Carole Desbarats at Eurozine:

In 1962, Lévi-Strauss published La Pensée Sauvage, the same year as two essential films: La Jetée and Le Joli Mai. Lévi-Strauss also puts forward a certain form of subjectivity when he states that the improviser does not ‘limit himself to accomplishing or carrying out, he “speaks”. Not only with things … but also by means of things: relating, through the choices that he makes between a limited range of things, the character and life of the author, without ever fulfilling his project, the improviser always puts into it something of himself.’ Concluding his reflection, Lévi-Strauss situates the artist midway between scientific knowledge and magical thinking.

At the start, Lévi-Strauss explains improvisation as being based on two absences: that of a plan completely set out in advance and that of a hierarchy in terms of the materials used. He contrasts improvisation with an engineer’s plan and attributes it to ‘savage’, or at least non-western thinking. Leaving this cultural dimension aside, let us concentrate on Lévi-Strauss’s celebration of a practice often denigrated by those for whom only organized, rational procedures are worthy of interest.

more here.

Margaret Drabble at the TLS:

Independent and self-reliant, Spark was not an ideological feminist, although she portrayed strong and self-willed women, ranging from school teachers to film stars, abbesses, terrorists and billionaires. Even her admirers (among them Joyce Carol Oates, Ali Smith and Elaine Feinstein) use words such as “arch”, “pert” and “sly” to describe her prose, compliments which some feminists might reject as sexist. Catholics see her as a Catholic writer, but while her work has something in common with that of her supporter Graham Greene, her attitudes to her faith are far from conventional. Frank Kermode (who thought Spark “our best novelist”) describes her religion as “bafflingly idiosyncratic”. She wrote of sin and suffering, liked to split theological hairs, and was particularly drawn to the Book of Job, but many of her portraits of believers are caustic in the extreme. The devout, gullible and multiple-bosomed Mrs Hogg in her first novel, The Comforters(1957), the pig-eyed treacherous convert Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the divinely wicked Abbess of Crewe and her silly flock, and the camp and parasitical Jesuits, Father Cuthbert Plaice and Father Gerard Harvey (scholar of ecological paganism) in The Takeover (1976), do not show the Church in a good light. The whisky priests and tormented adulterers of Greene fare better at the hands of their creator. This can be puzzling to readers of other faiths or none, though Greene, Evelyn Waugh and David Lodge – all fellow Catholics, and all admirers of Spark – do not seem to discern meaningful incongruities between faith and art.

more here.

Avi Shilon at Literary Review:

The secret of his leadership lies in a profound pessimism that is reflected in his approach to the conflict (and, to an extent, to life). It’s a pessimism that is regarded as realism by most Israelis. The fact that the evaporation of hope in the peace process has been accompanied in recent years by an economic and cultural boom in Israel has enabled him to justify his policy, exacerbating the frustration of the liberal camp in Israel, which, as in many other parts of the Western world, is in decline.

Pfeffer accurately describes Netanyahu’s success in winning over Israel’s lower class, despite the fact that he was born to an elite family, and in channelling the anger of many Mizrahi Jews and right-wing Israelis towards the old elites and the media for his own benefit. In this respect, Bibi is both a uniquely Israeli phenomenon and part of an international trend of populist leaders who exploit democratic systems in order to amplify their own power, at the same time weakening the mechanisms that are essential for protecting democracy.

more here.

”  The sickening images of children cruelly separated from their parents
and held in cages as a result of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ policy of
‘zero-tolerance’ will leave an indelible stain on the reputation of the USA…”
………………………………………………………………. —Amnesty International

Voyage

Imagine you lived
in a ravaged place, your house
shaking with the loud calls of rage
at uncontrollable forces, the calls
spilling into the street. And now
the house is gone, and during the long fire
that swept through the city
as a Hand dusts a table,
you were taken from the destruction and death
of those who knew you, and you labor among another people,
now, in their language, who feed you
from their bowls and also teach you,
on the leaf-strewn ground, their dancing. Still,
you cannot go home. When you look at the grasses here,
they are not yours; when you rest your forehead on the table
or run your hand over the bedding
that you lay in last night
with the one who holds you
wildly, carefully, these are not yours. It is possible that, if you
displease,
if your voice does not lilt, anything could be taken from you.
Imagine that when you kneel down in the sand by the river
you see instead the ashes and bone chips
that are what’s left of your people now, and when you try to
hold
a handful to you, even that is merely the luminous green
river silt. You cannot remember their voices
under the river of other voices.
How then are you to sing in a strange land?

by Sharon Kraus
from Strange Land
University Press of Florida, 2001

Eugenia Loli in Two Serious Ladies:

More here.

Katie Schneider in New York Magazine:

To be clear: A migraine is not a headache, and people with migraines don’t like their condition being called one. It’s not that headaches aren’t part of a migraine: They are. But a headache is a single symptom of a multifaceted neurological disease — one that includes loss of vision, intense nausea, and sensitivity to light and sound. And those are just the common side effects. Some sufferers find themselves yawning compulsively, slurring their speech, and losing sensation on one side of the body. Some migraineurs (yes, that is the technically accurate moniker for migraine sufferers) start seeing big things as small — a side effect dubbed “Alice in Wonderland syndrome” by doctors. Nonetheless, for as long as they have existed, migraines have been trivialized as headaches or dismissed altogether. Which is clear when you look at the treatments available: Almost every drug used between 1550 B.C. and today has been a repurposed one. Poultices of opium and honey, botox, anti-convulsant drugs, antidepressants, beta blockers — drugs whose efficacy was not intended but stumbled upon. Triptan, a class of vessel constrictors created to abort and lessen the effects of (not prevent) attacks at their onset was released in 1991. It was the only class of drug created specifically for migraines — that is, until now. On May 17, a preventative drug called Aimovig, 30 years in the making, gained FDA approval; it’s a monthly shot that modulates patients’ levels of CGRP, a neurotransmitter whose levels rise during migraine attacks. This means that it is days away from getting in the hands (or arms — it’s an injectable) of migraineurs. At at least for those who are able to pay full price: The drug costs $6,900 a year, or $575 per treatment.

That it took until 2018 to produce a drug that could help up to 39 million people in the U.S. alone — 18 percent of all American women, 6 percent of men, and 10 percent of children — is mostly due to a long-standing misunderstanding of what happens in a person’s body during a migraine attack, says neurologist Dr. Peter Goadsby, the director of the UCSF Headache Center. Until the advancement of imaging technology in the 1990s, migraines were entirely invisible. But it also has to do with the fact that women most commonly inherit the disease. One out of four women will experience migraine in their lives, three times as many as men—likely because hormonal fluctuations are a major migraine trigger.

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 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. Please click on “Read more” below.

New posts below!

Read more »

Eric Schliesser in Digressions & Impressions:

Regular readers know (recall) that I believe the second wave of liberalism+ has ended and that it may not survive the present darkness. (In brief: first long wave: 1776-1914; second wave: 1945-2009. Some readers will say, good riddance, and to you I say, I hope you do better.) The present crisis is much visible in our daily politics (and headlines), shifting public norms, and the rising confidence of regimes and thinkers who, again, openly espouse hierarchical, ethnic, zero-sum, eugenic, and violent solutions to present conflicts.* While there is much urgent, practical work to be done to salvage institutions that may be at the core of a renewal, some reflection away from daily politics is also required. Perhaps, a way forward can be found if we articulate and invite reflection on unresolved short-comings of the liberal tradition today. I think this is urgent not just because we need polities that make minimal decency possible,** but also because we need (or so I assume today) liberal institutions to meet humanity’s great challenges — environmental disaster, genetic engineering, drone warfare — ahead.

Before I do so I mention two qualifications: first, even though there is no shortage of criticism, much of it has been calling attention to features not bugs of liberalism: that it is disruptive of tradition, that it embraces markets, that it is cosmopolitan, that it prefers muddling through and compromise over decisive action, that it requires living with uncertainty, and that it effaces any distinction between higher and lower pleasures and goods. The critics who complain about these features can show us what is found unattractive in liberalism, and surely teach us much about the costs of embracing liberalism, but they cannot point the way to a better, revived form of liberalism.

More here.

From the BBC:

Franklin D Roosevelt, who became President in 1933, introduced a series of measures called the New Deal to help counteract the effects of The Great Depression.

The Farm Security Administration was set up to assist farmers and agricultural workers. As well as administering the distribution of loans and providing vital services like healthcare, the FSA employed some of the 20th Century’s finest photographers to document the lives of Americans in need.

Perhaps the best-known photograph from the project was Migrant Mother, an image Dorethea Lange took in a pea-pickers camp in Nipomo, California.

Writing in 1960, Lange said: “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

“We cured alcoholism in every rat we ever tried,” says Heilig, who is now at Linköping University in Sweden. “And at the end of every paper, we wrote: This will lead to an exciting treatment. But everything we took from these animal models to the clinic failed. We needed to go back to the drawing board.”

Heilig doesn’t buy that mice and rats have nothing to teach us about addiction. It’s more that researchers have been studying them in the wrong way. Typically, they’ll let the animals self-administer drugs by pressing a lever, which they almost always learn to do. That should have been a red flag. When humans regularly drink alcohol, only 15 percent or so become dependent on the stuff. Why them and not the other 85 percent? That’s the crucial question, and you won’t answer it with an experiment in which every rodent becomes addicted.

More here.

Melik Kaylan in Forbes:

Anyone with a pundit’s opinion about the election in Turkey seemed to feel that it was, in some way or other, the ‘most important’ one in.. well.. in a generation, in modern times, possibly ever. Yet it was hardly as pivotal as the referendum a year ago when Recep Tayyip Erdogan barely scraped a majority to move all executive power to the Presidency where he presided. After that, his triumph in the recent June 24^th balloting was a foregone conclusion. Because we know this much about populist authoritarians hiding behind the legitimacy of plebiscites: they never lose. They don’t leave things to chance. They orchestrate the media, the opinion polls, the electoral commissions, the permits for rallies, political party funders, last-minute money printing, naturalization of foreigners, and the police who arrest opposition candidates.

Yet in country after country, global newsmedia endorses the outcome every time despite ‘a few’ anomalous instances of gerrymandering, ballot-stuffing, large scale location shifting, bullying and intimidation at voting centers and much else. Always, we are told, that the winner is clearly ‘still’ very popular in his country. We heard this about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and then his successor Nicolas Maduro. Sisi in Egypt. We keep hearing it about Putin. And repeatedly about Erdogan.

More here.

Jessica Brown in The Guardian:

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else,” wrote Earnest Becker in his book, The Denial of Death. It’s a fear strong enough to compel us to force kale down our throats, run sweatily on a treadmill at 7am on a Monday morning, and show our genitals to a stranger with cold hands and a white coat if we feel something’s a little off. But our impending end isn’t just a benevolent supplier of healthy behaviours. Researchers have found death can determine our prejudices, whether we give to charity or wear sun cream, our desire to be famous, what type of leader we vote for, how we name our children and even how we feel about breastfeeding.

And, of course, it terrifies us. Death anxiety appears to be at the core of several mental health disorders, including health anxiety, panic disorder and depressive disorders. And we’re too scared to talk about it. A ComRes surveyfrom 2014 found that eight in ten Brits are uncomfortable talking about death, and only a third have written a will. But we don’t need to worry so much, according to new research comparing our perception of what it’s like to die with the accounts people facing imminent death. Researchers analysed the writing of regular bloggers with either terminal cancer or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) who all died over the course of the study, and compared it to blog posts written by a group of participants who were told to imagine they had been diagnosed with terminal cancer and only had only a few months to live. They looked for general feelings of positivity and negativity, and words describing positive and negative emotions including happiness, fear and terror.

More here.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner in The New York Times:

Jonathan Franzen now lives in a humble, perfectly nice two-story house in Santa Cruz, Calif., on a street that looks exactly like a lot of other streets in America and that, save for a few cosmetic choices, looks exactly like every other house on the block. Santa Cruz, he says, is a “little pocket of the ’70s that persisted.” Inside his house, there is art of birds — paintings and drawings and figurines. Outside, in the back, there are actual birds, and a small patio, with a four-person wrought-iron dining set, and beyond that, a shock: a vast, deep ravine, which you would never guess existed behind the homes on such a same-looking street, but there it is. There is so much depth and flora to it, so much nature, so many birds — whose species Franzen names as they whiz by our faces — that you almost don’t notice the ocean beyond.

He had been reluctant to move here. He played a game of chicken with the woman he calls his “spouse equivalent” (“I hate the word ‘partner’ so much”), the writer Kathryn Chetkovich, telling her that he would never live here and that she should instead move to New York, where he was living in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side. He still keeps an apartment there. He doesn’t miss Yorkville, which he calls the “last middle-class neighborhood in Manhattan,” though he’s pretty sure the new Second Avenue subway will change all that. Things were changing so fast as it was. The stores he loved kept closing. His favorite produce market, owned by a nice Greek couple, had been supplanted by a bank, and the Food Emporium he reluctantly shopped at became a Gristedes that resembled a Soviet-era rations market. But where are you going to live? The Upper West Side? Best of luck. Each east-west block is nearly a quarter of a mile. “You need to bring a pup tent if you’re walking between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue. It’s like, ‘Bring supplies!’ ”

It’s a different world here in Santa Cruz, an easier place to seclude yourself, to find some anonymity. You can interact on your own terms. Franzen and Chetkovich play mixed doubles with their friends and host game nights. They work out with a trainer named Jason twice a week, who was in a truly open adoption in the 1980s, a time when that was almost unheard-of in this country, which Franzen finds very interesting. Jason administers a workout that is “terrible,” though Franzen, who is 58, has grown to love it: push presses, 400-meter flat-out rowing. He likes to fool around on the guitar that sits in a cradle in the living room, “a better guitar than my advanced beginner status deserves,” trying to learn Chuck Berry and Neil Young songs from YouTube demos.

More here.

Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay
is Mistaken for Both the African American Post Terrance Hayes
and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom
Looks Anything Like the Others

If you think you know enough to say this poem
is about good hair, I’ll correct you
and tell you it’s about history
which is the blacksmith of our tongues.
Our eyes. Where you see misunderstanding
I see knuckles and teeth for sale
in a storefront window. I see the waterlogged
face of a fourteen-year-old boy.
The bullet’s imperceptible sizzle
toward an unarmed man. And as you ask me to sign the book
that is not mine, your gaze shifting between
me and the author’s photo, whispering,
but that’s not you? I do not
feel sorry for you. No. I think only that when a man
is a concept he will tell you about the smell
of smoke. He will tell you the distance
between heartbreak and rage.

by Ross Gay
from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders went to have dinner at a local restaurant the other day. The owner, who is adamantly opposed to the policies of the Trump administration, politely asked her to leave, and she did. Now (who says human behavior is hard to predict?) an intense discussion has broken out concerning the role of civility in public discourse and our daily life. The Washington Post editorial board, in particular, called for public officials to be allowed to eat in peace, and people have responded in volume.

I don’t have a tweet-length response to this, as I think the issue is more complex than people want to make it out to be. I am pretty far out to one extreme when it comes to the importance of engaging constructively with people with whom we disagree. We live in a liberal democracy, and we should value the importance of getting along even in the face of fundamentally different values, much less specific political stances. Not everyone is worth talking to, but I prefer to err on the side of trying to listen to and speak with as wide a spectrum of people as I can. Hell, maybe I am even wrong and could learn something.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

Early on in the study of quantum computers, computer scientists posed a question whose answer, they knew, would reveal something deep about the power of these futuristic machines. Twenty-five years later, it’s been all but solved. In a paper posted online at the end of May, computer scientists Ran Raz and Avishay Tal provide strong evidence that quantum computers possess a computing capacity beyond anything classical computers could ever achieve.

Raz, a professor at Princeton University and the Weizmann Institute of Science, and Tal, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, define a specific kind of computational problem. They prove, with a certain caveat, that quantum computers could handle the problem efficiently while traditional computers would bog down forever trying to solve it. Computer scientists have been looking for such a problem since 1993, when they first defined a class of problems known as “BQP,” which encompasses all problems that quantum computers can solve.

Since then, computer scientists have hoped to contrast BQP with a class of problems known as “PH,” which encompasses all the problems workable by any possible classical computer — even unfathomably advanced ones engineered by some future civilization. Making that contrast depended on finding a problem that could be proven to be in BQP but not in PH. And now, Raz and Tal have done it.

More here.

Darren Aronofsky at CNN:

I became aware of his utter lack of vanity. He never adjusted his hair or gave a damn about makeup or a lighting setup.

He was always dressed perfectly for whatever we were doing — never flashy, never understated. He just showed up, and he worked. I have rarely witnessed talent on his scale be so willingly present and real.

Tony was just himself: humble, confident, authentic, mischievous, kind. He greeted every fan’s request for a selfie with patience and a smile.

We spent long hours on rough roads traversing the country, sometimes talking about our favorite road movies (Preston Sturges’ “Sullivan’s Travels” by unanimous decision).

And every night we’d retreat to a basket of momos (Bhutanese dumplings) and a couple of fingers of Jack.

More here.

William Langewiesche in The Atlantic:

The B-2 stealth bomber is the world’s most exotic strategic aircraft, a subsonic flying wing meant to be difficult for air defenses to detect—whether by radar or other means—yet capable of carrying nearly the same payload as the massive B-52. It came into service in the late 1990s primarily for use in a potential nuclear war with the Soviet Union, and clearly as a first-strike weapon rather than a retaliatory one. First-strike weapons have destabilizing, not deterrent, effects. It is probably just as well that the stealth bomber was not quite as stealthy as it was meant to be, and was so expensive—at $2.1 billion each—that only 21 were built before Congress refused to pay for more. Nineteen of them are now stationed close to the geographic center of the contiguous United States, in the desolate farmland of central Missouri, at Whiteman Air Force Base. They are part of the 509th Bomb Wing, and until recently were commanded by Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets IV, whose grandfather dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. B-2 bombers are still primarily regarded as a nuclear-delivery system, meaning that their crews are by selection the sort of men and women capable of defining success as a precisely flown sortie at the outset of mass annihilation. No one should doubt that, if given the order to launch a nuclear attack, these crews would carry it out. In the meantime, they have occasionally flown missions of a different sort—make-work projects such as saber rattling over the Korean peninsula, and the opening salvos in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq—to tactical advantage without American discomfort.

Such was the state of affairs in the small hours of the morning at Whiteman on January 17, 2017, during the last days of the Obama administration. Six years had passed since any B-2 had flown in combat. But now, in the privacy of their bespoke, climate-controlled, single-occupancy hangars, several of them had been loaded with 80 GPS-guided bombs for use against enemies who had been spotted on the ground in a faraway country. The preparations had been hushed: Relatively few people on the base, even among those assembling and loading the bombs, knew that this was something other than a training run.

More here.