Chris Lehmann at The Baffler:
IT’S BEEN TEN YEARS NOW since the American economy nearly pitched itself carelessly into the abyss, taking a great deal of the rent-collecting structure of neoliberal capitalism along with it. As our thought-leading elite begins taking stock of the Great Recession’s tangled legacy, we do well to pause amid the great tax-slashing, trade-battering, wage-stagnant Guignol of our Trumpified political economy, and marvel at just how epically oafish our leadership class is when it comes to the simple processing of elementary information and market trends.
There is, to begin with, the whole sad mobbed-up social mythology of austerity as the panacea of first resort in all imaginable circumstances. In the latter half of 2008, as Wall Street became a wind tunnel of toxic, overleveraged debt, all our most sober founts of economic wisdom concurred that we couldn’t embark on the Keynesian program of pump-priming that the shell-shocked American economic order desperately needed; no, this crisis was a moment for inflation hawks and assorted other ghouls to close ranks and issue stern rebukes of the economic mayhem wreaked by financial stimulus.
more here.
Graves’s life was, in every sense, chaotic, but purposely so. He believed that ‘tranquillity’ (the Wordsworthian recipe) narcotises true poetry. The poet, like the kettle, must boil to produce. A few weeks before Graves started on Good-bye to All That, Riding enlarged the ménageto quatre with an Irish literary adventurer. It went all wrong and she jumped out of a fourth-floor window in Hammersmith. Graves followed suit. Both survived.
This story begins nearly four billion years ago, when the Earth was just another rock in just another solar system. In a pool of sludge on that rock, something astonishing happened. A long stringy molecule found a way to copy itself. Similar molecules would later carry the code that would enable life forms to grow, digest, run, breathe, read, launch rockets to the Moon. But for now, that molecule only knew how to do a single, important thing – to reproduce. This was the moment that life emerged. Since then, as each living organism has multiplied, the codes of life have altered by the tiniest increments generation after generation, stretching across time. Most of these mutations have had little impact. Very, very occasionally, they have been extraordinarily useful. The sum of millions of minuscule modifications over billions of generations has given some organisms the ability to survive in water, land, ice or the desert. They have helped them to beat disease, to be stronger, faster, fly. Across the aeons of biological time, this process has led one particular organism – us – to grow large brains, develop opposable thumbs and communicate complex ideas. We’ve mastered fire, tools, technology. In the great span of evolution, this transformation happened a mere split second ago. Degree by degree we continue to change.
Elephants ought to get a lot of cancer. They’re huge animals, weighing as much as eight tons. It takes a lot of cells to make up that much elephant. All of those cells arose from a single fertilized egg, and each time a cell divides, there’s a chance that it will gain a mutation — one that may lead to cancer. Strangely, however, elephants aren’t more prone to cancer than smaller animals. Some research even suggests they 
We (the readers of 3QD; I know there are many people who disagree) can take it as given that Alex Jones is a thoroughly evil person. Someone who spreads false statements that the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook shooting staged the whole thing deserves lots of bad things happening to him, e.g. lose all the money he has made from the web in a defamation suit that the parents have filed, have people boycott his dietary supplement hoax.
Try it: try talking about the subject of reading without drifting off into how the Internet has changed the way we absorb information. I, along with the majority of people I know whose reading habits were formed long before the advent of digital magazines and newspapers, Google Books, blogs, RSS feeds, social media, and Kindle, usually feel I’m only really reading when it’s printed matter, under a reading lamp, with the screen and phone turned off. But the reality is that I do a vast amount of reading online.
Polynesia could swallow up the entire north Atlantic Ocean. It’s that big. 
spanning George Boole to Claude Shannon. By some measures the works of these men combine to give us our modern, programmable computer.
Will you know what to do when the atomic bomb drops? 
The movement for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel – known as BDS – has been driving the world a little bit mad. Since its founding 13 years ago, it has acquired nearly as many enemies as the Israelis and Palestinians combined. It has hindered the efforts of Arab states to fully break their own decades-old boycott in pursuit of increasingly overt cooperation with 
It’s one of the greatest stories in science, right up there with Neil Armstrong’s small step on the moon and Jane Goodall’s 
Nobody wants to feel helpless or desperate. The days of charities showing people as one-dimensional victims are – hopefully – numbered. Theo Sowa, chief executive of the African Women’s Development Fund, has said: “When people portray us as victims, they don’t want to ask about solutions. Because people don’t ask victims for solutions.”
“Hijra,” a term of South Asia which have no exact match in the modern Western taxonomy of gender, designated as male at birth with feminine gender identity and eventually adopts feminine gender roles. They are often grossly labeled as hermaphrodites, eunuchs, transgender or transsexual women in literature. presently a more justified social term for them is the “Third Gender.” Transcending the biological definition, hijras are a social phenomena as a minority group and have a long recorded history in South Asia. However, their overall social acceptance and present conditions of living vary significantly in countries from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. Perhaps the Hijras in Bangladesh face the worst situation, which forces a good number of them to leave their motherland and migrate to India. Instead of coming from various social and family backgrounds, Hijras feel the strongest sense of belonging with their own group—fellow Hijra. These groups give them the shelter of a family and the warmth of human relationship. Outside the group, they are discriminated and scorned almost everywhere. Traditionally, these individuals earned their living based on the cultural belief that Hijras can bless one’s house with prosperity and fertility. Because of the shared geographical and cultural history of the subcontinent, this particular Hindu belief slowly made room in the Muslim culture of this land. Times have changed and Hijras have lost their admired space in the society. Now they make a living by walking around the streets collecting money from shopkeepers, bus and train passengers or through prostitution.