Dear Readers and Writers,

First of all, I want to thank all the people who have sent me excellent samples of their writing as a response to our call for new Monday Magazine columnists. I had promised that I would announce the names of the new people who will be writing for us today but, after doing some thinking and talking to various colleagues and friends, I am not going to do that and here’s the reason: among the approximately 40 excellent people who have applied, there is not a single woman. This is very strange and nothing like it has ever happened before at 3QD. While we do not follow anything like quotas and basically make our decisions based on the quality of the pieces submitted, this complete lack of women applicants is so anomalous that it has caused me to think hard about what we might be doing to discourage women from applying. I have spoken to a couple of experts on diversity in hiring about this and even ran the text of my initial call for writers through an AI-based program which tries to identify language which might not appeal to certain groups of people (based on a deep-learning analysis of several hundred million job descriptions and responses to them) but it had little criticism of what I had written and even diagnosed my writing as “slightly feminine”.

One woman whom I asked for advice said to me that, “Sometimes the problem is not what you say but what you don’t say”. This struck me as sensible and so I would like to open up the window for submissions for another 5 days to everyone again after saying this:

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?

The new deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm, Friday, July 20, 2018 (New York Time). Please click here for details of what to send if you want to write for us. I now plan to announce whom we’ll be taking next Monday, July 23, 2018. Sorry about the delay.

Best wishes,

Abbas

New Posts Below

Kenneth Roth and Salil Shetty in Foreign Policy in Focus:

Four years ago, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International—joining hundreds of others—urged the United Nations Security Council to send atrocity crimes committed in Syria to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution. Then, the conflict had already claimed 100,000 lives, overwhelmingly civilians. Today, the death toll is estimated at over half a million, with each day bringing new violations and unlawful killings.

Yet the ICC has been unable to act. Russia’s veto at the Security Council continues to block a path to justice for Syria’s victims. Other council members, including the United States, have also used or threatened to use their veto to block action on other atrocity crimes.

This sad situation is a far cry from the summer of 1998, when many governments with the support of nongovernmental organizations came together in Rome to create the ICC. Many of the major powers including the US opposed the effort, but smaller and medium-sized governments seized what turned out to be a fleeting moment. With a post-cold war faith in multilateralism and a resolve driven by genocide in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, these governments acted on longstanding but unrealized ambitions for a permanent, global criminal court. The Rome Statute, the court’s founding document, was adopted on July 17, 1998, and the court was set up four years later.

More here.

W. Ralph Eubanks in The Hedgehog Review:

The obelisk bearing the chiseled gray-granite face of a Confederate soldier enters my field of vision each morning as I stroll across campus. After forty years away from Mississippi, I returned last year to teach at my alma mater, Ole Miss. Having entered the University of Mississippi in 1974, only twelve years after James Meredith shattered the color barrier, I was one of about fifty black students in a freshman class of more than 800, African Americans then making up less than 5 percent of the entire student body.

During my time as a student at Ole Miss, the culture, heritage, and traditions of the university stood as obdurate barriers to a black person attempting to feel part of the university, much less at home in it. And though Ole Miss and the state of Mississippi more broadly have since made certain commendable strides in reckoning with the past, the statue is a reminder of how the forces of race and history remain in constant collision, and of how the misinterpretation of the past can sometimes overshadow historical reality.

“Most white Americans are obviously and often all too unconsciously committed to White Anglo-Saxon Protestant supremacy,” wrote the essayist and critic Albert Murray more than forty years ago in his enduring reflections on our nation’s “mulatto” culture, The Omni-Americans. What we are witnessing today, however, is quite conscious.

More here.

Tania James in the New York Times:

In Tamil, farewells are never final. As Akil Kumarasamy pointed out in a 2017 interview, the Tamil equivalent of goodbye is poyittu varen, meaning “I’ll go and return.” These are parting words especially suited to the refugee: ever running away, ever looking back.

Kumarasamy poignantly illustrates this tension in her debut story collection, “Half Gods.” Across decades and continents, her characters are haunted by catastrophic violence, their emotional scars passed from one generation to the next.

Wisely, Kumarasamy takes a muted approach to the violence. In “The Office of Missing Persons,” a Sri Lankan Tamil father engages with the police to find his teenage son — this during the final and bloodiest phase of the nearly 30-year Sri Lankan civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the separatist Tamil Tigers. From the outset, it’s obvious that Jeganathan, an entomologist beloved for his research by the Sinhalese government, will never find his son, and so the story’s momentum feeds on a growing dread that is crystallized when “the officer asked for Jeganathan’s son’s name and he knew it was a trick. He needed his name to find him and then have reason not to find him.” Between those lines exists an entire world in which killing a man is as easy as erasing his name from a ledger of missing persons.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

Last month, the artificial intelligence company DeepMind introduced new software that can take a single image of a few objects in a virtual room and, without human guidance, infer what the three-dimensional scene looks like from entirely new vantage points. Given just a handful of such pictures, the system, dubbed the Generative Query Network, or GQN, can successfully model the layout of a simple, video game-style maze.

There are obvious technological applications for GQN, but it has also caught the eye of neuroscientists, who are particularly interested in the training algorithm it uses to learn how to perform its tasks. From the presented image, GQN generates predictions about what a scene should look like — where objects should be located, how shadows should fall against surfaces, which areas should be visible or hidden based on certain perspectives — and uses the differences between those predictions and its actual observations to improve the accuracy of the predictions it will make in the future. “It was the difference between reality and the prediction that enabled the updating of the model,” said Ali Eslami, one of the project’s leaders.

According to Danilo Rezende, Eslami’s co-author and DeepMind colleague, “the algorithm changes the parameters of its [predictive] model in such a way that next time, when it encounters the same situation, it will be less surprised.”

Neuroscientists have long suspected that a similar mechanism drives how the brain works.

More here.

Aida Edemariam in The Guardian:

On Sunday night, Michael Ondaatje stepped on to the wide stage of the Royal Festival Hall in London. He found a lectern and, white head bowed, reached into his pocket for a small piece of paper. “It began with a small night conversation between a burned patient and a nurse,” he said. “I did not know at first where it was taking place, or who the two characters were. I thought it might be a brief novella – all dialogue, European-style, big type.”

The audience laughed. Because what actually turned up, of course, was The English Patient: 300-plus pages about four people inhabiting the mined rooms of a remote Italian villa at the end of the second world war; four very different people who meet in damaged solitude, who talk (there are a lot of night conversations), who love, whose histories, revealed in vivid flashes, become a taut, outraged meditation on the idea of war, of nationalism and of prejudice; a meditation that slips between spies and explorers, Suffolk and the Egyptian desert; the Punjab and Women’s College Hospital, Toronto, as easily as the sapper, Kip, slips into bomb craters to defuse bombs.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqaL9so8CHQ

John Carreyrou in Wired:

ALAN BEAM WAS sitting in his office reviewing lab reports when Theranos CEO and founder Elizabeth Holmes poked her head in and asked him to follow her. She wanted to show him something. They stepped outside the lab into an area of open office space where other employees had gathered. At her signal, a technician pricked a volunteer’s finger, then applied a transparent plastic implement shaped like a miniature rocket to the blood oozing from it. This was the Theranos sample collection device. Its tip collected the blood and transferred it to two little engines at the rocket’s base. The engines weren’t really engines: They were nanotainers. To complete the transfer, you pushed the nanotainers into the belly of the plastic rocket like a plunger. The movement created a vacuum that sucked the blood into them. Or at least that was the idea. But in this instance, things didn’t go quite as planned. When the technician pushed the tiny twin tubes into the device, there was a loud pop and blood splattered everywhere. One of the nanotainers had just exploded. Holmes looked unfazed. “OK, let’s try that again,” she said calmly. Beam¹ wasn’t sure what to make of the scene. He’d only been working at Theranos, the Silicon Valley company that promised to offer fast, cheap blood tests from a single drop of blood, for a few weeks and was still trying to get his bearings.

He knew the nanotainer was part of the company’s proprietary blood-testing system, but he’d never seen one in action before. He hoped this was just a small mishap that didn’t portend bigger problems. The lanky pathologist’s circuitous route to Silicon Valley had started in South Africa, where he grew up. After majoring in English at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (“Wits” to South Africans), he’d moved to the United States to take premed classes at Columbia University in New York City. The choice was guided by his conservative Jewish parents, who considered only a few professions acceptable for their son: law, business, and medicine.

More here.

Heather MacDonald in City Journal:

Identity politics has engulfed the humanities and social sciences on American campuses; now it is taking over the hard sciences. The STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math—are under attack for being insufficiently “diverse.” The pressure to increase the representation of females, blacks, and Hispanics comes from the federal government, university administrators, and scientific societies themselves. That pressure is changing how science is taught and how scientific qualifications are evaluated. The results will be disastrous for scientific innovation and for American competitiveness. A scientist at UCLA reports: “All across the country the big question now in STEM is: how can we promote more women and minorities by ‘changing’ (i.e., lowering) the requirements we had previously set for graduate level study?” Mathematical problem-solving is being deemphasized in favor of more qualitative group projects; the pace of undergraduate physics education is being slowed down so that no one gets left behind.

Stephen Asma in the New York Times:

It’s a tough time to defend religion. Respect for it has diminished in almost every corner of modern life — not just among atheists and intellectuals, but among the wider public, too. And the next generation of young people looks likely to be the most religiously unaffiliated demographic in recent memory.

There are good reasons for this discontent: continued revelations of abuse by priests and clerics, jihad campaigns against “infidels” and homegrown Christian hostility toward diversity and secular culture. This convergence of bad behavior and bad press has led many to echo the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson’s claim that “for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths.”

Despite the very real problems with religion — and my own historical skepticism toward it — I don’t subscribe to that view. I would like to argue here, in fact, that we still need religion. Perhaps a story is a good way to begin.

One day, after pompously lecturing a class of undergraduates about the incoherence of monotheism, I was approached by a shy student. He nervously stuttered through a heartbreaking story, one that slowly unraveled my own convictions and assumptions about religion.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

The oldest stone tools outside Africa have been discovered in western China, scientists reported on Wednesday. Made by ancient members of the human lineage, called hominins, the chipped rocks are estimated to be as much as 2.1 million years old.

The find may add a new chapter to the story of hominin evolution, suggesting that some of these species left Africa far earlier than once believed and managed to travel over 8,000 miles east of their evolutionary birthplace.

The age of the Chinese tools suggests that the hominins who made them were neither tall nor big-brained. Instead, they may have been small bipedal apes, with brains about the size of a chimpanzee’s.

“The implications of all this are large,” said Michael Petraglia, a paleoanthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, who was not involved in the new study. “We must re-evaluate our understanding of human prehistory in Eurasia.”

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

For nearly 40 years, the gender gap in voting has been the subject of continued speculation. How much does it matter? Would it be wide enough to put Democrats in office? Now, with President Trump ascendant, the question becomes still more urgent: What happens if the gender gap becomes a gender chasm?

On July 7, CNN predicted that the 2018 election would “have the largest gender gap on record for a midterm election since 1958.” On the same day, Dan Balz, my former colleague at The Washington Post, wrote:

The disconnect between President Trump and female voters is serious and not getting better. That’s a potentially big problem for Republicans in the November elections.

Polling data this year clearly suggests that women are moving away from the Republican Party.

The potential gender gap in congressional voting has risen from 20 and 22 points in 2014 and 2016, according to exit polls, to 33 points in a Quinnipiac Poll published earlier this month. Men of all races say they intend to vote for Republican House candidates 50-42, while women of all races say they intend to vote for Democratic candidates 58-33.

More here.

Katie Kelaidis in Quillette:

Tribalism and slavery are as old as humanity. The very first human records are records of human bondage. Reports estimate that today 60 million people are held as slaves. While each one of these lives represents an unacceptable tragedy, not one occurs with the approval of law. And that is revolutionary. For while slavery is as old as humanity, abolitionism is a relatively recent phenomenon that did not emerge until the ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment nurtured it into existence.

In a June 5 article for Slate, Jamelle Bouie writes of the Enlightenment: “At its heart, the movement contained a paradox: Ideas of human freedom and individual rights took root in nations that held other human beings in bondage and were then in the process of exterminating native populations.” In the context of an article largely aimed at undermining a “handful of centrist and conservative writers” who have taken up the Enlightenment’s defence, this appears to be a damning indictment of hypocrisy. That is, of course, unless one considers that, until the Enlightenment, it is nearly impossible to find a human society that did not, at least at times, practice slavery and engage in barbarous acts of conquest and colonization. It is even more difficult to find a society not engaged in these practices that reached a level of wealth and stability sufficient to allow non-survival related activities like political philosophy to flourish. The emergence of the kind of prosperous, moral societies that both Bouie and I wish to see flourish only came into existence with the moral and ethical revolution brought about by the Enlightenment.

While Bouie is correct that some Enlightenment thinkers, including Locke and Kant, did indeed advance theories of scientific racism that have had harmful consequences, he is wrong to argue that it was Enlightenment thinkers who invented scientific racism.

More here.