Almadi and Cobbs in OXFAM:

In the summer of 2023, Oxfam launched an initiative called A New Era for Black Women to spotlight the voices and priorities of low-wage earners. We are working with Black women’s advocacy groups in the Southeastern U.S. to surface issues that low-wage workers face and come up with policies addressing racial, gender, social justice, and economic inequality. Oxfam has a history of supporting labor organizers in Georgia, North Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, to promote policies for higher paying jobs, job protections, more resources for job training, and other ways to break down barriers to upward mobility.  This Black History Month, we are shining a light on some of the lesser-known leaders of labor movements in America as well as shouting out Black women who are currently leading the way to address root causes of inequality.

Sylvia Woods 1909-1987

Sylvia Woods, a Chicago-based union organizer and community activist, helped organize the Laundry Workers Union. She helped establish the Bendix Local 330 of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and even though only 25 percent of the membership was Black, she was elected financial secretary-treasurer of the UAW in. Through her organizing efforts, Woods realized that racism is a tool used to divide the working class. She believed that Black and white workers had to unite to defend their collective rights, and that ideology guided much of her organizing work.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Mina Tavakoli at The Yale Review:

Not since the muzak corporation has there been an institution that soundtracks drugstores, supermarkets, and shopping malls more readily than R.E.M. After monstrous airplay across the past three decades, one imagines even the most oblivious listener well-equipped to at least passively recognize the distinct jangle of the band’s biggest hits. Perhaps you can hum the chorus of “Man on the Moon” because of the sheer number of times it has blared in your local food court. You might have heard “Shiny Happy People” while standing in the pharmacy line or “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine)” in the produce aisle, and chances are very good that “Everybody Hurts” has haunted airport bathrooms near you.

This might feel like a mundane—if not outright rude or odd—legacy for any band, much less one that helped define the genre we still call “alternative.” R.E.M., so often cited as a lodestar for some of the more idiosyncratic guitar-wielding white men of the last few decades (Kurt Cobain, Stephen Malkmus, Thom Yorke) and once so handsomely knighted by the tastemakers of its time (Rolling Stone dubbed it “America’s Best Rock & Roll Band” in a 1987 cover story), seemed, for a long while, like a watershed in the history of countercultural music. But if it once was (or still is) alternative, one might then ask: Alternative to what?

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Christy DeSmith at The Harvard Gazette:

A pair of landmark studies, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, has finally identified the originators of the Indo-European family of 400-plus languages, spoken today by more than 40 percent of the world’s population.

DNA evidence places them in current-day Russia during the Eneolithic period about 6,500 years ago. These linguistic pioneers were spread from the steppe grasslands along the lower Volga River to the northern foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, with researchers dubbing them the Caucasus Lower Volga people. Genetic results show they mixed with other groups in the region.

“It’s a very early manifestation of some of the cultural traditions that later spread across the steppe,” said senior author David Reich, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and human evolutionary biology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The research provides the missing piece of a longstanding linguistic puzzle.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Justin Smith-Ruiu at The Hinternet:

Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, none but the most stubborn could deny that the leading cultural institutions in the United States remained under the dominance of the self-styled progressive left. Circa 2019, prominent progressive scholars such as Corey Robin could be found imploring their peers to wake up and to take stock of just how much ground the left had gained. At the same time, astute readers of online discourse were warning of subterranean rumblings from the manosphere — which in fact began much earlier and for some years seemed to be contained within the same virtual space as what was then a gestating proto-wokeism. I can remember as early as 2014 or so, the most perspicacious of my friends telling me I should really be paying attention to Gamergate if I wanted to understand the future of US politics. I did check in briefly, saw that it was all just a bunch of kids fighting over kids’ stuff, and checked right back out again.

Well, those kids aren’t kids anymore. It was only during the Biden presidency that the various pathological specimens of online adolescent masculinity grew just old enough to transfer their alienated thymos from the screen into actual politics. In effect, however our tight-focused presidential historians chronologize things, what we have seen over the past decade is a Tumblr regime (c. 2015 – c. 2022) followed by a 4chan regime (c. 2022 – present). The noise of global politics today is really just the much-deepened echo in a great canyon of the squeaking of rambunctious tweeners in the narrow channels of 2010s social media.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

From The Washington Post:

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

In 1907, Ithell Colquhoun (pronounced “Eye-thell Co-hoon”), at the age of one, arrived in England with her family from India, where her father had been part of the colonial service. She would never go back to the country of her birth. A sense of this early dislocation from a mystical land nagged at her for the rest of her life, and was one of the motivations that drove her art and her writing for more than 60 years. She wrote of India that: “My origin was there, and there I would return, other than in dreams.” She declared herself with such certainty because she believed that a mesh of spiritual connections that transcended time and place lay beneath the physical world. There were, therefore, concealed knowledge and hidden realms ripe for discovery by adherents of the arcane arts.

Colquhoun’s early decades coincided with the “Occult Revival” of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and she would prove to be a lifelong and exceptionally dedicated student, both as a painter and writer, and as a member of any number of spiritualist groups, from Druidry and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, to the Golden Section Order and the Fellowship of Isis.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Paige Williams at The New Yorker:

U.S. Steel mines iron ore in Minnesota and sends it across Lake Superior on freighters a thousand feet long. At Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, the ships enter the Soo Locks, which provide passage to the lower Great Lakes. Five hundred billion dollars’ worth of ore (and ninety-five per cent of the United States’ supply) annually moves through the locks, which have been managed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers since 1881. The Minnesota ships travel the long, dangling length of Lake Michigan and dock at its southern tip: Gary, Indiana.

Two days after Christmas, a ship called the Presque Isle sat in the slip at U.S. Steel’s Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in North America. “Looks like it just came in—it’s riding low,” Daniel Killeen, the vice-president of Gary Works, told Eddie Melton, the mayor of Gary. Melton and I were in a company van, touring the steelyard—eternal mud, crisscrossed with the tire tracks of massive machines. We passed conical piles of raw materials—the plant uses manganese, limestone, sinter, coke—and neat stacks of the finished product, steel slabs. Each slab measures about nine inches thick, six feet wide, and thirty feet long, and can be heated to twenty-four hundred degrees and pressed like pasta dough to make panels that are used in automobile manufacturing.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Shannon Carlin in Time Magazine:

Over the last 50 years, Saturday Night Live has been no stranger to controversy. Sometimes, the late night show courts it, like in the case of Chevy Chase, who purposely said the N-word live on air during SNL’s debut season. Other times, a backlash may spring up without warning. For example, Sinead O’Connor’s infamous protest against the Catholic Church took even the show’s creator Lorne Michaels, who notoriously hates surprises, off guard. As you’ll see, musicians have a way of stirring up trouble when they perform live from New York.

The most controversial moments in SNL history are those that get a rise out of people, even if they seem a bit quaint by today’s scandal standards. Believe us, Ashlee Simpson’s lip-sync disaster caused quite a stir at the time. But other moments, like Alec Baldwin upsetting the Boy Scouts of America or Wayne’s World mocking then First Daughter Chelsea Clinton, still feel as if they would, for better or worse, spark a lively debate in our social media age.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

My Friends the Pigeons

The American Experiment has entered
yet another critical phase.
My friends the pigeons, who rent
a ledge in the nine hundredth block
of St. Louis, seem painfully aware of this.
I hope I am not merely projecting
my own dread onto them, but if I am
I do so with trepidation,
for pigeons are, by their very nature,
conduits of urban grief, though if
studied with an open, critical mind,
refract anemic sentiments. Oh sage
pigeons of the nine hundredth block
of St. Louis Street! What next?
The Christian Right is gaining force.
The Christians who march with placards
on Bourbon Street . . . Will the crowds
cease to laugh at them?
A blight on that day the happy crowds
no longer laugh at them!
A blight on the idiocy of the Christian Right!
I have watched them on television and shivered with grief.
They are forcing me to embrace
what otherwise I might shun,
such as ugly, mite-infested pigeons,
surrogate angels for those
never told their bodies were evil.
I thank my sweet, dead mother
for never telling me my body was evil,
and for laying a big, dirty feather
on my pillow one Christmas Eve.

by Richard Katrovas
from New American Poets
David Godine Publisher, 1991

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:

Shocking if not surprising investigations from the Wall Street Journal and ABC News find that pilots at Reagan National Airport, also known as DCA, had been formally warning the Federal Aviation Administration for more than three decades of nearly hitting military helicopters traversing the same corridor. Pilots who had faced this exact situation filed these reports to the FAA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System:

• • In 2013: “I cannot imagine what business is so pressing that these helicopters are allowed to cross the path of airliners carrying hundreds of people! What would normally be alarming at any other airport in the country has become commonplace at DCA.”

• • In 2006: “Why does the tower allow such nonsense by the military in such a critical area? This is a safety issue, and needs to be fixed.”

• • In 1993: “This is an accident waiting to happen.”

• • In 1991: “Here is an accident waiting to happen.”

An investigation by the Washington Post is even more damning. Using simple, publicly available information, the Post’s reporters quickly discovered what the FAA had missed or ignored: The helicopter flight path and the airplane landing path at their closest point have a vertical separation of just 15 feet.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

James Woodford in New Scientist:

Sexual partners transfer their distinctive genital microbiome to each other during intercourse, a finding that could have implications for forensic investigations of sexual assault.

Brendan Chapman at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and his colleagues collected swabs from the genitals of 12 monogamous, heterosexual couples, then used RNA gene sequencing to identify microbial signatures for each participant. The researchers asked the couples to abstain from sex for between two days and two weeks, and took follow-up samples a few hours after intercourse.

“We found that those genetic signatures from the female’s bacteria were detectable in their male partners and vice versa,” says Chapman. This change in a person’s “sexome”, as the team has dubbed it, could prove useful in criminal investigations, he says.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Marshall Steinbaum in the Boston Review:

The year 2014 was a heady moment in the economic policy world. That spring, French economist Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century was published in English to astounding commercial and intellectual success. The book painted a devastating picture of the post–Cold War economic order, uniting groundbreaking empirical evidence with a comprehensive theory explaining the vast accumulation of wealth and power at the top of the global economic pyramid. And it appeared at a moment when the apparatus of the Democratic Party needed just such a shock.

Recovery from the 2008 financial crisis, itself a consequence of Clinton-era financial deregulation, had been too long and too weak in the making; inequality ratcheted ever upward and jobs continued disappearing overseas. These trends signaled that the policies, rhetoric, and personnel of the Obama administration simply weren’t up to the task. Piketty’s reception, though not without pushback, helped cement consensus that something had to be done, kicking off a spirited effort within the progressive policy world to reform the Democrats’ approach to the economy.

Now that Trump has dealt a decisive deathblow to the post-Obama political system, it’s worth taking stock of where that moment went.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.