Helen Thomas in Vice:

You might have encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses before as the conservatively dressed religious types knocking on your front door, offering copies of The Watchtower, a free magazine promoting their faith. But there’s a darker side to this religious group, whose estimated 8 million members worldwide believe we are living in the “last days.” For the latest episode of VICE’s Informer series, we spoke to an anonymous former Jehovah’s Witness “elder”—or senior male religious leader—about the prevalence of sexual abuse within the church and what he says is the organization’s reluctance to tackle the problem for fear of bringing the church into disrepute.

“There is a cover-up of sexual abuse. I now know and can tell you with certainty that it is very, very prevalent,” said the man, who is based in the UK and was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness from the age of 5. In response to a request for comment on the allegations, a representative for the Jehovah’s Witnesses in the UK said that the organization “vigorously contest[ed] the baseless allegation” that sexual abuse was very prevalent in the church. However, the organization was aware that “sadly, child sexual abuse is a reality in human society, and that Jehovah’s Witnesses are not immune.”

More here.

Luke Gebel et al in Nature:

The Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, is a world leader in basic biology research. The lab’s list of breakthroughs is enviable, from the structure of DNA and proteins to genetic sequencing. Since its origins in the late 1940s, the institute — currently with around 700 staff members — has produced a dozen Nobel prizewinners, including DNA decipherers James Watson, Francis Crick and Fred Sanger. Four LMB scientists received their awards in the past 15 years: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for determining the structure of ribosomes, Michael Levitt for computer models of chemical reactions, Richard Henderson for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and Gregory Winter for work on the evolution of antibodies (see Figure S1 in Supplementary information; SI). Between 2015 and 2019, more than one-third (36%) of the LMB’s output was in the top 10% of the world’s most-cited papers¹.

What is the secret of the LMB’s success? Many researchers and historians have pointed to its origins in the Cavendish Laboratory, the physics department of the University of Cambridge, UK, where researchers brought techniques such as X-ray crystallography to bear in the messy world of biology. Its pool of exceptional talent, coupled with generous and stable funding from the Medical Research Council (MRC), undoubtedly played a part. However, there is much more to it. None of these discoveries was serendipitous: the lab is organized in a way that increases the likelihood of discoveries.

More here.

Ed Simon at The Millions:

There are two irrefutable axioms that can be made about jazz. The first is that jazz is America’s most significant cultural contribution to the world; the second is that jazz was mostly, though not entirely, a contribution born from the experience and brilliance of America’s Black populace who have rarely been treated as full citizens. Regarding the first claim, if the genre is not America’s “classical music,” for there is a bit of a category mistake in Wynton Marsalis’s contention which judges the music by such standards, then jazz is certainly the most indispensable and quintessential of American creations, surpassing in significance other novelties, from comic books to Hollywood films. Crouch describes Ellington, and by proxy jazz, as “maybe the most American of Americans,” even while the conservative critic was long an advocate for the music as being fundamentally our native “classical” (a role for which he was influential as Marsalis’s adviser as director of jazz at Lincoln Center). The desire to transform jazz into classical music—even my own comparison of Ellington to Bach—is an insulting reduction of the music’s innovation. Jazz doesn’t need to be classical music, it’s already jazz.

more here.

Ken Chen at The Nation:

Fanon’s trickiness lies in how he seduces the reader with a moral outrage that he immediately deconstructs. Starting from a position of anti-colonial fury, his books ascend to a universalist crescendo. This can function like a trap for any reader who wants a monolithic Fanon, whether revolutionary or humanist, nationalist or internationalist, romantic or realist. Rather than stabilize him, we must allow him to be both—sometimes at once but at other times in progression. We must accept the dialectical Fanon, a thinker larger than the mutually defining opposites he described. To understand him, we cannot split him, as the psychiatrists would say. For in protecting Fanon from one aspect of himself, we ultimately end up trying to protect ourselves.

more here.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney,
from Death of a Naturalist.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996

Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review:

With increasing availability and sophistication of chatbots, we teachers are seeing a drastic decline in the cost of what in Great Britain is called “commissioning”—that is, getting someone else to do your academic work for you. There are many forms of academic cheating, at various levels of schooling, but commissioning by university students is the one I want to discuss today.

Long, long ago, in a pre-Internet galaxy far away, commissioning was costly and therefore rare. It was a bespoke commodity: Typically you’d find someone smart and pay him or her to write an essay for you, or even (this could be done only in large lecture classes whose students were anonymous to their professors) take an exam for you. The talent was almost always local; in a large university, cynical or broke graduate students could supplement their meager stipends quite significantly by catering to the anxieties of academically marginal undergrads.

More here.

Lance Fortnow in Quanta:

Once you start thinking about computation, you start to see it everywhere. Take mailing a letter through the postal service. Put the letter in an envelope with an address and a stamp on it, and stick it in a mailbox, and somehow it will end up in the recipient’s mailbox. That is a computational process — a series of operations that move the letter from one place to another until it reaches its final destination. This routing process is not unlike what happens with electronic mail or any other piece of data sent through the internet. Seeing the world in this way may seem odd, but as Friedrich Nietzsche is reputed to have said, “Those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

This innate sense of a machine at work can lend a computational perspective to almost any phenomenon, even one as seemingly inscrutable as the concept of randomness.

More here.

Luke Harding in The Guardian:

What went wrong? As Bristow tells it, the west failed because of bad strategy and a loss of will. After the attacks on the twin towers, a military response from the US and its allies was inevitable. Its goal: to exterminate al-Qaeda. As a young reporter, I watched the Taliban’s northern army surrender outside Mazar-i-Sharif. The five-year-old emirate ended in “a wilderness of shimmering desert and telegraph poles”, I wrote in 2001. It was “vanishing into history”.

This prediction turned out to be wrong. After a period in Pakistan’s tribal regions, the Taliban returned. They waged a brutal and increasingly effective insurgency against international and Afghanistan government troops. The conflict cost billions. Meanwhile, George Bush’s administration invaded Iraq. A surge by the next US president, Barack Obama, didn’t bring results. By 2021, the public had lost interest in Afghanistan, seeing it as a for ever war with few benefits.

Washington and London’s mistake, in Bristow’s view, was to seek a military solution to what was a political problem.

More here.

Benjamin Bratton at Noema Magazine:

What is today called “artificial intelligence” should be counted as a Copernican Trauma in the making. It reveals that intelligence, cognition, even mind (definitions of these historical terms are clearly up for debate) are not what they seem to be, not what they feel like, and not unique to the human condition. Obviously, the creative and technological sapience necessary to artificialize intelligence is a human accomplishment, but now, that sapience is remaking itself. Since the paleolithic cognitive revolution, human intelligence has artificialized many things — shelter, heat, food, energy, images, sounds, even life itself — but now, that intelligence itself is artificializable. Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief provide a useful typology of the Western theory of AI: AI Denial, AI Anger, AI Bargaining, AI Depression and AI Acceptance. These genres of “grief” derive from the real and imagined implications of AI for institutional politics, the division of economic labor and many philosophical and religious traditions.

more here.

Branigin and Chery in The Washington Post:

Gupta and Smith in The New York Times:

B. Ruby Rich at The Current:

Before he made Lilies (1996), the feature that became his grand masterpiece, John Greyson was already known for his groundbreaking work in video. Identified by his irreverent humor, dance-hall pastiches, fierce political commitment, and brash inventiveness, the Canadian artist had amassed a global following through various showcases, including in New York and at the Berlin Film Festival. I met him when he was just starting out as a young man in New York City championing video and, as he would go on to do throughout his career, the work of other artists.

Based on a play by Quebec playwright Michel Marc Bouchard, Lilies was Greyson’s first adaptation and his first work to be made in 35 mm. The film wraps its transgressive themes—forbidden sexuality, race, gender, the Catholic Church, murder, and the miscarriage of justice—in a voluptuous style that alternates polished tableaux of an imagined 1912 with rougher scenes staged forty years later.

more here.

O Taste and See

The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning the Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Denise Levertov
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

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. Azadeh Amirsadri
2. Katalin Balog
3. Gary Borjesson
4. Monte Davis
5. Mark DeLong
6. Eric Feigenbaum
7. John Hartley
8. Xavier Muller
9. Malcolm Murray
10. Laurence Peterson
11. Eleni Petrakou
12. Rachel Robison-Greene
13. Eric Schenck
14. Daniel Shotkin
15. Adele Stanislaus
16. Steve Szilagyi
17. Jeroen van Baar
18. Sander Van de Cruys

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

Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader:

Tempted as I am to lavish consciousness on everything around me, I was fascinated to learn that tobacco and tomato plants click when they are stressed. The frequency is too high for us to hear these distress calls, but mice and moths do. As a plant dehydrates, the clicking speeds up, as though they are nervously cracking their knuckles. The beach evening primrose reacts to the sound of bees buzzing by secreting a sweeter nectar. Deprived of water, plants avoid dehydration by tightening the pores in their leaves. Roots avoid salt in the soil by inching toward areas that are less salty. Grains of starch shift with gravity, telling a plant which way is up. Flowers plan ahead, turning toward the sun before it rises and timing their pollen production to be ready when a pollinator shows up. Plants release volatile chemicals when they are eaten or infected or mowed down (that summertime freshly-mown-grass smell we all rhapsodize about). Neighboring plants receive this communication and take, when possible, defensive measures.

Most astounding, plants learn.

More here.

Frank Celia at Quillette:

By now, you probably know that plastic recycling is a scam. If not, this white paper lays out the case in devastating detail. To summarise, amid calls to reduce plastic garbage in the 1970s and ’80s, the petrochemical industry put forth recycling as a red herring to create the appearance of a solution while it continued to make as much plastic as it pleased. Multiple paper trails indicate that industry leaders knew from the start that recycling could never work at scale. And indeed, it hasn’t. Only about nine percent of plastic worldwide gets recycled, and the US manages only about six percent.

As bad as this is, the situation might actually be much worse. According to an emerging field of study, the facilities that recycle plastic have been spewing massive amounts of toxins called microplastics into local waterways, soil, and air for decades. In other words, the very industry created to solve the plastic-waste problem has only succeeded in making it worse, possibly exponentially so. While the study that kicked off this new field received some press coverage when it appeared last year, the far-ranging import of its findings has yet to be fully integrated into environmental science. If the research is even close to accurate, and to date it has not been substantively challenged, the implications for waste management policies across the globe will be game-changing.

More here.

Louise Perry in The Spectator:

Emerging technology is about to present parents with a set of ethical questions that make the usual kinds of debates – breast milk or formula? Nanny or daycare? – seem trivial. We have always had the power (more or less) to control our children’s nurture. Before long – perhaps in just a few years – any parent who can afford to will have control over the minutest details of a child’s nature too.

The crucial change set to turn our lives upside-down is called ‘preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic disorders’ (PGT-P), hereafter ‘polygenic screening’. Testing a foetus or embryo for some conditions is now a routine part of the modern pregnancy experience. Prenatal Down’s Syndrome tests, for instance, are so widespread that in some Scandinavian countries almost 100 per cent of women choose to abort a foetus diagnosed with the condition, or – if using IVF – not implant the affected embryo. The result is a visible change to these populations: there are simply no more people with Down’s to be seen on the streets of Iceland and Denmark.

More here.