Erica X Eisen at The Paris Review:

In the Chester Beatty Library, there are books made entirely of jade. There are picture scrolls featuring calligraphy by the brother of the Japanese emperor. There are papyrus codices that constitute some of the few surviving texts of Manichaeism, a religion of darkness and light that rivaled Christianity in scale until its last believers died out in fourteenth-century China. There are Armenian hymnals, Renaissance catalogues of war machines, and monographs on native Australian fauna. There is all of this and more—thousands and thousands of other works diverse in period and place of origin, waiting for human eyes. And yet as I walk through the galleries, as I survey the cases of books safe behind their glass, it occurs to me that if a book is a thing meant to be read, then in a certain sense, these objects have lost their function to all but the scholarly epigraphists, backs bent in the private study room. And yet far from becoming something less because of this, the books on display have become something more.

Can we recover a physical literature? Can we recover a literature that is not merely read but felt? The library museum gestures at just such a possibility.

more here.

Melanie McFarland in Salon:

“Castle Rock,” Hulu’s longform series ode to Stephen King debuting Wednesday, is a reminder of how differently people can view the same story. By no means is it a “Rashomon”-type of affair; King’s commercial success is rooted in the fact that his stories are straightforward entertainments, with meanings no more complex than the eternal struggles between light and dark or good versus evil. The same applies to “Castle Rock,” a original creation by Sam Shaw (“Manhattan”) and Dustin Thomason, that is foremost a fairly straightforward pastiche of the horror author’s oeuvre. Those who are well-versed in King’s work, whether on the page or by way of one of the 100-plus screen adaptations of his stories — may welcome the Easter egg hunt it offers by dotting each episode with details and character associations from previous works. The most obvious is the town itself. The average filmgoer is much more likely to recognize the second most important character in Castle Rock other than the town itself: Shawshank State Penitentiary. Even those familiar with King by reputation and little else should recognize the classic narrative of the prodigal son returned, personified here in Henry Deaver.

An attorney who specializes in death row cases, Deaver is lured back to Castle Rock at the behest of an unidentified caller. It’s not a trip he wants to take, but something prods him into going. Henry could be thought of the spiritual sibling to Selena St. George, the accusatory daughter in the film adaptation of “Dolores Claiborne.” Like Selena, it’s implied that Henry left town to escape something in his past that the townsfolk won’t allow him to forget. But a key difference, besides their gender, is that Henry, played by Andre Holland, is black.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In early 2014, Laura Brealey was visiting her daughters in Singapore when she slipped on a marble floor and cracked her hip. She had it replaced, but in the process, the surgeons noticed that her breathing sounded odd, and told her to speak to a respiratory specialist. At her daughtJer’s urging, she did so when she returned home to London, England—and was told that she had lung cancer. The doctors moved quickly. That same August, they cut out part of her right lung, and gave her both radiotherapy and chemotherapy. The tumor disappeared. Things were looking promising. But the following summer, Brealey started experiencing fresh pain in her ribs. The cancer was back. When I meet Brealey in April 2016, in a brightly colored room at University College Hospital, she’s about to start her third drug—a new one called nivolumab that her doctor, a young oncologist named Charlie Swanton, is hopeful about. As he preps her for the new treatment, he is also thinking about how to manage the severe pain that the tumor is causing, as it presses against the nerves that run along Brealey’s ribs. “It hasn’t been easy for Laura,” says Swanton. “When I first told her she couldn’t go back to Singapore to visit her family…”

“… I nearly fell off my chair in shock,” she finishes. Brealey, now 75, has bright blue eyes, short white hair, and preternaturally high spirits. “My best friend’s brother calls me the Indestructible Laura. I’m very active. Before this, I was going to the gym, doing aqua-aerobics, pilates, gardening. Now, I just sleep. This has been a nuisance.” She misses the theater, longs to return to Asia, dreams about going on the Trans-Siberian Railway. When she mentions the tumor that is curtailing all of those plans, she talks as if it was an errant child. “It’s so stubborn,” she says. Brealey’s story is typical. An initial wave of treatments seemed to knock a tumor out, but despite the scalpels, the radiation, and the drugs—not to mention relentless optimism—the tumor recurs, seemingly more resilient than before. Stubborn, as she says. Even the latest drugs, tailored to strike at the specific genetic faults behind a person’s tumor, fail to permanently halt the backswing of a tumor’s pendulum.

More here.

As Lazarus

How deep is deep enough
until I reach the bent rafters
of my own ribcage? I test
the extent of my dimensions. This—

this is an effort of pencil checks,
measuring-tape & desperation.
Behind the drywall of sternum
& knucklebone, I am certain
that the same thing that aches
in the attic is what keeps it
standing. How far down is it?
That place I’m afraid to name.
That place where God lives.

I’m pressing up against the door—
an angry thumb against a tooth,
snapped loose in my mouth.
How long have I been straining
at the concrete slab of my own
foundations, barely making a scratch?
Again—again, I’ve been asking God
for permission to uproot my life
like a weed in the asphalt, to split
the stem of my spine & let me sleep.
Again—again, he keeps telling me no.

by Ian Williams
from Ecotheo Review
July 24, 2018

Tom Fletcher in Prospect:

The Hague, September 2016. The speech from the UN high commissioner for human rights was not expected to ruffle feathers. A mild appeal to our better angels and then back to the canapés—traditionally, as one UN speechwriter puts it, “we don’t use adjectives, we don’t name names.”

But instead of platitudes, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein called out a parade of “xenophobes, populists and racists”: Wilders, Farage, Orbán, Le Pen, Trump and—in the same breath—Islamic State (IS). He shook with rage. The room was stunned into silence, then burst into a standing ovation. One ambassador present calls it “a moment of pure authenticity, emotion and reason.” A friend calls it Zeid’s “quantum leap.” But this was not simply a frustrated UN chief shooting from the hip. “He knew exactly what he was doing,” says his wife, Sarah.

There is an air of battered decency to the UN’s top official on human rights. Partly jet lag and the debilitating wade through undrained swamps of bureaucratic treacle. Partly bearing witness to the worst of humanity. As a junior UN official in Bosnia, he was profoundly marked by the sight of the skull of a child as a trophy on a warlord’s car. In a recent statement on Myanmar, he asked: “What kind of hatred could make a man stab a baby crying out for his mother’s milk. And for the mother to witness this murder while she is being gang-raped by security forces who should be protecting her?”

But the weariness is also something deeper. This is a man watching his worldview come under relentless assault. Zeid was a global citizen before the idea went in and then out of fashion.

More here.

Benjamin Moser in The New Yorker:

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Knight of the Imperial Order of the Rose, founder of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, has long been Brazil’s ambassador to the international society of official writers. He seemed to be preparing for the role for most of his adult life, which was so colorless and conventional it might have been taunting future biographers.

An outstanding employee of the Ministry of Agriculture, Commerce, and Public Works, Machado, like Kafka (of the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute) and Cavafy (of the Third Circle of Irrigation), wore prim suits, lived in nondescript neighborhoods, worked bureaucratic jobs, and rarely stirred from the city where he was born.

These authors looked like emblems of the petit bourgeois, and the gap between their appearance and their writing made them emblems of something else, too—of the inner life pulsing behind the mask that the modern person dons. That gap allowed such writers to take on an electric symbolism. By presenting no outward challenge to their epochs, they could move freely through them—and eventually define them.

Machado “had a half dozen gestures, habits, and pat phrases,” an early biographer, Lúcia Miguel Pereira, wrote, in 1936. He avoided politics. He was an ideal husband. He spent his free time at the bookshop. And, in founding the Academy of Letters, he brought an administrative structure to literature.

Yet to place this image beside his books is to wonder whether such diligence was a carefully calibrated act—and to see why, despite more than a century’s veneration, the vestment of national spokesman will never quite fit. Machado was too ironic, too mischievous, for the pretentions that the official homages imply.

More here.

Jeff Diamant and Kelset Jo Starr over at the Pew Research Center:

To better examine the prevalence of these attitudes, the Center developed a scale to measure the extent of Nationalist, anti-Immigrant and anti-religious Minority (NIM) sentiment. The NIM scale combines answers to 22 survey questions on a wide range of issues including views on Muslims, Jews and immigrants, as well as immigration policy.

Respondents’ scores increased if they said that immigration to their country should be reduced; that they were unwilling to be neighbors or relatives with Muslims or Jews; that immigrants from certain regions are not honest or hardworking; that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with their national culture and values; that being born in their country is important to being “truly French,” “truly German,” etc.; and for expressing a host of other sentiments on related topics. The higher the score, the more likely a respondent had expressed nationalist, anti-immigrant and anti-religious minority sentiments during the survey. Scores on the scale range from 0 to 10.

Relatively few adults in every country surveyed score above 5 on the scale. But there is considerable variation across countries. In Sweden, just 8% of those surveyed scored higher than 5, the lowest amount in any country, while in Italy, 38% did, the highest share in any country. In most countries, the share scoring 5.01 or higher was between 15% and 25%. For example, in both Norway and France, 19% of respondents scored 5.01 or higher.

The NIM scale also provides an opportunity to explore whether factors such as age, political ideology or religious affiliation are associated with these kinds of attitudes.

More here.

Alexander Tesar at The Walrus:

When the acclaimed Inuk film director Zacharias Kunuk attended his first Toronto International Film Festival reception seventeen years ago, he noticed the noise—the deep, resonant mumble of well-dressed partygoers talking over one another, the staccato clink of glasses. In the past, Kunuk had often been the only Inuk at these kinds of parties, which had few analogues in his home of Igloolik, Nunavut. This time, he spotted a few tawny patches of hide amongst the cotton and polyester: some members of his cast who were invited to attend were wearing traditional clothing. Suddenly, he realized what was familiar about the sound: the glamorous party sounded like a herd of walruses.

Kunuk no longer feels out of place at these sorts of events. The film he premiered at that festival, Atanarjuat (The Fast Runner), won the Caméra d’Or at the 2001 Cannes film festival and has been called the best Canadian movie ever made.

more here.

Death is Smaller Than I Thought

My Mother and Father died some years ago
I loved them very much.
When they died my love for them
Did not vanish or fade away.
It stayed just about the same,
Only a sadder colour.
And I can feel their love for me,
Same as it ever was.

Nowadays, in good times or bad,
I sometimes ask my Mother and Father
To walk beside me or to sit with me
So we can talk together
Or be silent.

They always come to me.
I talk to them and listen to them
And think I hear them talk to me.
It’s very simple –
Nothing to do with spiritualism
Or religion or mumbo jumbo.

It is imaginary.
It is real.
It is love.

by Adrian Mitchell
from: In Person: 30 Poets
Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2008
ISBN: 9781852248000

Valérie Rousseau at The Brooklyn Rail:

By conceiving the notion of art brutin a Europe devastated by the Second World War, French artist Jean Dubuffet questioned the underlying pretense behind the processes of artistic legitimization, dispossessing those authorities empowered to legislate in the art world. He also insisted on the flexible nature of definitions, maintaining that art brutcould incessantly evolve depending on the context of its emergence, knowing that the norm and the margins are perpetually reassessed. Without an art movement or identifiable style, art brut is not a category, but an evolving critical concept. Above all, as observed Céline Delavaux, Dubuffet likely proposed a singular, even poetic and literary way of thinking about art, “It is in the absence of the voice of the madman, the excluded, the uneducated, that his radically subjective art discourse was invented.”

more here.

Samuel Collins at Marginalia:

Herein lies the difference between the popular reception of a discovery like the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife and the war-gear of the Staffordshire Hoard. Never in the coverage of the hoard and its discovery was there any serious suggestion that there is a political or ethnic community anywhere that is, in any Jeffersonian sense, the lineal descendants of the makers of the hoard. Past politics, in this reading, is just that: the stuff of the past. No one raised the idea that the understanding of modern politics or political identities might be somehow altered by the hoard, or that that those who used and buried the hoard share any important connection to the political communities of modern Britain or elsewhere. All the popular writing that was done about the hoard, still only a small fraction of the ink spilled over the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, keep the hoard firmly situated in a remote and unfamiliar past, one where it makes sense to summon up as points of comparison either unrelated but spectacular treasures (“Staffordshire’s Tutankhamen”as a the BBC’s Antiques Roadshow put it) or Middle Earth or Westeros.

more here.

Sigal Samuel in The Atlantic:

Imagine you’re the president of a European country. You’re slated to take in 50,000 refugees from the Middle East this year. Most of them are very religious, while most of your population is very secular. You want to integrate the newcomers seamlessly, minimizing the risk of economic malaise or violence, but you have limited resources. One of your advisers tells you to invest in the refugees’ education; another says providing jobs is the key; yet another insists the most important thing is giving the youth opportunities to socialize with local kids. What do you do? Well, you make your best guess and hope the policy you chose works out. But it might not. Even a policy that yielded great results in another place or time may fail miserably in your particular country under its present circumstances. If that happens, you might find yourself wishing you could hit a giant reset button and run the whole experiment over again, this time choosing a different policy. But of course, you can’t experiment like that, not with real people.

You can, however, experiment like that with virtual people. And that’s exactly what the Modeling Religion Project does. An international team of computer scientists, philosophers, religion scholars, and others are collaborating to build computer models that they populate with thousands of virtual people, or “agents.” As the agents interact with each other and with shifting conditions in their artificial environment, their attributes and beliefs—levels of economic security, of education, of religiosity, and so on—can change. At the outset, the researchers program the agents to mimic the attributes and beliefs of a real country’s population using survey data from that country. They also “train” the model on a set of empirically validated social-science rules about how humans tend to interact under various pressures.  And then they experiment: Add in 50,000 newcomers, say, and invest heavily in education. How does the artificial society change? The model tells you. Don’t like it? Just hit that reset button and try a different policy.  The goal of the project is to give politicians an empirical tool that will help them assess competing policy options so they can choose the most effective one. It’s a noble idea: If leaders can use artificial intelligence to predict which policy will produce the best outcome, maybe we’ll end up with a healthier and happier world. But it’s also a dangerous idea: What’s “best” is in the eye of the beholder, after all.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

In the largest genetics study ever published in a scientific journal, an international team of scientists on Monday identified more than a thousand variations in human genes that influence how long people stay in school. Educational attainment has attracted great interest from researchers in recent years, because it is linked to many other aspects of people’s lives, including their income as adults, overall health and even life span. The newly discovered gene variants account for just a fraction of the differences in education observed between groups of people. Environmental influences, which may include family wealth or parental education, together play a bigger role. Still, scientists have long known that genetic makeup explains some of the differences in time spent in school. Their hope is that the data can be used to gain a better understanding of what educators must do to keep children in school longer. With a fuller understanding of the influences exerted by genes, scientists think they will be able to better measure what happens when they try to improve a child’s learning environment. The new study, published in the journal Nature Genetics, finds that many of the genetic variations implicated in educational attainment are involved in how neurons communicate in the brain. A striking number are involved in relaying signals out of neurons and into neighboring ones through connections called synapses. The findings are based on genetic sequencing of more than 1.1 million people. But the subjects were all white people of European descent. In order to maximize the odds of discovering genetic links, the scientists say they needed a very large, homogeneous sample.

When the team tried to use these genetic variants to explain differences in schooling time among African-Americans, the predictions failed. The researchers also found that genes don’t have a uniform effect: The influences of the genes varied from country to country. The researchers could not pinpoint the cause of these differences. But if educators in one country emphasize memory over problem-solving in math classes, for example, then some gene variants may provide a bigger benefit to some students than others, the scientists speculated. A truly global understanding of these genetic influences will require similarly huge studies of people of other ancestries, the researchers said.

More here.

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 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 (for example, a lot of philosophers applied this year). Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Abigail Akavia
2. Samia Altaf
3. Pranab Bardhan
4. Jeroen Bouterse
5. Nickolas Calabrese
6. Niall Chithelen
7. Shawn Crawford
8. Timothy Don
9. Robert Fay
10. Joan Harvey
11. Mary Hrovat
12. Lexi Lerner
13. Bill Murray
14. Thomas  O’Dwyer
15. Anitra Pavlico
16. Ahmad Saidullah
17. Andrea Scrima
18. Joseph Shieber
19. Tim Sommers
20. Adele Stanislaus
21. Joshua  Wilbur

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “About Us” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers no later than 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 columnists!

Best wishes,

Abbas