From NMAAHC:

On “Freedom’s Eve,” or the eve of January 1, 1863, the first Watch Night services took place. On that night, enslaved and free African Americans gathered in churches and private homes all across the country awaiting news that the Emancipation Proclamation had taken effect. At the stroke of midnight, prayers were answered as all enslaved people in Confederate States were declared legally free. Union soldiers, many of whom were black, marched onto plantations and across cities in the south reading small copies of the Emancipation Proclamation spreading the news of freedom in Confederate States. Only through the Thirteenth Amendment did emancipation end slavery throughout the United States.

But not everyone in Confederate territory would immediately be free. Even though the Emancipation Proclamation was made effective in 1863, it could not be implemented in places still under Confederate control. As a result, in the westernmost Confederate state of Texas, enslaved people would not be free until much later. Freedom finally came on June 19, 1865, when some 2,000 Union troops arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas. The army announced that the more than 250,000 enslaved black people in the state, were free by executive decree. This day came to be known as “Juneteenth,” by the newly freed people in Texas.

More here.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful—
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Sylvia Plath
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

Joshua Cohen at The Paris Review:

Graphing is the practice of visualizing the abstract—the use of the coordinate plane not to map a territory or to demarcate a two-dimensional surface but to track a measurable quantity across space and time, quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, and brightness. Its invention can be traced to Nicole Oresme, bishop of Lisieux, courtier to Charles V, and scholastic philosopher-­polymath who held forth at the College of Navarre of the newly founded University of Paris. His Tractatus de configurationibus qualitatum et motuum (Treatise on the Configurations of Qualities and Motions) from 1353 lays out early versions of what we now call functions and the x and y axes, which he referred to as “longitude” (the axis of the independent variable) and “latitude” (the perpendicular axis for plotting the values of the dependent variable). What made these pictures not merely illustrational but statistical “graphs” was Oresme’s radical insistence on presenting the variables in accurate ratio, with some accord of scale between the unit of measurement and the object or subject or process being measured. His key principle, at least when it comes to the visual, is: “The measure of intensities can be fittingly imagined as the measure of lines.”

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 a few 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.

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? Click on “Read more” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW

Read more »

Michael Adno at the Oxford American:

A hint of blue on the horizon meant morning was coming. And as they have for the past fifty-four years, Audrey and Gary Revell stepped out their screen door, walked down a ramp, and climbed into their pickup truck. Passing a cup of coffee back and forth, they headed south into Tate’s Hell—one corner of a vast wilderness in Florida’s panhandle where the Apalachicola National Forest runs into the Gulf of Mexico. Soon, they turned off the road and onto a two-track that stretched into a silhouette of pine trees. Their brake lights disappeared into the forest, and after about thirty minutes, they parked the truck along the road just as daylight spilled through the trees. Gary took one last sip of coffee, grabbed a wooden stake and a heavy steel file, and walked off into the woods. Audrey slipped on a disposable glove, grabbed a bucket, and followed. Gary drove the wooden stake, known as a “stob,” into the ground and began grinding it with the steel file. A guttural noise followed as the ground hummed. Pine needles shook, and the soil shivered. Soon, the ground glowed with pink earthworms. Audrey collected them one by one to sell as live bait to fishermen. What drew the worms to the surface seemed like sorcery. For decades, nobody could say exactly why they came up, even the Revells who’d become synonymous with the tradition here. They call it worm grunting.

More here.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Lately we’ve been discussing some of the ethics around genetics and embryo selection. One question that comes up in these debates is – are we claiming that some people are genetically inferior to other people? If we’re trying to select schizophrenia genes out of the population – even setting aside debates about whether this would work and whether we can do it non-coercively – isn’t this still in some sense claiming that schizophrenics are genetically inferior? And do we really want to do this?

I find it clarifying to set aside schizophrenia for a second and look at cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis is a simple single-gene disorder. A mutation in this gene makes lung mucus too thick. People born with the disorder spend their lives fighting off various awful lung infections before dying early, usually in their 20s to 40s. There’s a new $300,000/year medication that looks promising, but we’ve yet to see how much it can increase life expectancy. As far as I know, there’s nothing good about cystic fibrosis. It’s just an awful mutation that leads to a lifetime of choking on your own lung mucus.

So: are people with cystic fibrosis genetically inferior, or not?

The case for yes: they have the cystic fibrosis mutation. Having the cystic fibrosis mutation seems vastly worse than not having it. Surely if “genetically inferior” means anything at all, it means having genetics which it is vastly worse to have than not have.

The case for no: if you say ‘yes’, you sound like a Nazi. Or at least you sound like some sort of callous jerk who hates people with cystic fibrosis and thinks they’re less than human and maybe wants to kill them.

More here.

Mario Sergio Conti at Folha de São Paulo:

Besides being a linguist, Chomsky is a respected international political analyst. Of his more than one hundred books, four are specifically about Israel – its wars, governments, and aggressions against the Palestinian people. Despite hundreds of requests from the world press, he has not analyzed the Hamas attack on October 7 and the destruction of Gaza because he had a massive stroke last June. He has difficulty speaking, and the right side of his body is numb.

More here.

Maya Krishnan at The Point:

“I may die before my time.” The English philosopher Gillian Rose (1947-1995) opened one of her final lectures with these words; soon after, she would die of cancer at the age of 48. Rose’s words were doubly prescient. While her reputation has long been overshadowed by that of her more famous sister, the literary critic Jacqueline Rose, Gillian’s time seems to have arrived at last. Earlier this year in the U.K. Penguin Classics reissued Rose’s forthright memoir Love’s Work (1995), for which she is best known. The book, with its intimate yet unsentimental portrayal of sex, illness and death—in response to her cancer diagnosis, the author reaches “for my favourite whisky bottle” and vows “not to cease wooing, for that is my life affair”—has captivated many of its readers. London’s literati gathered in April at the London Review Bookshop for an event on Love’s Work, and preparations are already underway to mark the thirty years that have passed since the book’s publication and Rose’s death.

But if Rose’s time has arrived, it seems that it is Rose the memoirist, not Rose the philosopher, whom the world is ready to meet. That’s a shame, in part because it is an all-too-familiar story for a female philosopher’s reception to foreground her personal life. It’s also a missed opportunity.

more here.

The Editors at the LRB:

‘The trick is to create a world,’ John Burnside’s poem ‘Koi’ begins, ‘from nothing.’ Published in the LRB in 2001, it was one of nearly a hundred poems by Burnside that appeared in the paper between 1996 and his death last month at the age of 69. ‘The Persistence of Memory’ is published in the current issue:

Out in the field where, once,
we played Dead Man’s Fall,

the others are being called
through the evening dusk

As well as his many collections of poetry, Burnside was the author of several novels, two collections of short stories and three books of memoir.

Reviewing A Lie about My Father in 2006, Hilary Mantel called it a ‘challenging and troubling book’ by a ‘master of language, pushing language to do what it can.

more here.

next to of course god america i

“next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims’ and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn’s early my
country ‘tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?

He spoke.    And drank rapidly a glass of water

by E.E. Cummings
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

Christopher Solomon in The New York Times:

The average human head contains around 100,000 hairs. Each is connected to a follicle, which can hold one to five hairs. “It’s basically its own organ,” Dr. Mostaghimi said of a scalp follicle. “It has its own stem cells. It regenerates.”

Typically, men’s hair loss occurs because of an increase in an enzyme in the scalp that converts testosterone to a more potent form, called dihydrotestosterone (or DHT), Dr. Mostaghimi said. The reasons that one man might have more DHT than another are not well understood, but it has a genetic component. When men have too much DHT in their scalp, the hormone initiates a complex process that leads to hair miniaturization, in which hairs and follicles begins to shrink. (This is why men frequently have finer hair or even peach fuzz where they are balding.) This hair loss occurs in a predictable sequence: first around the temples, then at the crown of the head, where increased levels and activity of the offending enzyme and its modified testosterone are found, Dr. Mostaghimi said. Hence the phrase “male-pattern baldness.”

More here.

Josie Glausiusz in Nature:

Cheese fungus, head lice, human sperm, a bee eye, a microplastic bobble: scientific photographer Steve Gschmeissner has imaged them all under the probing lens of a scanning electron microscope (SEM). In his colourized electron micrographs, faecal bacteria resemble thin spaghetti, silica-walled diatoms look like cubes of breakfast cereal and a segmented tardigrade resembles a curled-up, tubby piglet. Gschmeissner, who has been imaging microbes, cancer cells and invertebrates for about 50 years, has crafted an extraordinary array of more than 10,000 SEM images, some of which have been featured in Nature. He spoke to Nature about the importance of scientific images, looking at imploding cancer cells and the miniature world he found on a rotten raspberry.

What are some of the projects you’ve worked on recently?

For the past six years, I’ve been collaborating with Greg Towers, a molecular virologist at University College London, who supplies me with samples to photograph. We’ve looked at a variety of viruses, including SARS-CoV-2, which causes COVID-19. The latest work I’ve done with Towers is a project on cancer-cell death. It’s the sort of work I love doing: science that tells a story with images. It’s been one of my most enjoyable and successful recent projects, because there’s very little else out there that shows what happens to cancer cells during chemotherapy.

More here.

Solangel Maldonado at The Conversation:

If you are single and looking for a romantic partner, chances are that you have used a dating app. But the likelihood that others will like, or even see, your profile may depend on your race.

Studies have found that all people on dating apps, regardless of their own race, are more likely to contact white people using the app. And all people using dating apps are least likely to contact African American women and Asian American men.

Until recently, some popular apps, including OkCupid, Match, Hinge and Grindr, provided race and ethnicity filters that allowed users to categorically exclude daters based on race and ethnicity. Although most apps, including Grindr, removed their ethnicity filters in the past few years, others, such as Hinge and Match, have not.

While people may think that whom they find desirable is a personal preference, attraction is influenced by family members’ views, the schools people attend, friends and society in general and dating sites themselves.

More here.

Bill Gates in Gates Notes:

Today is a big one for Kemmerer—for the coal plant workers who will be able to see their future job site being constructed across the highway, for the local construction workers who will be part of a 1,600-person skilled labor force building the plant, and for the local businesses that will take care of the new workforce.

The plant was designed by TerraPower, a company I started in 2008. But my nuclear journey started several years earlier, when I first read a scientific paper for a new type of nuclear power plant.

The design was far safer than any existing plant, with the temperatures held under control by the laws of physics instead of human operators who can make mistakes. It would have a shorter construction timeline and be cheaper to operate. And it would be reliable, providing dependable power throughout the day and night. As I looked at the plans for this new reactor, I saw how rethinking nuclear power could overcome the barriers that had hindered it—and revolutionize how we generate power in the U.S. and around the world.

More here.

Kavita Puri at the BBC:

“I feel enormous shame about what happened,” Susannah Herbert tells me.

Her grandfather was the governor of Bengal, in British India, during the run-up and height of the 1943 famine which killed at least three million people.

She is only just learning about his significant role in the catastrophe, and confronting a complex family legacy.

When I first meet her, she is clutching a photograph from 1940. It’s Christmas Day at the governor’s residence in Bengal. It’s formal, with people sitting in rows, in their finery, staring straight into camera.

In the front are the dignitaries – Viceroy Linlithgow, one of the most important colonial figures in India, and her grandfather Sir John Herbert, Bengal’s governor.

At their feet is a little boy, in a white shirt and shorts, knee-high socks and shiny shoes. It’s Susannah’s father.

More here.

Dan Piraro at Bizarro:

I successfully raised two children to adulthood who, until recently, I called my daughters. But in the past year, one of them has asked that I not refer to her with terms associated with females. She doesn’t feel that words like “her,” “ma’am,” or “daughter” describe her. In fact, she doesn’t think of herself as a woman and does not like to be referred to as “she.” Her pronouns are “they” and “them.”

I want to respect her their wishes, so I’ve asked how I should refer to her them. Their polite response was, “Call me your kid, your offspring, or just by my name.”

Was this confusing for me? Sure. Did it frighten, disturb, or alarm me? No. They (singular) are still the same person I raised; they’re simply sharing things about themself that have always been true but have gone unrecognized. Isn’t that a good thing?

More here.