Rachel Wetzler in Art News:

As Foster describes, one of the primary themes of the book [Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency] is an acknowledgment that the preoccupations of postmodernism—whose critical language Foster and his colleagues at October were instrumental in defining—are no longer sufficient for considering contemporary art. In lieu of the critique of representation that was the hallmark of art and criticism of the 1980s, the practices that we might consider avant-garde today—the work of artists like Thomas Hirschhorn, Isa Genzken, Tacita Dean, and Robert Gober—are oriented around a “probing of the real and the historical.”

Another central theme is Foster’s insistence on the value of criticism itself. In his chapter on the post-critical, he cites a number of recent challenges to the idea of criticism and criticality from both the right and the left: its putative irrelevance at a moment when artistic worth and literal market value are treated as one and the same; the neoconservative culture of affirmation that returned with particular force after 9/11; the elitist privilege that gives the critic’s judgment more weight than that of the public.

Most of these objections are swiftly dismissed, but Foster does take up arguments by the philosophers Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière—both of whom have become popular in art circles in recent years—who reject the critic’s “arrogant posture of demystification” as its own form of fetishism; ultimately, Foster maintains that the two fall back on their own circuitous logic in their condemnation of the critic’s aspiration to defetishize or demystify and that the alternatives they propose are noble but naive. (Foster makes clear that he thinks art is no match for governmental and corporate bodies when it comes to Rancière’s “distribution of the sensible.”) “Critique,” he acknowledges, “is never enough: one must intervene in the given, turn it somehow, and take it somewhere else. But this somewhere else is opened up through critique; without critique alternatives do not become readily manifest, let alone strongly motivated.”

More here.

Sarah Juliet Lauro in Avidly:

Graham Greene’s 1966 novel The Comedians, is the focal point of this class trip: we are there to gather material for a set of multi-media annotations that we hope to make available for free online. Greene wrote the book while living at the Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince during the Duvalier regime, and the narrative wrestles— if only in the corner of its eye, seen in flittering references to the USA’s propping up of Papa Doc — with the larger issue of foreign involvement in Haiti.

Greene’s novel offers a unique perspective on outsiders in Haiti, particularly in the book’s searing depiction of the American couple Mr. and Mrs. Smith, a well-meaning but ridiculous pair who have come in the hopes of building a center for vegetarianism. Brown, the narrator, points out that, too poor to buy meat, the majority of the population are de facto herbivores, but this does not dissuade the Smiths in their mission to bring their brand of help to Haiti, believing as they do that carnivorous consumption leads to violence. In one of the most painful moments in the book, the reader is subjected to a bit of dramatic irony: Mr. Smith, glowing with self-satisfaction after giving a wad of cash to a legless beggar, fails to notice that he may just as well have painted the man with a bull’s-eye. As another begins to close in on this new prey, the imminent beating is obvious to the reader while Mr. Smith remains blissfully ignorant. This is also an apt parable for what many felt was happening to the aid pouring into Haiti from the US (not without strings attached) during the Duvalier regime: it never made it into the right hands. So, you’re damned if, like Smith, you do try to help. But you’re probably also a heartless asshole, like Brown, the callous European hotelier, if you don’t even care to try. The most succinct and telling characterization of this type of self-interested foreigner is Brown’s horribly unmoving one-line eulogy when he sees that his longtime servant, Joseph, has died fighting the dictatorship: “He used to make good rum-punches.”

More here.

Patrick Ellis at n+1:

HOW MUCH MONEY is the Eiffel Tower worth? It is an answerless question, but one that many have nevertheless posed, and a few have tried to resolve. One recent estimate claimed €435 billion—but the price of air travel and entry tickets, evidently, cannot encompass the tower’s worth in the cultural imagination, so why would anyone ever bother? One possible reason: the Eiffel Tower is the great survivor of the 1889 World’s Fair and stands as a barometer, however unrealistic, of the future potential of all such expositions.

World’s fairs bring together participating nations into architecturally elaborate pavilions that display whatever each guest nation wishes to broadcast, in theory according to the fair’s topical theme du jour. These connections can be tenuous. At San Francisco’s fair of 1915, you might learn of agricultural practices in New Zealand, forest products in Honduras, or the palatial architectural of Japan. Architecture has always been a heavily promoted feature of the fairs, and they have helped to introduce Beaux-Arts, art deco, and Brazilian modernism (among other styles) to new audiences. Critics have routinely met such architectural novelties with disdain, given that the common palette is surfeit, expense, and transience. Apart from the handful of structures that have legs, and outlive the fair—organizers never know when they might wind up with another Ferris wheel (Chicago) or Space Needle (Seattle)—a world’s fair is an ephemeral event, never built to last.

more here.

Thomas Jessen Adams at nonsite:

It is of course a complete accident that the same year that marks the tenth anniversary of the failure of federally maintained levees, incompetent disaster relief, and rampant profiteering in the face of a relatively pedestrian hurricane known as Katrina should also mark the fiftieth anniversary of the publication by an obscure Assistant Secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan of The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. History is littered with such coincidences and in general, they are simply that, coincidences. Had a similar storm occurred instead in late August of 2006, hitting an increasingly privatized New Orleans run by the soon to be convicted felon Ray Nagin, in a nation governed by the unconvicted but decidedly more felonious George W. Bush, the results would have in all likelihood been all too similar and the accident of their anniversaries would not exist. Still, such coincidences can prove analytically fortuitous. The chance of history that brought the anniversaries of the Moynihan Report and Hurricane Katrina together helps elucidate both the long-term implications of Moynihan’s dominance over a large portion of American discourse regarding inequality—a discourse that bears a great deal of responsibility for the effects of that fairly mundane storm—and the long historical temporalities that produced Katrina as a storm of unthinkable tragedy. Indeed, Katrina did not form to the southeast of the Bahamas on August 22, 2005. It formed when Moynihan helped consolidate the culture of poverty thesis in 1965. It formed when a conception of freedom grounded in contract, work-discipline, and various versions of moral economy defeated its multiple historical alternatives. It formed when American politics ceased to effectively challenge these defeats. In fact, if we further widen our lens, we can see its beginnings in the monumental transition from slavery to freedom that is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year.

more here.

Kelefa Sanneh at The New Yorker:

Coates’s two books show how twinned fears of crime and punishment can be mutually reinforcing: how the historic failure of the police to keep African-Americans safe from violence can make police excesses all the more appalling. The police killing of Prince Jones was, surely, that much more disturbing to a man who remembered that when he was a boy the police had failed to protect his friend Craig. For some reformers, the key is retraining police officers to minimize violence. But Coates and Alexander warn against this kind of meliorist thinking. “A reform that begins with the officer on the beat is not reform at all,” Coates has written. To many Black Lives Matter activists, the phrase “state monopoly on violence” probably sounds more like a threat than like a reassurance.

Crime statistics in Baltimore are complicated: in the decades since Coates was a boy, murders declined, but so did the city’s population. In general, though, American crime rates have fallen since the early nineteen-nineties, and the nation’s imprisoned population—while extraordinarily high, by global standards—seems to have stopped increasing. As for police killings, each one is tragic, and each unjustified one is outrageous; police departments in Europe, for instance, are vastly less likely to kill. But there is no evidence that we are living through a modern epidemic.

more here.

Nobody
.

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us — don't tell!
They'd banish — you know!

How dreary to be somebody!
How public like a frog
To tell one's name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!
.

by Emily Dickinson
published 1891, Series 2

Musical arrangement by Jim Culleny and Joe Podlesny
Copyright 8/9/15 by Jim Culleny

Enrique and Gullans in delanceyplace:

“The human virome includes trillions of viruses that live in and on our cells, plus even more that inhabit the bacteria in our microbiome. The virome is poorly understood and could be considered the 'dark matter of nature' and humanity; we know it is there but have a very hard time describing it or knowing what it is doing. The human virome is essentially our fourth genome; it interacts directly and indirectly with our other three genomes. Moreover, like your genome, epigenome, and microbiome, your virome is absolutely unique. Viruses live in our intestines, mouths, lungs, skin, and even in our blood, the latter being only discovered recently. But fret not; given that people are generally healthy day-to-day, the virome overall must be benign, and given the millennia of mutual coexistence, our viromes must provide benefits that we don't yet appreciate.

“Viruses are champions of DNA mutation. A 2013 study of the human gut virome tracked the identities, abundance, and mutations of native viruses in one person over two and a half years. There were 478 relatively abundant viruses, most of which had not been previously identified. A majority of the viruses were bacteriophage, the type that infects bacteria. Eighty percent of the viruses persisted for the entire 2.5 years, but they all mutated, some slowly, some very quickly. In some cases they mutated so fast that the virus would be deemed a new species within the 2.5 years. What came out of the body after symbiosis was very different from what went in. “So viruses, our ubiquitous interlopers, are an important part of our rapid evolution; they carry, exchange, and modify the DNA between cells or from one species to another. They drive evolution at all scales, in bacteria, plants, animals, and humans. The best example of this is the spread of antibacterial-resistance genes from one bacterial organism to its fellow species, and then to other bacteria of all types, in all geographies. Once a beneficial mutation arises in a microbe, viruses help spread it quickly throughout the microbiome and beyond.

More here.

From Granta:

Jenni Fagan

The health of a society can be judged by how well it cares for its most vulnerable citizens. The current refuges are children, women and men who desperately need the rest of the world to understand that this can happen to anyone – and it won’t go away.

The refugee and migrant crisis in Europe is an opportunity to reach out, engage politically, act humanely and do the only decent thing anyone can do – imagine how it would feel if you were unsafe and your children’s lives and family’s future depended upon the understanding of strangers?

All populations are historically transient. Humans are a migrant race full stop. These people could easily be us, it’s time to get our priorities straight and offer our collective resolve to continue to challenge brutality and its effects on ordinary citizens in countries all across the world.

Tim Finch

They gave themselves away with the words on their T-shirts.

Invaders. Mystery space riders.

Army life. XVI Soldier 4. Spec. Mil.

Yes, they were an army of invading aliens

So we built a fortress to repel them.

More here.

Vivian Gornick at The Nation:

When in June the Supreme Court declared same-sex marriage the law of the land in Obergefell v. Hodges, on the one hand I, along with millions of others, cheered; on the other, I was reminded of that long ago time when I, and everyone I knew then, thought long and hard and almost daily about how good it would be if loneliness and marriage were no longer linked together; if it were free and independent persons who got married for any reason other than the fear of living alone.

Forty years ago, when the liberationist movements were young, the cast of mind among a multitude of activists and theorists working on behalf of women, blacks, and gays was visionary. The struggle for equal rights seemed existential, as though it was calling into philosophical question the very idea of politics. In a sense, we were like babes in the woods in a state of original wonderment. How had these hierarchies of power and powerlessness come about? we asked ourselves, as though this question had never been asked before. Why do the laws and customs of society invariably benefit this group and disenfranchise that one? What underlying purpose do these decisions serve? What is actually going on here?

more here.

Claire Bishop at Artforum:

THE FIFTY-SIXTH VENICE BIENNALE is dominated by a Danh Vo double bill: “mothertongue,” a solo show in the Danish pavilion, and “Slip of the Tongue,” a large exhibition curated by the artist at the François Pinault Foundation’s Punta della Dogana, where Vo has mixed his own work with that of some three dozen others. Vo’s solo outing makes for one of this year’s most striking national pavilions, an exquisitely spare arrangement of Danish modern furniture, Oaxacan tiles, sinuous dead branches, and sawn-off or crated-up statuary from the first through seventeenth centuries. The tasteful atmosphere is subtly undercut by the venue’s plate-glass windows, which are covered in barely legible words (e.g., YOU'RE GONNA DIE) that turn out to be quotes from The Exorcist, as are many of the works’ expletive-laden titles (e.g., Do you know what she did, your cunting daughter?). Some of these elements have obvious autobiographical significance—the tiles and branches were shipped from the Vietnamese-born artist’s latest country of residence, Mexico—but understanding what, if anything, connects these meticulously arranged artifacts to one another is something of a challenge. An accompanying pamphlet offers extended captions, an essay by art historian Patricia Falguières, and an artist’s statement in which allusions to colonialism and Catholicism are interspersed among stories about Vo’s father, Phung. However, these texts are so aleatory and fragmented that they ultimately reinforce the installation’s poetic opacity.

In the sprawling Punta della Dogana, “Slip of the Tongue” is just as sparse and striking. Here, as in the pavilion, modestly scaled objects are judiciously distributed in a great deal of empty space, and even manage to counteract the relentless machismo of Tadao Ando’s architecture. Once again the configuration of works is transhistorical: Illuminated manuscript fragments by late-medieval masters, borrowed from the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, are displayed alongside modern and contemporary pieces from the Pinault holdings—including Bertrand Lavier, Lee Lozano, Pablo Picasso, Auguste Rodin, Nancy Spero, and Alina Szapocznikow—and more than twenty pieces by Vo himself.

more here.

Rob Young at The New Statesman:

Aldous Huxley had got his way, this book would have been titled Phanerothymia and Other Colours. That was the term Huxley proposed for the experience of taking lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the hallucinogenic drug first synthesised in a Swiss laboratory on the eve of the Second World War. It was the British psychiatrist Humphry Osmond who came up with “psychedelia”, from the Greek words for “mind” and “manifest”. The term has since become associated predominantly with music. Rob Chapman’s book attempts to catalogue the far-reaching effects of the psychedelic experience as it expanded into the world over a 25-year period after the war, when books such as Huxley’sThe Doors of Perception (1954) became required reading for counter­cultural sky pilots.

Acid removes the filters that the brain normally applies to reality and users often describe a perception of interconnectedness, a slowing down of time and sensations of synaesthesia. The arts had been striving for similar effects with special vigour in the 20th century through movements such as cubism and surrealism and various branches of avant-garde music. Chapman traces a curlicued history connecting the Hungarian artist László Moholy-Nagy’s kinetic light sculptures with the youth parties in mid-1960s San Francisco, where fledgling psychedelic groups such as the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane routinely performed with multicoloured oil-wheel light shows.

more here.

M. Asaduddin in The Wire:

Muslim Cosmopolitanism in the Age of Empire is an exhilarating book encompassing broad swaths of trans-imperial history, religio-cultural geography and a stunning breadth of vision. Seema Alavi’s credentials as a historian of substance are well-established. Starting with a book on India’s military history and the Sepoys of the Company that came out of her doctoral research work in Cambridge with C A. Bayly, she later forayed into the history of indigenous medicine, producing the gem of a book, Islam and Healing with another book thrown in between—The Eighteenth Century in India. The current tome has a distinguishing feature that sets her apart from the ordinary run of historians – her multilingual scholarship, her willingness and ability to access source materials in several languages and her skill in marshalling arguments from different perspectives combined with insights drawn from literary sources to give a comprehensive, almost definitive, view of the phenomenon under discussion.

The seed of Muslim cosmopolitanism was, perhaps, sown when the Prophet had exhorted his disciples to undertake even the hazardous journey to China in quest of knowledge. Unlike some cultures, where travel across seas and mountains were proscribed for fear of losing purity/caste, Islam always put a premium on travel and trade, the Prophet himself being the best exemplar of both. When one travels one gets exposed to multiple cultures, belief systems and world-views, thus shedding one’s parochialism and embracing traits of cosmopolitanism. Baghdad (of Baitul Hikmah fame), Constantinople (current Istanbul, the seat of Ottoman empire), Cairo, Cordoba, Damascus, Bukhara, and Delhi were all Muslim cosmopolitan cities at different historical moments where scholars, statesmen, adventurers from all over the world congregated and conducted dialogue in a spirit of openness and catholicity. In the current times, when Muslims, for a variety of reasons, have become victims of insularity and ghettoisation, Alavi’s book is a potent antidote to the widespread but ill-informed media narrative about Muslim resistance to forces of modernity and globalisation.

More here.

Kevin Gurney et al in Nature:

Cities are taking steps to combat climate change, given the scant progress made by international treaty negotiations. Los Angeles, California, home to around 4 million people, has one of the most ambitious targets: to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by 35% below 1990 levels by 2030. The city has calculated its carbon 'footprint' and found that road vehicles constitute 47% of total carbon dioxide emissions, and that electricity consumption constitutes 32%¹. So how should Los Angeles target its policies? Knowing that certain roads, types of vehicle or parts of a city dominate road emissions and why people drive at specific times would tell city planners where and how to lower emissions efficiently. Improvements in traffic congestion, air quality, pedestrian conditions, and noise pollution could be aligned. But tracking emissions road by road and building by building is beyond the capacity of most cities. Luckily, scientists are gathering the data that city managers need — in studies that match sources of CO₂ and methane with atmospheric concentrations. Now the research community needs to translate this information into a form that city managers can use. Emissions data need to be merged with socio-economic information such as income, property ownership or travel habits, and placed in software tools that can query policy options and weigh up costs and benefits. And scientists should help municipalities to raise awareness of the power of detailed emissions data in tailoring climate and development policies.

Carbon hotspots

Cities account for more than 70% of global fossil-fuel CO₂ emissions, the main driver of climate change. If the top 50 emitting cities were counted as one country, that 'nation' would rank third in emissions behind China and the United States². Urban areas are set to triple globally by 2030 (ref. 3). Much of this emitting landscape falls within the control of mayors, city planners, businesses and community groups that have responsibility for residents' health and well-being. A 2014 survey lists 228 global cities — representing nearly half a billion people — that have pledged reductions equivalent to 454 megatonnes of CO₂ per year by 2020 (see go.nature.com/inaxr4). Shenzhen in China, for example, aims to put an extra 35,000 electric vehicles on the road by the end of 2015. The German city of Munich aims to produce enough green electricity by 2025 to meet all its power requirements.

More here.

William C. Carter in The Public Domain Review:

Proust’s theory of memory rejects the notion that we can simply sit and quietly resurrect the past in its true vividness through what he called voluntary memory. When we attempt to do this, we find that it doesn’t work very well. We remember very little and often only in a haphazard and rather bland way. On the other hand, Proust’s title should be taken to suggest a different approach: the Narrator’s search (recherche means both search and research in French) is an active, arduous quest in which the past must be rediscovered—largely through what Proust called involuntary memory, as demonstrated in the famous madeleine scene—then analyzed and understood, and finally, if your ambition is to preserve it in writing, transposed and recreated in a book. As we will see, Proust lived long enough to see the title Remembrance of Things Pastand, while he objected to it, did not take measures to change it.

A native of Scotland, Scott Moncrieff had served as a captain in the Scottish Borderers during World War I. Before reading A la recherche du temps perdu, he had already made a name for himself as the translator of major French works, such as La Chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland) and Stendhal’s two masterful novels Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma). After the Great War Scott Moncrieff had served as secretary to Lord Northcliffe, in addition to being an editor at The London Times. In January 1920, a thirty-year-old Scott Moncrieff resigned his post at the Times in order to devote himself entirely to translating À la recherche du temps perdu.

More here.

In Bidoun:

Eltahawy
I reach people who speak English, yes, and I have a large following in America, it’s true. But I’m also reaching people who speak Arabic. A lot of people on Twitter — the very same people who were angry at me over that Foreign Policy article — they were venting on Twitter and Facebook in English. They speak Arabic, too.

I wrote that essay understanding very well that I’m privileged. And I wrote that essay trying to look beyond my privilege. I wrote that essay to address people who are also privileged, and to ask them to look beyond that privilege.

I was interviewed by BBC Hard Talk a few weeks ago, and one of the questions that Stephen Sackur asked me was, “After what happened to you, where they beat you and broke your bones and sexually assaulted you — don’t you think that this essay was written out of personal anger?” Of course it was written out of anger, just not the anger he was talking about. My anger was a product of the realization that if I wasn’t who I was, if I didn’t have the privileges I have, I might very well be dead. If I didn’t have a high media profile, when I sent out that tweet saying I had been arrested, Al Jazeera and the State Department wouldn’t have picked up my story. Certainly not as quickly as they did. This hashtag #freemona wouldn’t have started trending globally in fifteen minutes. I probably would have died or been gang-raped or something horrendous.

I was so disheartened and angry by those people who verbally attacked me. We have to look beyond our privileges and see how horrendous it is to be a woman in so many parts of the Arab world. Clearly the women I’m writing about are not going to read my Foreign Policyarticle, and even if they did, so what? They’re not the audience. That audience, my audience, is those who know how bad it is, and yet their privilege prevents them from being outraged enough. And it’s that outrage that will make our revolution really succeed. The revolution to get Mubarak out of our heads! Mubarak is still in our heads. He’s called Morsi now!

El Rashidi
I know. It feels, at times, like it’s a farce….

Eltahawy
It is, it is! And it couldn’t have happened any other way because we had nothing else available. The revolution is not over, but it will not succeed until we get women involved, too. That’s the social and cultural revolution.

El Rashidi
Many say that the Muslim Brotherhood will serve as a catalyst for the real revolution.

Eltahawy
The Muslim Brotherhood is going to help really pinpoint this. You hear how Morsi talks. You hear how the Salafis talk. You see how women are addressed in the constitution. Mubarak is still up here. [Points] He’s in prison now but still terrorizing our minds. Unless we get him out of our heads the revolution is fucked.

More here.

Theodore Johnson in The Atlantic:

Linked fate, in a political context, suggests that black voters approach elections with one simple question: Which candidate is better for the African American population? The analysis begins at the most fundamental level by ascertaining which party or candidate is most likely to protect civil rights and support equal access to economic opportunity for blacks. Everything else is secondary. For example, a politician’s stance on renewable energy, free market economics, abortion, immigration, national debt, and role of the military in regional conflicts all pale in comparison to basic considerations of liberty.

African Americans may ask themselves: Can we vote? Can we work? Can we prosper? Can we live? With game-changing statutes like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 being signed into law by a Democratic president and routinely the target of Republican opposition, the Democratic candidate immediately emerges as the preferred candidate. A recent study also shows that when the candidate is black, the effects of descriptive representation raises the level of black voter participation and support even higher—an occurrence confirmed by historical black turnout rates in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

A competing view of linked fate is that black voters are not loyal to the party, but to each other at a deeper level than other races and ethnicities. A centuries-long history grounded in the shared experience of racial subjugation and discrimination produced a common bond among African Americans that leads them to view the world through the same prism. No matter how respectable and educated an African American was in the early 20th century, he or she was unlikely to be granted civil-rights protections until they were guaranteed for the whole race. The remnants of such views are still seen today, most prominently evinced in the Black Lives Matter movement. In short, there is no personal liberty without group liberty.

Update 28 September: Winners announced here.

Update 20 September: Finalists announced here.

Update 19 September: Semifinalists announced here.

Update 15 September: Voting round now open, will close on 18 September 11:59 pm EST. Go here to browse the nominated posts and vote.

* * *

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Nick Lane has agreed to be the final judge for our 6th annual prize for the best blog and online-only writing in the category of science. Details of the previous five science (and other) prizes can be seen on our prize page.

Nick Lane is a British biochemist and writer. He was awarded the first Provost's Venture Research Prize in the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, where he is now a Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry. Dr Lane's research deals with evolutionary biochemistry and bioenergetics, focusing on the origin of life and the evolution of complex cells. Dr Lane was a founding member of the UCL Consortium for Mitochondrial Research, and is leading the UCL Research Frontiers Origins of Life programme. He was awarded the 2011 BMC Research Award for Genetics, Genomics, Bioinformatics and Evolution, and the 2015 Biochemical Society Award for his sustained and diverse contribution to the molecular life sciences and the public understanding of science.

Nick Lane is the author of four acclaimed books on evolutionary biochemistry, which have sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide, and have been translated into 20 languages.

Nick's first book, Oxygen: The Molecule that Made the World, is a sweeping history of the relationship between life and our planet, and the paradoxical ways in which adaptations to oxygen play out in our own lives and deaths. His next book, Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, is an exploration of the extraordinary effects that mitochondria have had on the evolution of complex life. Nick's third book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, is a celebration of the inventiveness of life, and of our own ability to read the deep past to reconstruct the history of life on earth. The great inventions are: the origin of life, DNA, photosynthesis, the complex cell, sex, movement, sight, hot blood, consciousness and death. Life Ascending won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books, and was named a Book of the Year by New Scientist, Nature, the Times and the Independent, the latter describing him as “one of the most exciting science writers of our time.” Nick's most recent book, published in 2015 is entitled The Vital Question: Why is Life the Way it Is? It attacks a central problem in biology – why did complex life arise only once in four billion years, and why does all complex life share so many peculiar properties, from sex and speciation to senescence? The book argues that energy has constrained the whole trajectory of evolution, from the origin of life itself, to the properties of complex organisms including ourselves.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the editors of 3 Quarks Daily will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Dr. Lane.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of 500 dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of 200 dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a 100 dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS Feed.)

The schedule and rules:

September 7, 2015:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are strongly discouraged, but we might make an exception if there is something truly extraordinary.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been first published on or after September 7, 2014.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 100 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

September 14, 2015

• The public voting will be opened.

September 18, 2015

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time). Semifinalists are announced.

September 19, 2015

• The finalists are announced.

September 28, 2015

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Sughra Raza. In Solidarity. Botswana, March 2015.

Digital photograph, manipulated.

Elephants may be wiped off the face of the earth in less than fifteen years, unless there is a concerted effort to protect them.

Please do all you can to spread awareness and education to stop poaching for ivory.

by Mara Jebsen

In 1999, when Amadou Diallo was shot 41 times, my friend Z took it hard. She had just started dating a white guy, and he couldn’t understand why she was crying so much. “You’re no relation to him” he kept reminding her. She’d cry harder.

One afternoon, we were in a lounge at Duke University’s Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, where, that year, we’d meet several times a week. There was an artist-in-residence there —a politically active poet from Durham, who was wildly charismatic, and had made himself a little following of artists from North Carolina, and students at the university. He loaned us Nina Simone CDs, and books of Eldridge Cleaver poems. Z and I usually talked about poetry, but this time talk was all about Diallo’s death and the new boyfriend who didn’t get it. “Maybe you could explain it to him,” she said, looking at me. “Why?” I asked. “Because you’re white,” she said, “and maybe you understand him better.”

I was stung—though I knew better than to show it. In any case, I didn’t talk to him, and in the end it didn’t matter, I figured, as I don't think the relationship was sustained. We were all about 19 at the time.

But why was I stung? Why didn’t I want her to think that I was like that boy because we were both white? How would I have explained to him that it was right that she cared about Diallo because they were both black? What would that conversation have sounded like, had I had the grace to venture it? I think, a solid 16 years later, that the answer to those questions has something to do with the central dilemma of the ally. What is it, in the end, to ‘devote’ yourself to a cause that is not (considered) your own?

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