Catherine Baker in Prospect Magazine:

The very day that ‘white identitarians’ called a rally in Charlottesville to protest against the recent removal of a monument to the Confederate leader Robert E. Lee, anti-fascist campaigners started warning it would bring white supremacist violence to the city. That violence manifested last weekend when a man linked to the openly fascist group Vanguard America allegedly killed one activist, Heather Heyer, and injured at least 19 others with his car. Armed white nationalists also reportedly intimidated the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue and beat black and left-wing counter-protestors with the same torches that had created the spectacle of a neo-Nazi torchlight parade. Donald Trump’s remarks at a press briefing inside Trump Tower on Tuesday evening, however, shocked many journalists and politicians when he stated that “there’s blame on both sides”—narrating the violence in similar terms to those used by a New York Times reporter, who had tweeted about seeing “club-wielding ‘antifa’ beating white nationalists.” The left, Trump said, held equal responsibility for the violence with the alt-right. In stating there had been violence on “both sides” without any further context, Trump amplified the narrative of Charlottesville that white supremacists themselves had been telling the media—and employed the dangerous language of relativization. This sort of language is a familiar one to historians of the twentieth century: it is with the language of relativization that leaders responsible for ethnic conflict have disclaimed responsibility for planning and organizing the persecution of groups they have identified as enemies.

Both the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, and Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, gave rise to persistent claims that there had been violence on all sides or “all sides had committed crimes.” Usually by design, these covered up how much stronger one side was than another, or which side had been most heavily implicated in the outbreak of war.

More here.

Michael Shermer in The American Scholar:

Have you ever thought about killing someone? I have, and I confess that it brought me peculiar feelings of pleasure to fantasize about putting the hurt on someone who had wronged me. I am not alone. According to the evolutionary psychologist David Buss, who asked thousands of people this same question and reported the data in his 2005 book, The Murderer Next Door, 91 percent of men and 84 percent of women reported having had at least one vivid homicidal fantasy in their life. It turns out that nearly all murders (90 percent by some estimates) are moralistic in nature—not cold-blooded killing for money or assets, but hot-blooded homicide in which perpetrators believe that their victims deserve to die. The murderer is judge, jury, and executioner in a trial that can take only seconds to carry out.

What happens in brains and bodies at the moment humans engage in violence with other humans? That is the subject of Stanford University neurobiologist and primatologist Robert M. Sapolsky’s Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. The book is Sapolsky’s magnum opus, not just in length, scope (nearly every aspect of the human condition is considered), and depth (thousands of references document decades of research by Sapolsky and many others) but also in importance as the acclaimed scientist integrates numerous disciplines to explain both our inner demons and our better angels. It is a magnificent culmination of integrative thinking, on par with similar authoritative works, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature. Its length and detail are daunting, but Sapolsky’s engaging style—honed through decades of writing editorials, review essays, and columns for The Wall Street Journal, as well as popular science books (Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, A Primate’s Memoir)—carries the reader effortlessly from one subject to the next. The work is a monumental contribution to the scientific understanding of human behavior that belongs on every bookshelf and many a course syllabus.

More here.

Matt Bruenig in People's Policy Project:

In the New York Times, David Leonhardt shared a version of the following graph produced by Piketty, Saez, and Zucman as part of their Distributive National Accounts project.

What the graph shows is that top incomes increased massively between 1980 and 2014, while the incomes of other groups grew much more slowly, with the vast majority of adults experiencing income gains below the national average.

To supplement this graph, I have decomposed the income gains of the top 1 percent into capital and labor components. Capital refers to income received from owning assets: dividends from stock, interest from debt, and rents from real estate. Labor refers to income received from working: salaries and wages. What this decomposition shows is that the majority of income gains for the top 1 percent came from capital rather than labor. In fact, all top 1 percent income growth after 2000 came from capital.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Fiona Wollard in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: Why don’t you think we could just take it as a basic fact that doing harm is ethically worse than allowing harm but not acting oneself? And if we don’t like that, why not just accept there is no distinction and outside of our prejudiced intuitions? I guess the question is: why philosophise it and seek reasons?

FW: Both those options seem really odd to me. On the one hand, the fact that doing harm is worse than allowing harm doesn’t feel like the kind of thing that could be a basic moral fact. I couldn’t take it as a basic moral fact that it is worse to perform harmful actions on Thursdays rather than Wednesday or to harm people with my left hand rather than my right hand. These suggests seem absurd. How could that difference matter morally? I think the doing/allowing distinction faces a similar challenge: when it is a we’re talking serious harm, when it might be a matter of life and death, how can the doing/allowing distinction make a difference? On the other hand, I think it would be overreacting to immediately retreat to simply accepting that there is no difference. Given the important role the doing/allowing distinction plays in common sense morality, we have to try to see if we can understand and defend it.

3:AM: You defend the notion that the distinction is morally relevant and you do this by introducing the idea of imposition. What is this notion and how does it help make the distinction play the role you defend?

FW: My use of imposition is inspired by Frances Kamm. She notes that the difference between doing and allowing seems to be connected to a difference in order of imposition. She says: ‘If the same efforts had to be made to avoid killing as have to be made in order to save a life, they would be made to prevent the killer from imposing first on an innocent person. In contrast, the efforts made in saving would, in a sense, involve the innocent bystander being imposed on first for the dying person.’

More here.

Adrian Tomine in The New York Times:

The provocatively upbeat title of Akhil Sharma’s first collection of short stories, “A Life of Adventure and Delight,” raises some questions. Is it an earnest declaration of tone and content? Is it ironic? The answer, like the book itself, is complicated, debatable and subjective. When the title appears within the text, it’s a fragment of the thoughts of Gautama, an Indian immigrant in New York, who has called a prostitute to his apartment. The encounter is a personal triumph for the frustrated, conflicted young man, both a fulfillment of a long-held wish and a rebellion against cultural expectations. At his request, the prostitute has undressed and is jumping up and down as Gautama gleefully grasps her breasts. It’s an unexpected scene, simultaneously unsettling and lighthearted: “His hands on her breasts, Gautama became happier and happier.” A life of adventure and delight, indeed, for one character. But for the other? Maybe not so much. This slippery tone — at once amused and critical, resigned and outraged — infuses each of these eight haunting, revelatory stories. As in so much of contemporary American fiction, the attention here is on the conflicts and consolations between couples and family members in a naturalistic present day. Throughout, Sharma adheres unwaveringly to Raymond Carver’s dictum of “no tricks,” telling his stories with bracingly direct, unassuming language. The dialogue is equally spare but true. But where some writers choose to obfuscate or minimize their ethnic background, Sharma is boldly forthright and probing. Focusing exclusively on Indian characters, both in Delhi and in the New York metropolitan area, he brings a keen cultural awareness to each of these stories. In some instances, this ethnologic insight is played for laughs — as in the story “Cosmopolitan,” in which an Indian man in New Jersey studies magazines like Mademoiselle as research in his quest to date American women. Perusing articles on topics like “what makes a woman a good lover,” the man is “reminded how easily one can learn anything in America.” In the same story, the protagonist, attending a party, “improvised on jokes he had read in ‘1,001 Polish Jokes.’ The Poles became Sikhs, but the rest remained the same.” In the story “Surrounded by Sleep,” a teenager begins to converse with God, whom he envisions as Clark Kent. “Originally,” the narrator explains, “God had appeared to Ajay as Krishna, but Ajay had felt foolish discussing brain damage with a blue God who held a flute and wore a dhoti.”

…In the final lines of the story (and the book), Sharma arrives at a moment that all the previous stories have been leading toward: “We were on Route 27 when my mother reached over my shoulder and slapped me, hard. Her hand hit my face and ear. Her breath was loud. She reached over and hit me again. I thought, Good, I should be hit.” It’s a small, beautifully underplayed moment, and perhaps a first step for a character who might one day write a book as perceptive, humane and pointed as this.

More here. (Note" Congratulations to dear friend Akhil!)

Dmitri Levitin at Literary Review:

A historical anniversary can be something of a false god. Convinced – rightly or wrongly – of the reading public’s numerical obsession, publishers race to churn out their own ‘definitive’ accounts of the event being commemorated. This year has been particularly notable for this, witnessing as it has not only the centenary of the Russian Revolution, but also the quincentenary of the event that supposedly began the Reformation: 31 October will mark the anniversary of Martin Luther nailing to the door of the church attached to Wittenberg Castle his ninety-five theses against papal teaching on indulgences.

Or, at least, so we are told. One of the central claims of Peter Marshall’s lovely 1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation is that this event probably never happened. In claiming this, he is following a well-trodden path, as he readily admits: the German Catholic historian Erwin Iserloh already suggested in the early 1960s that the historical evidence for the ‘theses-posting’ (the German, Thesenanschlag, conveys far better the force of the supposed event), which allegedly occurred on All Saints’ Eve 1517, was very dubious. But Marshall also has a new story to tell, one that is concerned with anniversaries and is often far more interesting than the many repetitive accounts of Luther and the Reformation that have appeared this year. That is the story of how the Thesenanschlaggradually came to assume such a central role in European and American cultural memory, generating the modern idea of the ‘Reformation’.

more here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

Thomas Gainsborough’s early masterpiece, Mr and Mrs Andrews (c1750), has long been read as a celebration of that pivotal moment in mid-Georgian Britain when man managed to wrestle nature to its knees and tell it what to do. To one side of the painting are the recently married Robert and Frances Andrews, a lucky young couple handsomely dressed in a rustle of linen, satin and soft leather. Significantly, though, the pair are posing not in the library or hall of their manor house but out in the grounds, in the well-worked, wheat-covered bit of Suffolk’s loamy Stour valley that provides the capital on which their combined fortune depends. In the far distance you can just make out the tower of All Saints’ Church where this alliance between two local landowning families – one gentry, one trade – has recently been settled to everyone’s satisfaction.

Gainsborough painted the happy couple, not to mention their happy acres, with such a zesty freshness that it’s a shock to learn that, until the picture was bought by the National Gallery in 1960, Mr and Mrs Andrews was kept hidden away by the family, like some mad aunt in the attic. James Hamilton, the author of this richly humane biography of the artist, thinks he knows why. Hamilton suggests that, far from being a servile recorder of other people’s good fortune, young Tom Gainsborough was never afraid to blurt out inconvenient truths, much in the manner of his great hero William Hogarth.

more here.

Ryan Gilbey at The New Statesman:

The last time Geoffrey Rush was cooped up on screen in a tatty grey room with a well-spoken man, the result was The King’s Speech, not so much a film as a machine for winning Oscars. Final Portrait, in which Rush plays Alberto Giacometti during the weeks in 1964 that he spent drawing the writer James Lord (Armie Hammer), is a subtler, warmer piece that has few of the earlier one’s imploring, manipulative tendencies. Anyone familiar with movies about artists toiling over their canvases may be minded to bring a cushion to the cinema: Jacques Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse ran for four hours, Victor Erice’s leisurely documentary The Quince Tree Sun for nearly two-and-a-half. At 90 minutes, Final Portrait is scarcely more than a doodle by comparison, but that briskness suits its philosophical points.

It begins with a casual request by Giacometti to Lord. Would he consider sitting for a portrait? It should only take a few hours at the artist’s studio in Paris. An afternoon at most. Arriving at the cluttered studio, Lord finds an artist whose idea of an ice-breaker is to tell him he has the head of a brute. He tries to remain chirpy even as Giacometti offers the first hint that the project may be doomed. “I’ll never be able to paint you as I see you,” he grumbles. “It’s impossible.”

more here.

Sam Leith in The Spectator:

How do they do it? Among writers, the earnest audience member at a literary festival who asks, ‘Do you write by hand or on a computer?’ is a sort of running joke; an occasion for the rolling of eyes. And yet, let’s enter a note in defence of that audience member: how novelists and the authors of literary nonfiction go about their work is interesting. If, as Kingsley Amis argued, most of a writer’s work is the application of the seat of one’s trousers to the seat of the chair, it’s legitimate to ask: what trousers, what chair, sexuality where and when? In my experience the answers are wildly different from writer to writer; an experience borne out by our sampling — 400 words a day, or 15,000? A bath for inspiration, or exercise? Endless redrafting or first thought, best thought?

Kamila Shamsie:

For years I tried to avoid building up ‘writing habits’. They quickly become writing tics that get in the way of just sitting down and getting on with putting words on a page. When working on my first novel, I wrote in the daytime as well as the night, wrote by longhand as well as on my computer, wrote in one continent or another, just so long as I had a quiet space.

But at a certain point, habits creep in. Sometimes for your own good: though I’m nocturnal I force myself to write during the day, so that I can be done by the evening. Sometimes for the sake of convenience: it’s been years since I wrote longhand — editing is so much easier on a laptop. Sometimes for no good reason except that every writer needs to have something to be irrational about: while I can still shift from one continent to the next as I write, I can no longer — as I did with my first three novels — write while looking at a wall. I need a window to look out of, or better yet, a table and chair outdoors so I’m unenclosed.

I could pretend that lack of enclosure is necessary for the imagination to feel unbound, or some such hooey. Truth is, I let down my guard, I allowed in a tic, and now it’s taken up residence and won’t be shifted.

More here.

Cynthia Haven in The Book Haven:

A month ago, I received a package from Berlin with a note from Ryan Ruby, author of The Zero and the One. Our point of connection was the French theorist René Girard: “In a pivotal scene, one character discusses an interpretation of Dostoevsky‘s Demons in terms that were largely influenced by Girard’s reading of that book in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel.” According to the book jacket, Ruby’s novel about a friendship at Oxford that takes a dark turn, and considers “the power of dangerous ideas.” From the book itself:

From the earliest days of our friendship, Zach and I sought out philosophers whose names would never have appeared on the reading lists we received before the beginning of each term. To our tutors, such thinkers did not merit serious consideration. Our tutors were training us to weigh evidence, parse logic, and refuse counter-examples; they encouraged us to but more stock in the rule than the exception and to put our trust in modest truths that could be easily verified and plainly expressed. Whereas the philosophers who interested us were the ones who would step right to the edge of the abyss – and jump to conclusions; the ones who wagered their sanity when they spun the wheel of thought; the ones, in short, who wrote in blood. In counter-intuitiveness we saw profundity and in obfuscation, poetry. With wide eyes, we plucked paperback after paperback from the shelves at Reservoir, the used bookshop opposite the entrance to Christ Church Meadow, our own personal Nag Hammadi, hunting for insights into the hermetic nature of the universe and ourselves.

I used to frequent that bookshop, though my visits were too brief to consider the place a hotbed of a “dangerous ideas.” And I’m not sure that René’s ideas can be considered “dangerous” ones – we’ll see what you think next spring when my Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard is out with Michigan State University Press. But Hans Abendroth?

More here.

From Phys.org:

At the center of our galaxy, roughly 26,000 light years from Earth, lies the supermassive black hole (SMBH) known as Sagittarius A*. Measuring 44 million km across, this object is roughly 4 million times as massive as our Sun and exerts a tremendous gravitational pull. Since astronomers cannot detect black holes directly, its existence has been determined largely from the effect it has on the small group of stars orbiting it.

In this respect, scientists have found that observing Sagittarius A* is an effective way of testing the physics of gravity. For instance, in the course of observing these stars, a team of German and Czech astronomers noted subtle effects caused by the black hole's gravity. In so doing, they were able to yet again confirm some of the predictions made by Einstein's famous Theory of General Relativity.

Their study, titled "Investigating the Relativistic Motion of the Stars Near the Supermassive Black Hole in the Galactic Center", was recently published in the Astrophysical Journal. As is indicated in the course of it, the team applied new analysis techniques to existing observations that were made by European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) and other telescopes over the course of the past 20 years.

From this, they measured the orbits of the stars that orbit Sagittarius A* to test predictions made by classical Newtonian physics (i.e. universal gravitation), as well as predictions based on general relativity. What they found was that one of the stars (S2) showed deviations in its orbit which were defied the former, but were consistent with the latter.

More here.

Video length: 6:35

This is another of my posts with which I attempt to bring our readers opinions usually outside their comfort zone. Please read it charitably and if you respond, do so in a civil and thoughtful manner or risk getting banned from commenting on 3QD. If nothing else, let it be a way to understand how almost half of America thinks. This is Scott Adams in his own blog:

A mass hysteria happens when the public gets a wrong idea about something that has strong emotional content and it triggers cognitive dissonance that is often supported by confirmation bias. In other words, people spontaneously hallucinate a whole new (and usually crazy-sounding) reality and believe they see plenty of evidence for it. The Salem Witch Trials are the best-known example of mass hysteria. The McMartin Pre-School case and the Tulip Bulb hysteria are others. The dotcom bubble probably qualifies. We might soon learn that the Russian Collusion story was mass hysteria in hindsight. The curious lack of solid evidence for Russian collusion is a red flag. But we’ll see how that plays out.

The most visible Mass Hysteria of the moment involves the idea that the United States intentionally elected a racist President. If that statement just triggered you, it might mean you are in the Mass Hysteria bubble. The cool part is that you can’t fact-check my claim you are hallucinating if you are actually hallucinating. But you can read my description of the signs of mass hysteria and see if you check off the boxes.

If you’re in the mass hysteria, recognizing you have all the symptoms of hysteria won’t help you be aware you are in it. That’s not how hallucinations work. Instead, your hallucination will automatically rewrite itself to expel any new data that conflicts with its illusions.

But if you are not experiencing mass hysteria, you might be totally confused by the actions of the people who are. They appear to be irrational, but in ways that are hard to define. You can’t tell if they are stupid, unscrupulous, ignorant, mentally ill, emotionally unstable or what. It just looks frickin’ crazy.

The reason you can’t easily identify what-the-hell is going on in the country right now is that a powerful mass hysteria is in play. If you see the signs after I point them out, you’re probably not in the hysteria bubble. If you read this and do NOT see the signs, it probably means you’re trapped inside the mass hysteria bubble.

More here.

Leon Neyfakh in Slate: