Martha C. Nussbaum reviews ON OPERA and ESSAYS AND REVIEWS 1959-2002, by Bernard Williams, in The New Rambler:

Bernard Williams died in June, 2003, at the age of only 73, after a long and sometimes painful struggle with multiple myeloma.[1] I still dream that he is alive – not least while working on this review. He had a quality of vivid aliveness that makes it next to impossible to concede that he is not here any longer. So I shall not concede, but shall continue to use the present tense. Being in Williams’s presence is at times painful because of that intensity of aliveness, which challenges the friend to something or other, and yet it was, and is, not terribly clear to what. To authenticity, I now think: to being and expressing oneself more courageously and clearly than one had done heretofore. Given the tendency of his brilliance to expand, filling the whole space around him, individuality was, nonetheless, and is, one of the most difficult things one could possibly attempt in his presence, and the attempt was, and is, never without struggle.

Williams’s last consecutive book, Truth and Truthfulness, appeared in 2002, before his death. Three posthumous collections of essays have preceded these two books, gathering his major articles on moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the history of philosophy. (Williams was a serious scholar of both ancient Greek literature and philosophy and Descartes’ rationalism.) These two collections, separated from one another by more than a decade, represent the last publications we may expect to see from him, so they seem unusually precious. Both exemplify to an unusually high degree a quality of willingness to put one’s whole intellectual and emotional character on the line that always characterized his way of doing philosophy.

More here.

Melissa Davey in The Guardian:

Homeopaths believe that illness-causing substances can, in minute doses, treat people who are unwell.

By diluting these substances in water or alcohol, homeopaths claim the resulting mixture retains a “memory” of the original substance that triggers a healing response in the body.

These claims have been widely disproven by multiple studies, but the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) has for the first time thoroughly reviewed 225 research papers on homeopathy to come up with its position statement, released on Wednesday.

“Based on the assessment of the evidence of effectiveness of homeopathy, NHMRC concludes that there are no health conditions for which there is reliable evidence that homeopathy is effective,” the report concluded.

“People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness.”

An independent company also reviewed the studies and appraised the evidence to prevent bias.

More here.

Preeti Dawra in Live Mint:

“One has to continually erase so much of what has been read and heard about this country in order to arrive at the messy truth of the present moment of Pakistan,” says Ayesha Jalal , one of Pakistan’s leading historians and an eminent global South Asian scholar.

“You really have to come here and live its daily contradictions to understand the reality of modern day Pakistan,” adds Jalal, who is the Mary Richardson professor of history at Tufts University in the US where she teaches both in the history department and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. She has also taught at Harvard and Columbia University.

Jalal, an elegant woman in her mid-fifties with a feisty intellect and sharp tongue, was born in Lahore. Her father is Hamid Jalal, a senior Pakistani civil servant, and she is the grandniece of the renowned Urdu fiction writer Saadat Hasan Manto.

She explains that when she moved to New York as a teenager, where her father was posted at the Pakistan’s United Nations mission in 1971, she had difficulties reconciling the official narratives of the Pakistani state with daily news reports of atrocities perpetrated by the Pakistan army in then East Pakistan, which later became Bangladesh.

“This led me to ask questions about Pakistan’s history and self-representations, which in time came to define my research interests.”

More here.

Ed Yong in Not Exactly Rocket Science:

Last summer, I met Granny. I was on a whale-watching boat that had sailed south from Vancouver Island, in search of a famous and well-studied group of killer whales (orcas). Two hours after we set off, we started seeing black fins scything through the unusually calm and glassy water. We saw a dozen individuals in all, and our guide identified them by the shape of their fins and the white saddle patches on their backs. Granny, for example, has a distinctive half-moon notch in her dorsal fin.

Seeing her, I felt an intense and solemn respect. She is the oldest member of the group, perhaps the oldest orca on the planet. Her true age is unknown, but a commonly quoted estimate puts her at 103, which would make her a year older than the Titanic, and far more durable. Imagine all that she has seen in that time: the generations of her children and grandchildren; the countless pursuits of fleeing salmon; the increasingly noisy presence of fishermen, scientists and gawking tourists. Decades of knowledge and wisdom live in her brain. Ad that knowledge might explain one of the most unusual features of killer whale biology—their menopause.

Animals almost always continue to reproduce until they die. There are just three exceptions that we know of: humans, short-finned pilot whales, and killer whales. In all three species, females lose the ability to have children, but continue living for decades after. That’s menopause. Female killer whales go through in their 30s or 40s. Why? Why sacrifice so many future chances to pass on your genes to the next generation?

More here.

A Walk With History

how do you write history in a language that has no
past tense?

i don’t ask for it
more than once
history stumbles over me

how is it that you are part of history
if you haven’t fine-dined with her?

it was the railroad worm in adam’s apple
it was the pine bark turned into rye bread
it was the rotten meat ration on the battleship potemkin
it was a hike in the price of oil
it was a viss of rice for a lot of vice
it was the iron chef in hell’s kitchen at fuli restaurant

what’s up in your hometown?

a turnpike,
a flyover is under construction
over the juncture of history

when did clio land?

this morning, about half past two

did she have anything to declare?

nothing
they strip-searched her anyway

what did they find on her?

a whistleblower, a conch-shell blower
a critically endangered cheroot industry
a pair of cheap putsches
the crowd psychologist dr. state with
his twin sons, racism and reverse racism
an albino cockroach, a fake hypocrite, and
an immigrant, whose name
you will never get

.
by ko ko thett
fromThe Postscript Journal, 2

____________________________________

Rafil Kroll-Zaidi in Harper's:

Penguins have lost the ability to taste fish. A South Korean woman’s hair was eaten by a robot, and U.S. conservatives were found to be culturally East Asian. Americans who enter the top 1 percent of earners are less likely to remain there if they are not white. Individualism in the United States was correlated with the rise of white-collar jobs. Hedge-fund managers who look trustworthy attract more clients than managers who look undependable, but the latter generate larger returns. Brides in 1930s Connecticut who were judged agreeable and emotionally stable by their bridesmaids lived longer. U.S. counties in which residents more frequently tweet “bitches,” “haters,” “jealous,” “drama,” “cunt,” “grrr,” “sooo,” “fucked,” and “Mondays” have more heart-disease deaths. The blindfolded lead the nonblindfolded in estimating the severity of everyday impairment caused by blindness. The legs of adult British Columbians cramp in the night twice as often during the summer. Swiss prison guards report contentedness. New Zealanders in a doctor’s office are fourteen times more likely to steal gossipy magazines than serious ones. Dutch chimpanzees who moved to Edinburgh now grunt like locals. Wolf society, not human domestication, gave dogs their social skills.

High school girls who underwent virtual-reality assertiveness training reported less sexual victimization, and college men who took online sexual-violence-awareness tutorials reported committing less rape. Old banned chemicals may be weakening polar bears’ penile bones. Sugary-drink consumption correlates with early menarche. Teen pregnancy rose by 30 percent between 2003 and 2010 in Iraq. Caesarean delivery, vacuum-assisted delivery, maternal fatigue, and violent partners were associated with pain in postpartum vaginal intercourse. Labor augmentation does not cause autism, but Romanian orphanages may. Dutch babies laugh, smile, and cuddle more than American babies. An Arizona toddler mistakenly given scorpion antivenin for methamphetamine poisoning exhibited immediate improvement. Targeted social rejection worsens asthma in popular adolescents. Teen boys who wrongly think themselves fat often grow up to be fat. A woman who received a fecal transplant from her obese sixteen-year-old daughter rapidly became obese herself. Repeated blows to the head were linked to cognitive impairment.

Camponotus fellah ants who become isolated from others walk around continuously, fail to digest their food, and have one tenth the life span of social ants.

More here.

Eric Ormsby in The New Criterion:

What language did Adam and Eve speak in the Garden of Eden? Today the question might seem not only quaint, but daft. Thus, the philologist Andreas Kempe could speculate, in his “Die Sprache des Paradises” (“The Language of Paradise”) of 1688, that in the Garden God spoke Swedish to Adam and Adam replied in Danish while the serpent—wouldn’t you know it?—seduced Eve in French. Others suggested Flemish, Old Norse, Tuscan dialect, and, of course, Hebrew. But as James Turner makes clear in his magisterial and witty history, which ranges from the ludicrous to the sublime, philologists regarded the question not just as one addressing the origins of language, but rather as seeking out the origins of what makes us human; it was a question at once urgent and essential.1 After all, animals do express themselves: they chitter and squeak, they bay and roar and whinny. But none of them, so far as we know, wields grammar and syntax; none of them is capable of articulate and reasoned discourse. We have long prided ourselves, perhaps excessively, on this distinction. But on the evidence Turner so amply provides, we might also wonder whether the true distinction lies not simply in our ability to utter rational speech, but in the sheer obsessive love of language itself; that is, in philology, the “love of words.”

This abiding passion for words, cultivated fervently from antiquity into modern times—or at least until around 1800, in Turner’s view—encompassed a huge range of subjects as it developed: not only grammar and syntax, but rhetoric, textual editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography, as well as, eventually, anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, literary criticism, and even law. It comprised three large areas: textual philology, theories about the origins of language, and, much later, comparative studies of different related languages.

More here.

What was so special about 9:26:53 am today? Well, the date is 3/14/15 and at that time, the date and time together would have been the same as the first ten digits of Pi: 3.141592653. It is also Albert Einstein's birthday today. Here's Steven Strogatz in The New Yorker:

Pi does deserve a celebration, but for reasons that are rarely mentioned. In high school, we all learned that pi is about circles. Pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around the circle, represented by the letter C) to its diameter (the distance across the circle at its widest point, represented by the letter d). That ratio, which is about 3.14, also appears in the formula for the area inside the circle, A = πr2, where π is the Greek letter “pi” and r is the circle’s radius (the distance from center to rim). We memorized these and similar formulas for the S.A.T.s and then never again used them, unless we happened to go into a technical field, or until our own kids took geometry.

So it’s fair to ask: Why do mathematicians care so much about pi? Is it some kind of weird circle fixation? Hardly. The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. Even young children get this. The digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. They go on forever, seemingly at random—except that they can’t possibly be random, because they embody the order inherent in a perfect circle. This tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi.

Pi touches infinity in other ways. For example, there are astonishing formulas in which an endless procession of smaller and smaller numbers adds up to pi. One of the earliest such infinite series to be discovered says that pi equals four times the sum 1 – + – + – + ⋯. The appearance of this formula alone is cause for celebration. It connects all odd numbers to pi, thereby also linking number theory to circles and geometry. In this way, pi joins two seemingly separate mathematical universes, like a cosmic wormhole.

But there’s still more to pi.

More here.

Questlove at The New York Times:

Sonic Youth has never had a reputation for shying away from unpleasantness in the search for truth and beauty, and the book does the same, opening with a scene in drizzly São Paulo, as the band played its last show together and Gordon and Moore’s marriage finally fully unraveled. “My about-to-be-ex husband and I faced that mass of bobbing wet ­Brazilians, our voices together spell-checking the old words, and for me it was a staccato soundtrack of surreal raw energy and anger and pain: Hit it. Hit it. Hit it,” Gordon writes. “I don’t think I had ever felt so alone in my whole life.” From here she takes the reader into her childhood. The organization of the book is as unconventional as you’d expect from an artist like Gordon (the first chapter is titled “The End”), and I’m a sucker for unconventional organization, especially early on, when you’re trying to pick up a rhythm as you read it. The chapters are short, no more than three or four pages, short enough that you might call them songs. They jump around a bit but run roughly chronologically. Gordon recalls growing up in Rochester, N.Y., and moving to Los Angeles when her ­sociologist father took a job at U.C.L.A. She paints a cleareyed portrait of her mother, who stayed at home and struggled to stay creative. She ­remembers her charismatic and mentally ill older brother, Keller — “brilliant, manipulative, sadistic” — her closest companion in childhood, “the person who more than anyone else in the world shaped who I was, and who I turned out to be.”

more here.

Charlie Kurth in Aeon:

But just how bad is anxiety, really? Is it just an unpleasant feeling to work through, or something worse? According to a very distinguished tradition, one that stretches all the way back through the Stoics and Aristotle to Plato, it is worse. Much worse. When we’re anxious, we fret and ruminate in ways that don’t just distract us, but consume us. What’s more, because anxiety tends to be so unpleasant, we act impulsively – doing whatever we think will make the feeling go away. For these reasons, the classical consensus has it that such emotions are to be avoided.

Immanuel Kant suggested an even graver problem with anxiety: it is incompatible with virtue. For Kant, the virtuous individual is someone who has brought ‘all his capacities and inclinations under his (reason’s) control’; therefore, he writes in The Metaphysics of Morals (1797), the ‘true strength of virtue is a tranquil mind’. But when we’re anxious, our minds are anything but tranquil. We lack the rational control that’s distinctive of virtue: it is emotion, not reason, that determines our behaviour. That’s bad. This picture of anxiety as a dark and pernicious force certainly has illustrious supporters. Even so, I believe that it is mistaken. It goes against the grain to say this, but anxiety can be a good thing. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that it is central to our ability to successfully navigate moral and social life. I won’t go as far as to say that we need more of it, but we should cultivate it. Worry is important; we should get it right.

More here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

I started keeping a diary twenty-five years ago,” the book begins. “It's eight hundred thousand words long.”

We live, of course, in a diaristic era. This April, Heidi Julavits will publish “The Folded Clock,” which uses the diary as a source of revelation and reflection; meanwhile, Karl Ove Knausgaard has become a lightning rod for his 3,600-page autobiographical “My Struggle” (the fourth volume is due out in the U.S. in early May).

Manguso's intent, however, is different — not to re-create her diary but to meditate on it, as both artifact and pathology. There is nothing in “Ongoingness” about the decision to come to Los Angeles, first in 2010 and then again, after moving back to New York, in 2013. There are no proper nouns, no names, few reference points other than the obsessive weight of the diary itself.

As she acknowledges in the early pages, “I wrote so I could say I was truly paying attention. Experience in itself wasn't enough. The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I'd missed it.”

more here.

Lisa Jardine at the Financial Times:

We may not have entirely endorsed his contemporary Anthony Wood’s unkind assessment of Aubrey as “a shiftless person, roving and magoty-headed, and sometimes little better than crazed”. But neither did we take Scurr’s care to listen to his personal authorial voice.

Aubrey was born in north Wiltshire in 1626, to a gentry family whose precarious finances collapsed after his father’s death. He attended Oxford as a gentleman-commoner during the 1640s at the height of the English civil war, when the university was the headquarters of Charles I and besieged by the Commonwealth forces. The intellectual, social and emotional upheaval Aubrey experienced in his early years presaged a lifetime of disruption and disturbance, exacerbated by his frequent need to prevent his creditors from catching up with him.

He had an irrepressible urge to record everything around him that took his attention. His curiosity matched the intellectual ferment of the times. He was, wrote his friend George Ent, one “whose boundlesse mind/Scarce within Learnings compasse is confin’d”. He was an early Fellow of the Royal Society, a restless and insatiable pursuer of fragments of material and written culture from the past, and an inveterate compiler of obscure information. As Scurr has written, he was “an antiquary, collecting remnants of history to save them from the deluge of time.

more here.

Paul Tullis in The New York Times:

Jane Goodall was already on a London dock in March 1957 when she realized that her passport was missing. In just a few hours, she was due to depart on her first trip to Africa. A school friend had moved to a farm outside Nairobi and, knowing Goodall’s childhood dream was to live among the African wildlife, invited her to stay with the family for a while. Goodall, then 22, saved for two years to pay for her passage to Kenya: waitressing, doing secretarial work, temping at the post office in her hometown, Bournemouth, on England’s southern coast, during the holiday rush. She had spent her last few days in London saying goodbyes and picking up a few things for the trip at Peter Jones, the department store in Chelsea. Now all this was for naught, it seemed. The passport must have fallen out of her purse somewhere. It’s hard not to wonder how subsequent events in her life — rather consequential as they have turned out to be to conservation, to science, to our sense of ourselves as a species — might have unfolded differently had someone not found her passport, along with an itinerary from Cook’s, the travel agency, folded inside, and delivered it to the Cook’s office. An agency representative, documents in hand, found her on the dock. “Incredible,” Goodall told me last month, recalling that day. “Amazing.”

Excited and apprehensive, she boarded the ship, the Kenya Castle, with her mother and uncle, and together they inspected the vessel, circling its decks, looking out the porthole in the room she would occupy for the better part of a month. Then her family departed, and at 4 in the afternoon, the ship cast off. Twenty-four hours later, as most of the passengers were suffering from seasickness on their traverse across the Bay of Biscay, Jane Goodall was at the prow of the ship — “as far forward as one could get,” she wrote to her family. Her letter also recorded, in a detailed manner that foreshadowed the keen observational skills she would bring to her research as well as the literary bent she would deploy in reaching a broad audience, how the sea changed color as the bow rose and fell with the waves. “The sea is dark inky blue, then it rises up a clear transparent blue green, and then it breaks in white and sky blue foam. But best of all, some of this foam is forced back under the wave from which it broke, and this spreads out under the surface like the palest blue milk, all soft and hazy at the edge.”

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 Ken Roth, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners from these: (in alphabetical order by blog or website name here)

1. 3 Quarks Daily: Notes Of A Grand Juror
2. Abandoned Footnotes: The Saudi Monarchy as a Family Firm
3. Brown Pundits: Blasphemy, blasphemy laws, Pakistan, Charlie Hebdo…
4. Justin Erik Halldór Smith: Abandoning Ukraine
5. Los Angeles Review of Books: The Limits of Muslim Liberalism
6. Pandaemonium: Assimilation vs. Multiculturism
7. Religious Left Law: The Highlander Folk School: A Civil Rights Movement Halfway House
8. The Philosopher's Beard: The Robot Economy and the Crisis of Capitalism: Why We Need Universal Basic Income
9. U.S. Intellectual History: How the CIA Bought Juan Rulfo Some Land in the Country

We'll announce the three winners on March 23, 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.

Corey Robin in Salon:

Facebook can be a weird place on Martin Luther King Day. Some of my friends post famous passages from MLK’s speeches. Others post statistics on racial inequality. Still others, mostly white parents, post photographs of their children assembled in auditoriums and schoolyards. These are always hopeful images, the next generation stirring toward interracial harmony. Except for one thing: nearly everyone in the photos is … white.

In her public school this year, my first-grade daughter learned that Daisy Bates helped integrate the Little Rock schools. She knows that Ella Baker, someone I’d never heard of till I went to college, was part of the civil rights movement. Meanwhile, her school has a combined black and Latino population of 15 percent, down from nearly 30 percent just seven years ago.

In school, white children are taught to be conscious of race and racism in a way I never was when I was as a kid in the 1970s. Yet they go to schools that are in some respectsmore segregated now than they were in the 1970s. In 1972, under Richard Nixon, 36 percent of black students in the South attended white-majority schools. By 2011, under Barack Obama, that number had plummeted to 23 percent. In every region of the country, a higher percentage of black students go to nearly all-minority schools than was the case in 1988. The same is true of Latino students in the South, the West and the Midwest.

Microsoft Word recognizes the word “desegregate.” It doesn’t recognize “resegregate.”

The way we live now is not reflected in the way we talk. Or type.

Maybe this gap between our words and deeds is a sign of vitality and promise. Shouldn’t our language always be one step ahead of our actions? Shouldn’t our children learn concepts in school that challenge realities they see in society? Maybe. Or maybe we’re forcing children to talk about inequities in school that we wouldn’t dare touch, much less transform, in society at large.

More here.