Ariel Sabar in Smithsonian Magazine:

The 19th-century French theologian and explorer Ernest Renan called the Galilean landscape the “fifth Gospel,” a “torn, but still legible” tableau of grit and stone that gave “form” and “solidity” to the central texts about Jesus’s life—the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Renan’s somewhat romantic views were not unlike those of the tourists whose gleaming buses I got stuck behind last summer on the road to places like Nazareth and Capernaum; pilgrims have long come to these biblical lands hoping to find what Renan called “the striking agreement of the texts with the places.” Modern archaeologists working here, however, are less interested in “proving” the Bible than in uncovering facts and context absent from the texts. What religion did ordinary people practice? How did Galileans respond to the arrival of Greek culture and Roman rule? How close did they feel to the priestly elites in Jerusalem? What did they do for work? What, for that matter, did they eat?

The Gospels themselves provide only glancing answers; their purpose is spiritual inspiration, not historical documentation. As for actual firsthand accounts of Galilean life in the first century, only one survives, written by a Jewish military commander named Josephus. This has made archaeology the most fruitful source of new information about Jesus’s world. Each layer of dirt, or stratum, is like a new page, and with much of Galilee still unexcavated, many chapters of this Fifth Gospel remain unread.

More here.

Hello,

The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants. Details of the prize can be found here.

On the right is a “trophy” logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs.

So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to John Collins, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)

1. Experimental Philosophy: Can we have free will and lack it too?
2. Feminist Philosophers: On How We Talk About Passing
3. Justice Everywhere: (One of) Effective Altruism’s blind spot(s)
4. Orienteringsforsok: Slow corruption
5. Philosophical Percolations: Getting out of the philosophers’ rut
6. Step back, step forward: Hypocrisy in general, utilitarianism in particular
7. The Forum: Are Delusions Bad for You?
8. The Philosopher's Beard: Children are special, but not particularly important
9. Vihvelin: Counterfactuals: The Short Course

We'll announce the three winners on December 28, 2015.

Good luck!

Abbas

P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best six posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.

The moment it was accepted that Aristotle had not been right about everything was a crucial turning point in the history of science.

Steven Poole in the New Statesman:

The early-modern Scientific Revolution is still in some populist quarters described as a triumph of experimental reason over religious superstition. It is one of the many virtues of David Wootton’s fascinating history that this canard barely merits a mention, let alone a tedious refutation. For, as he shows, many in the vanguard of the emerging order of the 16th and 17th centuries were religious; they took the new science to be a bulwark against atheism; and, as Wootton plausibly argues, Newtonianism would have been inconceivable without the tradition of belief in a creator God.

In Wootton’s telling, the revolution that created the tradition of science we recognise today was instead a victory of a different kind. The core story spans the long century from the astronomer Tycho Brahe’s first identification of a nova (as we would now say, an exploding star) in 1572, to Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity (1687) and Opticks (1704). Wootton describes it, in terrifically rich detail, as a revolt of mathematicians, wielding numbers and experiments, against philosophers, who assumed that Aristotle had been right about everything.

The mathematicians in this story include early scientists such as Galileo (whom we remember mainly for his telescope but who also conducted pedantic experiments on objects floating in water); they also include, more surprisingly, the artists who first codified the rules of perspective in painting.

More here.

Adil Najam and Henrik Selin in The Conversation:

At 7:27 pm local time Saturday, December 12th, 2015, a new Paris Agreement on global climate change was born after four years of taxing labor. Its much-anticipated birth was quickly followed by copious self-congratulations by many of the parents in the room who almost all were overcome by joy and bursting with pride.

Praise heaped upon newborns should be taken with a grain of salt. “Historic” is a term often thrown about too cavalierly, and a “new era” does not start every time government bureaucrats pull a few all-nighters. But, what has come out of Paris clearly marks a new direction for global climate cooperation.

We wish the newborn well, but upon some post-natal reflection, it is clear that the birth of the Paris Agreement should be cause for both hope and caution. Certain political developments are principally good and welcome. Other changes are largely bad. And some purposeful omissions may be plain ugly.

The Paris Agreement signals that climate change is back at the center of the global political agenda – at least for now.

A collective weight has been lifted off the backs of the many delegates who for the past six years have been struggling to recover from the Copenhagen fiasco in 2009, where countries failed to agree on a common strategy. The lingering gloom of Copenhagen has been replaced by Paris euphoria. For this, the French hosts deserve much credit.

More here.

Paul Krugman in Rolling Stone:

When it comes to Barack Obama, I've always been out of sync. Back in 2008, when many liberals were wildly enthusiastic about his candidacy and his press was strongly favorable, I was skeptical. I worried that he was naive, that his talk about transcending the political divide was a dangerous illusion given the unyielding extremism of the modern American right. Furthermore, it seemed clear to me that, far from being the transformational figure his supporters imagined, he was rather conventional-minded: Even before taking office, he showed signs of paying far too much attention to what some of us would later take to calling Very Serious People, people who regarded cutting budget deficits and a willingness to slash Social Security as the very essence of political virtue.

And I wasn't wrong. Obama was indeed naive: He faced scorched-earth Republican opposition from Day One, and it took him years to start dealing with that opposition realistically. Furthermore, he came perilously close to doing terrible things to the U.S. safety net in pursuit of a budget Grand Bargain; we were saved from significant cuts to Social Security and a rise in the Medicare age only by Republican greed, the GOP's unwillingness to make even token concessions.

But now the shoe is on the other foot: Obama faces trash talk left, right and center – literally – and doesn't deserve it. Despite bitter opposition, despite having come close to self-inflicted disaster, Obama has emerged as one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in American history.

More here.

Matthew Munhall in the (Notre Dame and St. Mary's College) Observer:

“Sad bastard music” is how Julien Baker has taken to referring to her songwriting, at least somewhat jokingly, in recent interviews. It’s an apt description of the 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s stunning debut, “Sprained Ankle,” an album about coping with sadness in its various permutations. Baker’s songs — about addiction, loneliness, heartbreak, mortality — are emotionally arresting; they grab you by the neck and force you to feel something.

Baker has been writing songs since junior high and became immersed in the Memphis music scene in high school with her band, Forrister. When she went off to school at Middle Tennessee State University, though, she found herself missing her bandmates and began writing songs alone in the practice room of her school’s music building. The result of those late-night songwriting sessions is “Sprained Ankle,” an album that falls in the lineage of Bon Iver’s “For Emma, Forever Ago,” Waxahatchee’s “American Weekend” and Torres’ self-titled LP — confessional, emotionally direct debuts that emerged from an artist in solitude.

Most of the album is just Baker’s voice, which oscillates between quiet restraint and a powerful wail depending on what the song calls for, and her electric guitar, drenched in reverb and delay. With these two instruments, she constructs a self-contained universe, expansive in sound even as its subject matter is inward-looking.

More here. [Thanks to Yohan John.]

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

In 1997, physicians in southwest Korea began to offer ultrasound screening for early detection of thyroid cancer. News of the programme spread, and soon physicians around the region began to offer the service. Eventually it went nationwide, piggybacking on a government initiative to screen for other cancers. Hundreds of thousands took the test for just US$30–50. Across the country, detection of thyroid cancer soared, from 5 cases per 100,000 people in 1999 to 70 per 100,000 in 2011. Two-thirds of those diagnosed had their thyroid glands removed and were placed on lifelong drug regimens, both of which carry risks. Such a costly and extensive public-health programme might be expected to save lives. But this one did not. Thyroid cancer is now the most common type of cancer diagnosed in South Korea, but the number of people who die from it has remained exactly the same — about 1 per 100,000. Even when some physicians in Korea realized this, and suggested that thyroid screening be stopped in 2014, the Korean Thyroid Association, a professional society of endocrinologists and thyroid surgeons, argued that screening and treatment were basic human rights.

In Korea, as elsewhere, the idea that the early detection of any cancer saves lives had become an unshakeable belief. This blind faith in cancer screening is an example of how ideas about human biology and behaviour can persist among people — including scientists — even though the scientific evidence shows the concepts to be false.

More here.

David Griffith at The Paris Review:

At a little more than fifty pages, “The Displaced Person” is one of Flannery O’Connor’s least anthologized stories—and if you share her beliefs about what she called “topical” stories, it’s also one of the most problematic. O’Connor was wary of stories that focused squarely and perhaps sentimentally on social issues. Her own “Everything that Rises Must Converge,” featuring a bigoted white woman riding a newly integrated bus, was, she feared, just such a story—though in a letter to a friend she confided that she “got away with it … because I say a plague on everybody’s house as far as the race business goes.”

In the very same letter, O’Connor writes that “the topical is poison,” lambasting Eudora Welty’s famous story “Where Is the Voice Coming From,” written from the point of view of the man who assassinated the civil rights leader Medgar Evers. “It’s the kind of story that the more you think about it the less satisfactory it gets,” O’Connor wrote. “What I hate most is its being in the New Yorker and all of the stupid Yankee liberals smacking their lips over typical life in the dear old dirty Southland.”

Like many in the South, O’Connor abhorred racism but was slow to embrace integration, feeling that to rush things would lead to more violence.

more here.

Amanda Power at Lapham's Quarterly:

At its most essential level, the notion of an omniscient, omnipotent, interested, judging God was translated into our inherited forms of governance through the Roman Catholic interpretation of Christ’s words to Peter, in the Gospel According to Matthew. “Upon this rock I will build my church,” Christ says to his apostle, “and the gates of Hades shall not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” The Church alleged that this authority had been transmitted through the succession of the bishops of Rome, and flowed from pope on down through the clerical hierarchy, so that every priest shared in the power to bind and loose on earth, in the knowledge that their decisions would be upheld by God.

Through the priests, God’s power to watch and judge had a human embodiment. They were not to shed blood, but there were circumstances in which they were to hand over obdurate individuals to secular authorities for execution. God’s dispersed authority was thus delegated even to laypeople whose individual jurisdiction extended no further than towns and villages. At the top of the secular hierarchy, monarchs were anointed by priests, thus symbolizing their religious legitimacy. As in John of Salisbury’s “ministers of God,” these monarchs’ worst abuses were sanctioned by the assertion of the elites that governments always operated with the backing of watchful divine will.

more here.

Elif Batuman at The New Yorker:

When I first heard about Hanya Yanagihara’s “A Little Life”—a 720-page, four-friends-in-New-York novel that unexpectedly morphs into the saga of the self-loathing and self-harm of the disabled survivor of serial homosexual pedophilia—I didn’t plan on reading it. This decision was based on a belief I formed about myself as a child in the nineteen-eighties: some people, I saw, really liked to read novels about foster children who had flashbacks to terrible encounters with pedophiles or other abusers, but I usually preferred books that were about other things. I didn’t appreciate the ready-made importance or seriousness that seemed to be conferred by the subject matter. I thought it was great that books like that existed, and I knew they met a need, but they weren’t for me.

“A Little Life” became one of the most-talked-about books of 2015, a best-seller in the U.S. and the U.K., the subject of many enthusiastic reviews andreader testimonials, and a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award. (It has now begun to appear on end-of-the-year top-ten lists.) I read some of the positive reviews. Sooner or later, I would get to a sentence like “Jude was taught to cut himself by Brother Luke” and would be unable to imagine myself reading such a book. As for the negative reviews—which were less numerous but sometimes written by close friends with whom I often agreed about books—they seemed to be describing a genuinely problematic text.

more here.

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. Practical Ethics: Should we intervene in nature to help animals?
2. Scientia Salon: Brontosaurus and the nature of philosophy
3. Thinking Of Things: A False Sense of Insecurity
4. The Philosopher's Beard: Children are special, but not particularly important
5. Feminist Philosophers: On How We Talk About Passing
6. Philosophical Percolations: Getting out of the philosophers’ rut
7. Beauty Demands: Variations on a beauty theme: The uses of ‘normal’
8. Imperfect Cognitions: Intellectual Humility: Interview with Duncan Pritchard
9. Oxford University Press Blog: Does the meat industry harm animals?
10. University of Birmingham: “Them and Us” no longer: mental health concerns us all
11. What Is It Like To Be A Philosopher? Interview with Michael Ruse
12. The Philosophers' Cocoon: Pink: The sweet spot of extended cognition
13. Samuel C. Rickless: A History of Western Philosophy in 108 Limericks
14. Sprachlogik: An Account of Necessity as an Attribute of Propositions
15. Pacificklaus: Sardines, Death and Fear
16. Quaeritur: Understanding Climate Change Denial through the Lens of Nietzsche
17. The Forum: Are Delusions Bad for You?
18. Jacob Archambault: On the future of research in the history of philosophy
19. Orienteringsforsok: Slow corruption
20. Vihvelin: Counterfactuals: The Short Course

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to John Collins for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists tomorrow.

George Pendle in More Intelligent Life:

You’ve seen them before, those three eyeless monsters with their maws stretched taut in terrible screams. The unforgettable characters at the centre of Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies For Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion” (above) were so shocking when they were first revealed in 1944 that the critic John Russell declared, “We had no name for them, and no name for what we felt about them.” Yet the three figures which have been on show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York do not fill the viewer with the same sense of terror. In fact the effect is quite the opposite. Here are the same shrieking creatures, but this triptych is much larger and neater than the original, which was as small as a devotional painting and as raw as a chunk of meat. That’s because this is not the same picture but a copy entitled “Second Version of Triptych 1944”, a painting made almost half a century later when the Tate wouldn’t loan the original out for an exhibition of Bacon’s work.

Gagosian’s show of Bacon’s late paintings is full of such double-takes and do-overs. All the signifiers of his best known pictures are here – the bare rooms, the fleshy shadows, the sickly puces and vulgar violets – but they appear in lesser known works. As the wall text proudly states, “there has until now never been a show devoted solely to investigating the innovations and departures of his late paintings.” Judging from the evidence, that is because Bacon appears to have innovated and departed not very much at all. It’s true that in the last 15 years of his life he started using spray paint to add blossoming white lesions to his murky canvases. He also began imprinting them with strips of corduroy and developed a peculiar obsession with dressing his amorphous, fleshy lumps in cricket pads. But if there is one significant change it is that by the 1980s his once terrifying ghouls and gobbets had come to seem almost familiar. These are horrors drawn by rote. In his late paintings Bacon was no longer painting the void, he was decorating it.

More here.

Sandra Blakeslee in The New York Times:

The dodo is dead. The passenger pigeon has passed on. But Lonesome George, the iconic Galápagos tortoise whose death marked the end of his species, is in post-mortem luck. A scientific expedition has discovered some of his close blood relations alive and well. With careful breeding, biologists now hope to revive George’s species and reintroduce the tortoises to the island on which they evolved. It would be a signal achievement in a place that gave rise to our understanding of evolution and speciation. Originally there were at least eight species of Galápagos tortoise, scientists now believe. (One was discovered only this year.) At least three species are now extinct, including tortoises on Pinta Island. The last one, George, was discovered wandering alone in 1972 and taken into loving custody. His death, in 2012 at more than 100 years old, was a powerful reminder of the havoc visited by humans on delicate ecosystems worldwide over the last two centuries.

There are two types of Galápagos tortoises: saddlebacked and domed. The sailors much preferred the smaller saddlebacks, which were easier to lug around and said to taste better. They were also easier to find: Domed tortoises live at higher elevations and can weigh 300 pounds. Saddlebacks evolved at lower elevations and feed on drier vegetation. Saddlebacked tortoises disappeared from Santa Fe Island and Floreana Island, a favorite hangout for sailors posting letters for other ships to carry home. With George’s death, the Pintas were gone, too. But now the story of extinct Galápagos tortoises has taken a strange, and hopeful, twist. More than a century ago, it turns out, sailors dumped saddlebacked tortoises they did not need into Banks Bay, near Wolf Volcano on Isabela Island. Luckily, tortoises can extend their necks above water and float on their backs. Many of them made it to shore, lumbered across the lava fields and interbred with Isabela’s native domed tortoises. In 2008, scientists tagged and collected blood samples from more than 1,600 tortoises living on the flanks of the volcano. Back in the laboratory, there was a genetic eureka: Eighty-nine of the animals were part Floreana, whose full genetic profile DNA had been obtained from museum samples.

More here.

David Roberts in Vox:

A new study by political scientists Joanne Miller, Kyle Saunders, and Christina Farhart helps shed some light on these questions.

Endorsing conspiracy theories, they say, is a form of “motivated reasoning” — an effort to gather facts and construct frameworks that “protect or bolster one’s political worldview.” They set out to determine what sorts of people are most likely to be susceptible to that sort of thing.

They went into the study with two hypotheses:

1. All things being equal, knowledge — close engagement with partisan politics, consumption of political news — will tend to exacerbate the tendency to endorse conspiracy theories (CTs).

2. Trust in the political system will tend to mitigate this effect; those with high levels of trust will be less prone to accept CTs.

Putting those together, they expected to find CTs most common among high-information, low-trust people — those who are highly engaged and informed about politics but do not trust politicians, political elites, or mainstream institutions.

So do the hypotheses hold up?

The researchers found, after examining two large data sets (details in the paper), that the effect of trust is as expected, across the political spectrum. Lower-trust conservatives and liberals are both more likely to endorse ideologically congenial CTs (i.e., CTs that make the other side look bad).

But beyond that, there are interesting asymmetries. For liberals, more knowledge reduces endorsement of CTs, no matter the level of trust, and more trust reduces endorsement of CTs, no matter the level of knowledge — “knowledge and trust are both independently negatively related to liberals’ endorsement of liberal conspiracies.”

For conservatives, on the other hand, more knowledge increases endorsement of CTs among those with low trust; for high-trust conservatives, knowledge seems to have no effect — it neither increases nor decreases tendency to endorse CTs.

More here.

Sheri Berman in Dissent:

What are the uses of anarchism? The short answer is “not many.” Although anarchists have often been motivated by worthy aspirations and occasionally raised awareness of crucial issues, in general, anarchism is an ineffective way of improving the world. Anarchists are better dreamers than doers, and politics is the art of the possible. Although it may disappoint many on the left, a successful movement requires compromise, organization, and yes, even leadership, to actually get things done.

There are many variants and historical manifestations of anarchism, but characterizing all is a rejection of authority and hierarchy. Anarchists dream of a world without states, traditional political organizations, or any other structures that restrict individual freedom. Because they share such beliefs and goals with libertarians, anarchists are easily confused with them. In the American context, at least, the main distinction between the two concerns capitalism: anarchists view it as inherently coercive, while libertarians venerate it as the embodiment and guardian of individual rights. This has led the former to be viewed as left wing and the latter as right wing, but in reality, anarchists differ dramatically from other sectors of the modern left (just as libertarians differ dramatically from traditional conservatives and other factions of the modern right).

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century anarchism’s rejection of traditional political organizations and activity led to its involvement in various uprisings and rebellions, the most important of which was the Paris Commune. Anarchists also became associated with “propaganda of the deed”—“spontaneous” and “voluntary” actions that reflected the power of the individual and were designed to inspire others. Although these actions need not necessarily be violent, they often were: during this period anarchists were responsible for a series of spectacular assassinations and bombings. A czar of Russia, presidents of Italy and France, kings of Portugal and Greece, and a president of the United States all met their ends at the hands of anarchists. Despite their often spectacular nature, anarchist activities were almost uniformly unsuccessful.

More here. See Marina Sitrin's counterargument here.

David Kishik in Public Seminar:

In his eighth thesis on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin alerts us of a rhetorical trap into which too many of us too often fall. First we see something: rights trampled, freedoms snatched, humans oppressed, laws overlooked, brutality unleashed. Amazed by these horrors, we then feel compelled to say something: how can this still be possible today?

Aristotle claimed that philosophy begins with wonder, but Benjamin assures us that no deep insight ever arose from the above knee-jerk reaction. Unless, that is, by lingering on it for a second, we will eventually be led to rethink a deeply-engrained conviction.

What stands behind this fake wonder? It is a simple assumption, hovering between the words still and today. Back in the day, we reckon, it was more common for such atrocities to happen. People probably didn’t even bother to bat an eyelash. But things changed. The world advanced. Progress rules, even though it remains an uphill battle.

And this battle is real. We know that an eyelash batted in America will not release a political prisoner in China. So petitions are signed, marches organized, boycotts enforced, legislations repealed, and yes, sometimes even force has to be used for the good cause. And look how far we have come!

But then, like a stock-exchange bubble, the situation blows up in our faces. And we can’t believe that this is even happening. Again. Still. Given all that we’ve already achieved. So we don’t hesitate. We barely stop to think, and spring back into action. We try to right the wrong. Bring the aberration back to a healthy state. Restore the peace. Reconcile the rift. This is just an exception to the rule, we surmise. The just rule can still rule.

Think of a real example of grave injustice, like the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. How can this conflict remain unresolved for so many years? What part of “basic human rights” does the Israeli government fail to understand? How much suffering do the Palestinians have to endure before the world will really, truly wake up? How can this still be possible today? How can this misery continue on and on without concrete hope for a better future?

More here.

Scott Atran in Aeon:

Treating the Islamic State as merely a form of terrorism or violent extremism masks the menace. All novel developments are ‘extremist’ compared with what was the norm before. What matters for history is whether these movements survive and thrive against the competition. For our singularly self-predatory species, success has depended on willingness to shed blood, including the sacrifice of one’s own, not merely for family and tribe, wealth or status, but for some greater cause. This has been especially true since the start of the Axial Age more than two millennia ago. At that time, large-scale civilisations arose under the watchful gaze of powerful divinities, who mercilessly punished moral transgressors – thus ensuring that even strangers in multiethnic empires would work and fight as one.

Call it ‘god’ or whatever secular ideology one prefers, including any of the great modern salvational -isms: colonialism, socialism, anarchism, communism, fascism and liberalism. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes deemed sacrifice for a transcendent ideal ‘the privilege of absurdity to which no creature but man is subject’. Humans make their greatest commitments and exertions, for ill or good, for the sake of ideas that give a sense of significance. In an inherently chaotic universe, where humans alone recognise that death is unavoidable, there is an overwhelming psychological impetus to overcome this tragedy of cognition: to realise ‘why I am’ and ‘who we are’.

In The Descent of Man (1871), Charles Darwin cast this devotion as the virtue of ‘morality… the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy’ with which winning groups are better endowed in history’s spiralling competition for survival and dominance. It is the sacred values, immune to material tradeoffs, that bind us most. In any culture, an unwillingness to sell out one’s kin or religious and political brotherhoods and motherlands is the line we usually will not cross. Devotion to these values can drive successes which are out of all proportion to expected outcomes.

More here.

Sady Doyle in In These Times:

I am proud to call myself a relentless and inflexible critic of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. For some time now, the unstoppable torrent of Marvel content—at least 23 movies between 2008 and 2019, plus at least seven TV shows (Agent Carter and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on traditional broadcast, plus four separate Netflix shows for Iron Fist, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage and Daredevil, plus The Defenders, their inevitable team-up)—has been catastrophic not only for genre movies, but for entertainment as a whole.

Consider the effect Marvel has already had. Everything has to be a blockbuster, just to compete. Every blockbuster has to take place in “a universe” (which is to say, an endlessly prolonged and over-elaborated franchise) to command the largest possible share of consumer loyalty and income. Most of it, apparently, has to belong to Disney, one of the larger and more overtly evil media corporations in the world, which has now purchased Star Wars, Marvel, and (experts estimate) approximately 34 percent of your personal sense of childhood wonder.

It’s not just that we can’t get away from Marvel, or Disney: It’s that there are still genuinely great, beautiful, stand-alone sci-fi and horror and fantasy and action films being made, and Marvel is hurting their chances. This year, for example, we had Crimson Peak, Ex Machina and Mad Max: Fury Road. All of them were unique, thought-provoking, and progressive, particularly in their treatment of gender. And the first two struggled at the box office. Meanwhile, the relentlessly dull, surprisingly sexist, and borderline-nonsensical Marvel punchfest Age of Ultron made over $495 million (far outdoing Mad Max’s $300 million) despite the fact that I didn’t know a single person who walked out of the theater fully satisfied with the film.

So, yes: The Marvel Cinematic Universe is having the same effect on good genre fiction that Starbucks had on independent coffee shops. Not only are they brewing a worse product than the competition, they’re making it harder for anyone else to make a living by serving a decent cup. I have deep aesthetic and, dare I say, political objections to the entire enterprise. It would take a miracle, or a masterpiece, for me to ever unequivocally praise one of their products.

And Jessica Jones is either a miracle or a masterpiece, because I’ll be damned if it’s not a pretty good TV show.

More here.