’s a multiplicative process: every person you infect will infect others).

In fact masks (and faceshields) supplemented with constraints of superspreader events can save us trillions of dollars in future lockdowns (and lawsuits) and be potentially sufficient (under adequate compliance) to stem the pandemic. Bureaucrats do not like simple solutions.

More here.

Santiago Zabala in The Philosopher:

This pandemic is closer to a disruption than a crisis or emergency. While all three refer to unexpected and dangerous events requiring immediate action not all involve a rupture. Crises and emergencies have become chronic conditions in finance and politics. This is why we prepare for them through financial contingency plans, safety drills, and disseminating information for the public. These, according to some political scientists, can also socialize people into better democratic habits and attitudes. Disruptions, by contrast, are meant to tear apart our existence. To take a prominent contemporary example, think of the industries that Uber and Amazon have disrupted by offering cheaper services and products.

According to some experts the current pandemic is affecting our lives to a greater degree than the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the economic crisis of 2008 combined. This is why many say that we are “at war” with the virus. But of course a virus does not pursue political victories or demand changes in our foreign policies. Thinking in these terms is likely to lead to muddled and ineffective responses. Just think of a similarly misguided war, specifically the “war on terror,” which has trapped us in an ineffective cycle of militarized responses to a problem that cannot be solved by military means.

This same logic should also be applied to those politicians, business leaders and entrepreneurs who think the Covid-19 virus must be approached through “disruptive innovation”.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SDjCnVt7og

Kim Tingley in The New York Times:

The last class Joel Sanders taught in person at the Yale School of Architecture, on Feb. 17, took place in the modern wing of the Yale University Art Gallery, a structure of brick, concrete, glass and steel that was designed by Louis Kahn. It is widely hailed as a masterpiece. One long wall, facing Chapel Street, is windowless; around the corner, a short wall is all windows. The contradiction between opacity and transparency illustrates a fundamental tension museums face, which happened to be the topic of Sanders’s lecture that day: How can a building safeguard precious objects and also display them? How do you move masses of people through finite spaces so that nothing — and no one — is harmed?

All semester, Sanders, who is a professor at Yale and also runs Joel Sanders Architect, a studio located in Manhattan, had been asking his students to consider a 21st-century goal for museums: to make facilities that were often built decades, if not centuries, ago more inclusive. They had conducted workshops with the gallery’s employees to learn how the iconic building could better meet the needs of what Sanders calls “noncompliant bodies.” By this he means people whose age, gender, race, religion or physical or cognitive abilities often put them at odds with the built environment, which is typically designed for people who embody dominant cultural norms. In Western architecture, Sanders points out, “normal” has been explicitly defined — by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius, for instance, whose concepts inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man,” and, in Kahn’s time, by Le Corbusier’s “Modulor Man” — as a youngish, tallish white male.

When the coronavirus crisis prompted Yale to move classes online, Sanders’s first thought was: “How do you make the content of your class seem relevant during a global pandemic? Why should we be talking about museums when we have more urgent issues to fry?” Off campus, built environments and the ways people moved in them began to change immediately in desperate, ad hoc ways. Grocery stores erected plexiglass shields in front of registers and put stickers or taped lines on the floor to create six-foot spacing between customers; as a result, fewer shoppers fit safely inside, and lines snaked out the door. People became hyperaware of themselves in relation to others and the surfaces they might have to touch. Suddenly, Sanders realized, everyone had become a “noncompliant body.” And places deemed essential were wrestling with how near to let them get to one another. The virus wasn’t simply a health crisis; it was also a design problem.

More here.

Ashish Ghadiali in The Guardian:

Annie Zaidi was already a writer of renown in Mumbai when, in 2019, she submitted a 3,000-word essay to the Nine Dots Prize, an international competition lavishly sponsored by investment banker Peter Kadas, and won $100,000 as well as a book deal. Bread, Cement, Cactus, her haunting evocation of belonging and dislocation in contemporary India, is the fruit of that endeavour, delivering Zaidi on to an international platform for the first time in her decade-long career. The brief was to say something new about “home” – a concept that Zaidi quickly establishes has always evaded her. “I never lived,” she tells us, “in the city of my birth … (Allahabad, now Prayagraj, in Uttar Pradesh). Leaving us with her parents [in Lucknow] while she went back to university, my mother quit a bad marriage.” Later, she found a job and moved to a remote industrial township in Rajasthan where “the need for bread, and milk for the children, overrode her unease at being so far from everything familiar”.

Each chapter is a standalone essay, as Zaidi looks back to the successive settings of an itinerant past, successfully dovetailing personal reflection with political analysis so that, in each location, intimate memories work as jumping-off points for research and investigation into the macro-trends that are shaping contemporary India. In that Rajasthani township, JK Puram, for example, Zaidi’s recollection of youthful discontent plays into a reckoning with the horror of tribal dispossession as stories from her childhood of “Bhil tribesmen … who could relieve kids of their valuables” are slowly recast.

…In the end, the architecture of the book attempts to lead us towards a counter-resolution that will establish home instead in the paradise of personal experience – in “the morning mist” for example – but this is never as convincing as the lasting sense of indignation and injustice that Zaidi evokes. “What belongs to whom?” she asks. “Who pays the costs of what is taken and cannot be returned?” These are questions perhaps more powerful than the answers Zaidi can provide, but it’s through questions such as these that she points towards the deeper mysteries of our human condition.

More here.

Floating

We are in the good Target, picking out bathing suits
for a last-minute invitation to the beach. My daughter
is nine. Mom, she whispers, can I get the, you know
(holding up two fingers), the two-piece?
And I say sure because her trust in me
is a swirled marble sinking slowly in an aqua pool.
Already she questions my answers,
looks sideways when I tell what I know.
Last month I bought her a sweatshirt
with The Future Is Female printed in simple black letters.
And today, what? The florescent rainbow bikini?
I can’t tell her yet what the world will expect
of her body—complicit, my own hands wanting
a little longer, that familiar weight, heavy bloom
of her scented head—salt, sleep, sun.

by Karen Harryman
from Narrative Magazine

Dani Rodrik and Stefanie Stantcheva in Project Syndicate:

COVID-19 has exacerbated deep fault lines in the global economy, starkly exposing the divisions and inequalities of our current world. It has also multiplied and amplified the voices of those calling for far-reaching reforms. When even the Davos set is issuing calls for a “global reset of capitalism,” you know that changes are afoot.

There are some common threads running through the newly proposed policy agendas: To prepare the workforce for new technologies, governments must enhance education and training programs, and integrate them better with labor-market requirements. Social protection and social insurance must be improved, especially for workers in the gig economy and in non-standard work arrangements.

More broadly, the decline in workers’ bargaining power in recent decades points to the need for new forms of social dialogue and cooperation between employers and employees. Better-designed progressive taxation must be introduced to address widening income inequality. Anti-monopoly policies must be reinvigorated to ensure greater competition, particularly where social media platforms and new technologies are concerned. Climate change must be tackled head-on. And governments must play a bigger role in fostering new digital and green technologies.3

Taken together, these reforms would substantially change the way our economies operate. But they do not fundamentally alter the narrative about how market economies should work; nor do they represent a radical departure for economic policy. Most critically, they elide the central challenge we must address: reorganizing production.

More here.