Margalit Fox in the New York Times:

Jim Harrison, whose lust for life — and sometimes just plain lust — roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh, died on Saturday at his home in Patagonia, Ariz. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, his publisher, Grove Atlantic, said on Monday.

A native of Michigan, Mr. Harrison lived most recently during the summers in the wild countryside near Livingston, Mont., where he enthusiastically shot the rattlesnakes that colonized his yard, and during the winters in Patagonia, where he enthusiastically shot all kinds of things.

In both places, far from the self-regarding literary soirees of New York, for which he had little but contempt, and the lucre of Hollywood, where he had done time as a dazzlingly dissolute if not altogether successful screenwriter, he could engage in the essential, monosyllabic pursuits that defined the borders of his life: to walk, drive, hunt, fish, cook, drink, smoke, write.

The result was prodigious: 21 volumes of fiction, including “Legends of the Fall” (1979), a collection of three novellas whose title piece, about a Montana family ravaged by World War I, became a 1994 film starring Brad Pitt; 14 books of poetry; two books of essays; a memoir; and a children’s book.

More here. And here is an interview in the Paris Review.

Steven Hill in Salon:

The New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo recently wrote an oddly lamenting piece about how “the Uber model, it turns out, doesn’t translate.” Manjoo describes how so many of the “Uber-of-X” companies that have sprung up as part of the so-called sharing economy have become just another way to deliver more expensively priced conveniences to those with enough money to pay. Ironically many of these Ayn Rand-inspired startups have been kept alive by subsidies of the venture capital kind which, for various reasons, are starting to dry up. Without that kind of “VC welfare,” these companies are having to raise their prices, and are finding it increasingly difficult to retain enough customers at the higher price point. Consequently, some of these startups are faltering; others are outright failing.

Witness the recent collapse of SpoonRocket, an on-demand pre-made meal delivery service. Like Uber wanting to replace your car, SpoonRocket wanted to get you out of your kitchen by trying to be cheaper and faster than cooking. Its chefs mass-produced its limited menu of meals, and cars equipped with warming cases delivered the goods, aiming for “sub-10 minute delivery of sub-$10 meals.”

But it didn’t work out as planned. And once the VC welfare started backing away, SpoonRocket could not maintain its low price point. The same has been happening with other on-demand services such as the valet-parking app Luxe, which has degraded to the point where Manjoo notes that “prices are rising, service is declining, business models are shifting, and in some cases, companies are closing down.”

Yet the telltale signs of the many problems with this heavily subsidized startup business model have been prevalent for quite some time, for those who wanted to see. In July 2014, media darling TaskRabbit, which had been hailed as a revolutionary for the way it allowed vulnerable workers to auction themselves to the lowest bidders for short-term gigs, underwent a major “pivot.” That’s Silicon Valley-speak for acknowledging that its business model wasn’t working. It was losing too much money, and so it had to shake things up.

TaskRabbit revamped how its platform worked, particularly how jobs are priced. CEO Leah Busque defended the changes as necessary to help TaskRabbit keep up with “explosive demand growth,” but published reports said the company was responding to a decline in the number of completed tasks. Too many of the Rabbits, it turns out, were not happy bunnies – they were underpaid and did a poor job, despite company rhetoric to the contrary. An increasing number of them simply failed to show up for their tasks. As a results, customers also failed to return.

More here.

Nick Dames in The Atlantic:

Evgeny Morozov offers a masterpiece of an a**-spanking in the form of a review of Alec Ross's The Industries of the Future in The Baffler:

At times, the book reads like an extended college admissions essay, with the student, prompted to reflect on his most memorable experience, desperately trying to relate something very trivial he did last summer to lofty questions of globalization and democracy. Ross reflects, for example, on his time working as a janitor after his freshman year in college, linking it to his experiences as an innovation adviser to the Secretary of State. On another level, The Industries of the Future can be read as an extended effort to prove to the world that Ross does belong in the very center of that bizarre Venn diagram—right at the intersection of technology, foreign policy, and the Democratic Party—that had secured him his original job at the State Department.

Such books are normally written before a person is appointed to a high-level advisory position within the government; they are meant to attest to one’s intellectual credentials and articulate a grand strategic vision of the future, which can then guide the person’s advisory work. Ross, however, got his career backwards: he got his advisory position based on his campaign work for Obama, though he had few academic or intellectual credentials to his name. Then, after he left the State Department in 2013, he pursued the well-trodden path of aspiring pundits-cum-lobbyists: a fellowship at an Ivy League school (Columbia), seats on half a dozen corporate boards (FiscalNote, Kudelski Group, Leeds Equity Partners, Telerivet, AnchorFree, 2U), and now, finally, a book.

Given Ross’s career trajectory—from a supposed “big thinker” without any big thoughts to a power broker between industry and government—this book appears eight years too late. While his publisher blurbs him as a “leading innovation expert” whose book “belongs on the shelf alongside works by Tom Friedman and Fareed Zakaria” (pretty faint praise, this), The Industries of the Future reads more like a love letter to a few more unexplored corporate boards, preferably in industries that will last longer than Alec Ross’s career as the next Tom Friedman.

More here.

Andrew Cockburn at Harper's Magazine:

According to the Washington Post, guests on Donald Trump’s luxurious personal 757 jet—gold-plated seat-belt buckles!—who get peckish and order a burger are served Wendy’s. It would have to be Wendy’s. No other food chain strives so hard to avoid buying tomatoes from Florida, where they are almost guaranteed to have been picked by immigrants, a policy surely appealing to Trump. Admittedly, the tomatoes in question are quite possibly picked by a worker confined in conditions of near slavery, paid minimal amounts and forced to scavenge for food, but at least he or she is not an immigrant working in this country.

To understand the background to the Wendy’s guarantee, we have to go back to the beginning of the century, when a workers’ rights group in Florida, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, pioneered an innovative and effective strategy. Agricultural workers are a traditionally exploited group, excluded from the National Labor Relations Act, the New Deal law enshrining basic workers’ rights such as collective bargaining. Conditions have been especially dire for the men and women, almost entirely immigrants from Mexico and Central America, who picked the Florida fruit and vegetable crops. In 2001, tomato pickers were still being paid the forty cents per thirty-two-pound bucket of tomatoes that they were two decades earlier. (Some received nothing at all. When I visited Immokalee in 2001, the C.I.W. had just uncovered a slave camp nestled between a Ramada Inn and a retirement community in the little town of Lake Placid, the fifth such operation busted by the Coalition in the past six years. Inmates who tried to escape risked beatings or worse.

more here.

Katie Roiphe at Literary Hub:

If there is anyone on earth who could decide not to die it would be Susan Sontag; her will is that ferocious, that unbending, that unwilling to accept the average fates or outcomes the rest of us are bound by. She is not someone to be pushed around or unduly influenced by the idea that everyone has to do something or go through something, because she is and always has been someone who rises above. Nonetheless, right before Christmas, she is lying in a bed in Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, doing something that very much appears to those around her to be dying.

One night she and her friend Sharon DeLano stay up late listening to Beethoven’s late string quartets in her hospital room. Sontag is very doped up. She is in a good enough mood to tell Sharon one of her favorite jokes. “Where does the general keep his armies?” Sharon answers, “I don’t know.” “In his sleevies,” Sontag says, smiling.

The next day she is much more sober. When Sharon arrives, Susan is reading the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s juvenilia and they watch two movies together. Sharon has to press pause frequently, because Susan is talking through the whole movie, adding commentary and glosses.

more here.

Jonathan Meades at Literary Review:

London’s architecture has become laughably boorish, confidently uncouth and flashily arid. Neomodern bling and meretricious trash are the current norms. Without exception, big-name architects turn out to be horizontals who happily put their knees behind their ears at the first sight of an oligarch, a Gulf princeling, a Central Asian dictator, a modern slave-driver or a property swine, while lecturing us on sustainability, low emissions, affordability, bicycles, ethical regeneration and whatever other right-on shibboleths are in the air this week. London is a magnet for a caste of designers who seem hardly to notice that the milieu they inhabit is chasmically remote from the lives of those affected and afflicted by their creations. It is the city – sorry, ‘global city’ – where reputations built through decades of imagination and toil, strict image control and rigorous PR are frittered away in a blizzard of self-parody and voracious cupidity. The tectonic gerontocrats Rogers, Viñoly, Piano, Foster, Nouvel, Shuttleworth and so on are apparently locked in a perpetual competition to vandalise the sky with banality. There are outsiders in there too, architectural practices that, all too evidently, never had a reputation to lose – for instance, the incompetents culpable of the Strata building in Elephant and Castle, or those at Broadway Malyan, whose destruction of Vauxhall deprived London of a valuable terrain vague. A few hundred metres west, the ineffable Gehry has his head in the corpse of Battersea Power Station like a vulture in a lamb’s ribcage.

Despite all this, or rather because of all this, the standard of English writing about urbanism, architecture and its mostly unintended or unforeseen consequences has risen to dizzying heights.

more here.

Joseph Luzzi in The American Scholar:

già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle,
sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa,
l’amor che move ’l sole e l’altre stelle.

now my will and my desire were turned,
like a wheel in perfect motion,
by the love that moves the sun and the other stars.

These breathtaking lines conclude Dante’s Divine Comedy, a 14,000-line epic written in 1321 on the state of the soul after death. T. S. Eliot called such poetry the most beautiful ever written—and yet so few of us have ever read it. Since the poem appeared, and especially in modern times, those readers intrepid enough to take on Dante have tended to focus on the first leg of his journey, through the burning fires of Inferno. As Victor Hugo wrote about The Divine Comedy’s blessed realms, “The human eye was not made to look upon so much light, and when the poem becomes happy, it becomes boring.”

In truth, some of the most sublime moments in The Divine Comedy, indeed in all of literature, occur after Dante makes his way out of the Inferno’s desolation. But Hugo’s attack suggests the particular challenge in reading Dante, whose writing can seem remote and impenetrable to modern tastes. Last year marked the 750th anniversary of Dante’s birth in 1265, and as expected for a writer so famous—Eliot claimed “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third”—the solemn commemorations abounded, especially in Italy where many cities have streets and monuments dedicated to their Sommo Poeta, Supreme Poet. Yet Dante has the unenviable fate of having become more known than read: his name is immediately recognizable, his achievements justly acknowledged, but outside the classroom or graduate seminar, only the hardiest of literary enthusiasts pick up his Divine Comedy. Oddly enough, and at least in the United States, we seem to know more about Dante the man—his exile, his political struggles, his eternal love for Beatrice—than his poetry.

More here.

Wayside Shrines

Doomed as I was to follow a big rig
laden with pigs and a wrecker with its intermittent strobe
I was all the more conscious of piles of rock
marking the scene of a crash,
some with handwritten notes, others a cache
of snapshots in a fogged-up globe.

Even a makeshift mobile may see off one of Calder’s
and the path among the alders
pan out like a prom-queen’s occipital lobe,
yet nothing can confirm one’s sense of being prized
like another’s being anathematized.
.

by Paul Muldoon
from Plan B
London: Enitharmon, 2009

Gretchen Reynolds in The New York Times:

Adding a little dark chocolate to a training diet may effortlessly improve endurance performance, according to a new study of sports nutrition. The findings provide ammunition both for athletes looking for an edge and those hoping for an excuse to indulge. For some time, dark chocolate has been touted as a relatively healthy treat, with studies showing that small amounts may have benefits for the heart and brain. Most of this research has focused on the role of a substance called epicatechin, a plant nutrient found in cocoa. Dark chocolate is generally rich in epicatechin, though levels vary, depending on how the sweet was produced. Levels of epicatechin tend to be much lower in milk chocolate, which contains little cocoa, and white chocolate contains little or none of the nutrient.

Epicatechin is known to prompt cells that line blood vessels to release extra nitric oxide, a substance that has multiple effects in the body. Nitric oxide slightly increases vasodilation, or a widening of the veins and arteries, improving blood flow and cardiac function. It also gooses muscle cells to take in more blood sugar, providing them with more energy, and it enhances the passage of oxygen into cells. Because of its many physiological effects, each of which can aid physical performance, athletes long have looked for ways to increase the amount of nitric oxide in their bloodstreams. Some down supplement pills, although the benefits of nitric oxide supplements are unproven. Others swallow beetroot juice, a beverage that contains a hefty dose of nitrates, which then break down in the body into nitric oxide and other substances. There are questions, however, about the safety of nitrates and also, as anyone who has tried beetroot juice will tell you, the palatability of a beverage that tastes distinctly like liquid dirt.

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 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.

You would have a column published at 3QD every fourth Monday. It should generally be between 1000 and 2500 words and can be about any subject at all. To qualify for a Monday slot, please submit a one or two paragraph bio and a sample column to me by email (s.abbas.raza.1 at gmail.com) as an MS Word-compatible document, or a URL if what you want us to look at is available online, which I will then circulate to the other editors and we will let you know our decision by about April 11. If you are given a slot on the 3QD schedule, your sample can also serve as your first column if it has never been published anywhere in print or online before. Feel free to use pictures, graphs, or other illustrations in your column. Naturally, you retain full copyright over your writing.

Please DO NOT submit more than one piece of writing, and also do not send the URL for a whole blog or website. I do not have the time to look through multiple postings. Select one piece of writing that you think is representative of the kinds of things you'd like to do at 3QD and just send that please.

Several of the people who started writing at 3QD have gone on to get regular paid gigs at well-known magazines, others have written well-received books. Even those who have not, have written to us saying that it has been a uniquely rewarding experience.

The deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM New York City time, Saturday, April 2, 2016.

Yours,

Abbas

NEW POSTS BELOW

Robert Zaretsky in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

On March 25, 1946, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, having left the rainforests of Brazil for the concrete canyons of New York City, confronted a social structure as complex and harsh as those he had found in the rainforests of Brazil. Moonlighting as the French Embassy’s cultural attaché, Lévi-Strauss received an unexpected visit from a group of French passengers who had just arrived on an American freighter, theOregon. Immigration officials had detained one of them because he refused to give the names of friends who belonged to the Communist Party. Lévi-Strauss dispatched a colleague to the docks, and the French visitor, frazzled and frustrated, was finally released.

With this faintly absurd event began Albert Camus’s only visit made to America.

Camus was no ordinary tourist. France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had sent him as an official representative of the recently liberated country. Who better to speak to American audiences about France’s experience of occupation and liberation? By 1944 and the liberation of Paris, the young French-Algerian writer was not just the author of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, both published to critical acclaim in occupied Paris. He was also the editor of Combat, the most influential underground paper of the French Resistance. With a suddenness that both touched and troubled him, Camus had become the one marketable export left to a bloodied and brutalized country: the French intellectual for whom ideas were a matter of life and death.

His friend, Jean-Paul Sartre, had preceded him to New York in 1945. Playing the role of existentialism’s John the Baptist, Sartre spoke at great length about Camus to a reporter from, of all places, the American edition of Vogue. Praising the new literature that had taken root in the liberated soil of France, Sartre declared, “its best representative is Albert Camus, who is thirty years old.”

More here.

Liliana Segura and Jordan Smith in The Intercept:

Despite the image peddled by popular TV shows like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, which portray forensic experts as crime-fighting scientists with unparalleled gifts of observation, the field has become increasingly embattled in recent years. Crime labs have come under fire for mishandling evidence, and high-profile exonerations have exposed how “junk science” has sent innocent people to prison. The bad press has led to heightened skepticism of forensics, forcing practitioners to defend their reputation.

2015 was no exception. Soon after the AAFS convened last February under the banner “Celebrating the Forensic Science Family,” a series of controversies cast further scrutiny on the field. There was the abrupt halting of DNA testing in Washington, D.C.’s first independent crime lab — a three-year-old $220 million project whose director was forced to resign amid damning audits. There was the ongoing fallout in Massachusetts over a crime lab chemist who falsified thousands of drug tests over her nine-year career. And there were the usual headlines exposing miscarriages of justice based on junk science: a Texas man freed after 25 years in prison due to bad “bite mark” evidence, and three men exonerated in New York after more than 30 years based on a faulty arson investigation (one died of a heart attack in prison). Among the record number of cleared cases in 2015, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, 45 involved “false or misleading forensic science.”

But perhaps most devastating, in April 2015, the Justice Department issued a bombshell announcement, formally admitting to a disastrous mishandling of evidence that lawyers, prisoners, and even its own forensic experts had pointed out for years. For more than two decades, as the Washington Post reported, FBI analysts doing hair fiber examination “gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants.”

More here.

Colin McRoberts in Aeon:

Would you like to stop paying taxes? Just renounce your 14th Amendment United States citizenship and claim ownership of the secret cestui que (beneficiary) trust that the US government created in your name on the day that you were born. Credit card debt? No problem, the trust is flush with millions or billions of dollars that you can use, just as soon as you establish ownership of your verified birth certificate and the corporate entity that has your name – but in all-capital letters.

These are some of the claims advanced by the self-styled experts who insist that everything you know about the legal system is wrong. These days, we are distressingly familiar with alternative, conspiracy-theory versions of science and medicine. Less well-known is the legal version of this phenomenon, not as visible as creationism or anti-vaccine activism but in many ways as destructive. Just ask the residents of Harney County, Oregon, who recently saw militants occupying the Malheur Wildlife Refuge emboldened by ‘judges’ and ‘citizen grand juries’ who had less to do with actual law than fantasy football does with the US National Football League.

Pseudolaw resembles pseudoscience in both its methods and applications. Believers are typically intelligent and motivated, and capable of constructing complex edifices that sound superficially credible.

More here.

Rose Eveleth in Motherboard:

Facial recognition systems are all over the place: Facebook, airports, shopping malls. And they’re poised to become nearly ubiquitous as everything from a security measure to a way to recognize frequent shoppers. For some people that will make certain interactions even more seamless. But because many facial recognition systems struggle with non-white faces, for others, facial recognition is a simple reminder: once again, this tech is not made for you.

There are plenty of anecdotes to start with here: We could talk about the time Google’s image tagging algorithm labeled a pair of black friends “gorillas,” or when Flickr’s system made the same mistake and tagged a black man with “animal” and “ape.” Or when Nikon’s cameras designed to detect whether someone blinked continually told at least one Asian user that her eyes were closed. Or when HP’s webcams easily tracked a white face, but couldn’t see a black one.

There are always technical explanations for these things. Computers are programmed to measure certain variables, and to trigger when enough of them are met. Algorithms are trained using a set of faces. If the computer has never seen anybody with thin eyes or darker skin, it doesn’t know to see them. It hasn’t been told how. More specifically: the people designing it haven’t told it how.

The fact that algorithms can contain latent biases is becoming clearer and clearer. And some people saw this coming.

More here.

Alia Ali in Lensculture.com:

Throughout life we are presented with endless examples in which individuals and groups have been excluded from communities based on appearances, beliefs and actions. When this happens, there must always be two, those who impose standards, the decision makers, the 'included,' and those they exclude. Communication can be used to both connect and divide, evolve and regress, educate and destroy. Inclusion is, therefore, engaging someone in a dialogue, but not necessarily a verbal one.

…The characters in the portraits, called —cludes, are wrapped in layers of fabric that shield them from interrelating with anything beyond the material. What are these fabricated barriers in society that inhibit the incorporation of others? Or are the obstacles just that: ideas, intuitions, fear, discriminations and ‘understandings’? Does inclusion mean acceptance? If so, does this definition lend itself to exclusion meaning rejection? Or do they both mean different points on the spectrum of tolerance? What side of the fabric are we on and can we be on both sides at once? When we exclude, does it come from the fear of being excluded ourselves? Isn’t exclusion a form of security, as well? If so, what is it that we fear from discovering that lies beneath the cloth and behind the curtain? By remaining indifferent, and incommunicative, do we become like one of them, dehumanized? Dummies? Or are we the ones enclosed and what we see is an illusive barrier that we have bestowed on them?

Who are the ‘includes’ and who are the ‘excludes’? How do we become secludes.

Does the material set a power dynamic? It certainly creates a boundary, but who holds the power; them, for their anonymity, or us, for their confinement?

More here.

Rose Hackman in The Guardian:

Ahsan Samad sits on the sofa in the living room of his small family home in Brooklyn, New York. The 30-year-old plumber leans forward and carefully pours the coffee his mother has just brought in from the kitchen. His young niece and nephew are playing in a nearby room. “I know I have done nothing wrong. I am constantly thinking about it. Their visits made me terrified.” Samad looks up, bewildered and confused. He is trying to lay out the complexity of the mental hell the past four and a half years have been for him. Samad is an American citizen with no criminal record – no arrests, no felonies. But in the shifting eyes of the American law, he is something worthy of seeming extra attention. Samad is not just American – he is also Muslim.

Over the course of more than four years between September 2011 and 2015, he received at least five visits to his home by NYPD and then FBI officers. He says the visiting officers came with no warrant and used threatening and provocative language. During a visit in September 2011, they even forced themselves inside his home. Law enforcement agents presenting themselves to his residence were repeatedly and systematically told by him and his petrified family members to arrange for interviews in the presence of lawyers (who later followed up with agencies) – something law enforcement officials repeatedly declined to do. Followups by Samad’s lawyers – members of a free legal clinic named Clear, which is operated by the law school at City University of New York – have not revealed the existence of any kind of formal investigation tied to Samad and his family.

More here.