more here.

James Polchin at The Smart Set:

The camera her daughter and son-in-law gave her that winter was a heavy machine, awkward to move around, made of wood and the size of a large birdhouse. It was the most modern of its time. We can easily forget today how arduous and dangerous the process of photographing was back then. The glass plates used to expose the image (the forerunner to film) were there own chemistry lab, requiring a coating of a thick and flammable collodion solution, followed by a quick dash to the camera to insert the class behind the lens and expose it to the light before the plate dried. Then, through a series of sliver nitrate washes (the fumes could be deadly) and drying, washing and drying again, the glass negative was ready to transfer its image to the prepared albumen paper that was brushed with a frothy mixture of egg white and silver nitrate to give the paper a glossy texture. The plate was placed on the paper, exposed to the sun, and then, it too was washed and let dry. At any one point in this process, the photographs could easily be destroyed. This mixture of science and art burdened these practices with certain standards of skill. Photography was still considered a scientific experiment; it’s practitioners more akin to chemist than artists. What constituted a good photograph was as much about the process as the composition.

While there is little evidence that she was much interested in visual art before the 1860s, Cameron took to this process with her usual energy. Her interest was in what this process can create more than what it should create.

more here.

Stephen Marche in Esquire:

To all open letter writers,

First of all, hello. I've never met you, but I've been reading a lot of your open letters lately. Sinead O'Connor, just recently, you posted your third open letter to Miley Cyrus. That's about three too many, but I want you to know that I understand why you write open letters and I sympathize with your motives. I'm saying that because all open letters begin with this false sense of intimacy and the bogus claim that the writer really wants the best for the person he or she is addressing.

The time has come, open letter writers, to sit back and ask yourself why everybody is writing open letters. You all have your own explanations of course. Sinead, you opened your first letter to Miley Cyrus with the following justification:

“I wasn't going to write this letter, but today I've been dodging phone calls from various newspapers who wished me to remark upon your having said in Rolling Stone your 'Wrecking Ball' video was designed to be similar to the one for 'Nothing Compares' … So this is what I need to say … And it is said in the spirit of motherliness and with love.”

I'm sorry but the spirit of motherliness cannot really be enough of an answer to why you're writing. I think even you can see that attacking somebody publicly for what they're wearing isn't exactly the definition of “motherly love.”

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Jesus is hanging on the cross, or floating in the sky all over the second floor of the museum. This is all because of Marc Chagall.

Many critics have called Chagall the preeminent Jewish artist of the 20th century. Yet, Chagall had about a five-year period during the Second World War in which he became utterly obsessed with painting Jesus Christ. Mostly, Chagall painted Crucifixion scenes. A number of these paintings, along with Chagall’s work just before and after the war, can be seen as part of The Jewish Museum’s Chagall: Love, War and Exile show, which runs through February 2, 2014.

Looking at the paintings, one thing is clear right away. The paintings have little to do with Jesus as we usually see him — the central figure in the Christian Passion narrative. Chagall’s Jesus is a Jewish Jesus through and through. In many of the Crucifixion scenes (like The Artist with Yellow Christ, 1938 and Persecution, c. 1941) Jesus’ nether parts are covered with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. In Study for The Yellow Crucifixion(1942), Jesus is wearing tefillin, little black boxes containing verses from the Torah that are wrapped around the head and arm, with black straps going down to the hand.

More here.

Heather Ann Thompson on politics and incarceration in The Atlantic:

With so many powerful arguments being made against our current criminal justice system, why then does it persist? Why haven’t the American people, particularly those who are most negatively affected by this most unsettling and unsavory state of affairs, undone the policies that have led us here? The answer, in part, stems from the fact that locking up unprecedented numbers of citizens over the last forty years has itself made the prison system highly resistant to reform through the democratic process. To an extent that few Americans have yet appreciated, record rates of incarceration have, in fact, undermined our American democracy, both by impacting who gets to vote and how votes are counted.

The unsettling story of how this came to be actually begins in 1865, when the abolition of slavery led to bitter constitutional battles over who would and would not be included in our polity. To fully understand it, though, we must look more closely than we yet have at the year 1965, a century later—a moment when, on the one hand, politicians were pressured into opening the franchise by passing the most comprehensive Voting Rights Act to date, but on the other hand, were also beginning a devastatingly ambitious War on Crime.

More here.

Malise Ruthven reviews Akbar Ahmed's book in the New York Review of Books:

Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murad opens with the image of a beautiful thistle flower, wrenched from a ditch, that the narrator seeks to add to his bouquet. His effort to pluck it, however,

proved a very difficult task. Not only did the stalk prick on every side—even through the handkerchief I wrapped round my hand—but it was so tough that I had to struggle with it for nearly five minutes, breaking the fibres one by one; and when I had at last plucked it, the stalk was all frayed, and the flower itself no longer seemed so fresh and beautiful…. But what energy and tenacity! With what determination it defended itself, and how dearly it sold its life!

This late masterpiece, written in 1904 but never published in Tolstoy’s lifetime, was based on a real-life episode. In 1851 the Avar warlord Hajimurad al-Khunzaki, a confederate of the Imam Shamil, who led the resistance to Russia’s annexation of the Caucasus, betrayed his ally and went over to the Russians. In Tolstoy’s story he is driven by ambition, hoping to govern the Caucasian tribes under the “white tsar.”

More here.

James Longenbach at The Nation:

On November 13, 1915, following a hearing at London’s Bow Street magistrates’ court, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow was suppressed under the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. The magistrate, Sir John Dickinson, ordered that the 1,011 copies of the novel seized from the publisher be destroyed. Speaking for the prosecution, Herbert Muskett expressed “the most profound regret that it should have been necessary…to bring this disgusting, detestable and pernicious work under the notice of the Court.” The publisher was ordered to pay court costs of £10, 10s.

more here.

D. Graham Burnett at Cabinet:

Back to the sperm whale teeth. Were they money or not? They could certainly have that feel to a sandalwood trader trying to acquire a lucrative cargo of the fragrant lumber. But it didn’t take long before even those most nuts-and-bolts anthropologists noticed all kinds of un-money-like attributes of the local currency. You couldn’t quite count on your ivories to do what you thought they would do under all circumstances. That troubling randomizer of human behavior—meaning—seemed to inhere in the teeth, and generate various bizarre misunderstandings and conditions. There seemed surfeits of signification in the things—excess powers and unpredictable deficiencies.

For instance, while it was clear that some teeth (the larger, older, amber-hued specimens) received special attention (occupying pride of place in family treasuries and occasioning tenderly solicitous polishing), it did not follow, as one might expect, that such noble tabua traded hands at a consistent premium. Rather, for the preponderance of occasions in which the presentation of a tooth was required by custom (the building of a house, a diplomatic envoy, the death of an elder), it appeared that any tooth would do. Moreover, the “market” in teeth often behaved in what appeared a most irrational fashion. How could it be that a tooth acquired for less than one pound sterling in town could, a short distance away, secure a monster porker that would retail locally for ten? Where were the arbitrageurs?

more here.

Lawrence K. Altman in The New York Times:

Three Americans won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for discovering the machinery that regulates how cells transport major molecules in a cargo system that delivers them to the right place at the right time. The Karolinska Institute in Stockholm announced the winners: James E. Rothman, 62, of Yale University; Randy W. Schekman, 64, of the University of California, Berkeley; and Dr. Thomas C. Südhof, 57, of Stanford University. Their basic research solved the mystery of how cells, which are factories producing molecules, organize a system to transport the molecules within cells and export them outside. As it turns out, the molecules are moved around the cell in small packages called vesicles, and each scientist discovered different facets of what is needed to ensure that the right cargo is shipped to the correct destination at precisely the right time. For example, pancreatic cells make insulin and release it in the blood. Chemical signals called neurotransmitters are sent from one nerve cell to another to allow people to walk, talk, sing, pull their hand away from a hot stove and communicate. The molecular traffic within cells is as complicated as rush hour in any city, as the discoveries by the three Nobel winners revealed.

The world’s most prestigious scientific award arrived at a particularly dark time for federal science research: the National Institutes of Health, the agency that paid an estimated $49 million to help underwrite the winners’ work, has been forced to send home most of its staff because of the government shutdown. Basic research of the type that just won the Nobel is seen as particularly vulnerable to Capitol Hill budget cutters. “This is a stark reminder of how these are the best of times and the worst of times for American biomedical research,” Dr. Francis Collins, the N.I.H. director, said in an interview on Monday. “Today we celebrate the three N.I.H.-supported Nobel Prize winners, but we’re being slammed by sequestration and a government shutdown.”

More here.

Dina Spector in Business Insider:

Francois Englert, 80, and Peter Higgs, 84, won the Nobel Prize in physics on Tuesday for the theory of how particles acquire mass. Englehart and Higgs separately proposed this theory —what became known as the Higgs mechanism — in 1964. The theory also rests on the existence of the Higgs particle — a subatomic particle that provides proof of an invisible field that gives mass to matter.

But nearly five decades would pass before scientists could confirm the existence of a Higgs boson. On July 4, 2012, physicists using the Large Hardon Collider at CERN announced they had found a new particle that had the properties of the long-sought boson. The discovery was hailed at the biggest scientific breakthrough of this century. Higgs, now a professor emeritus at the University of Edinburgh, is notoriously modest about his involvement with the particle that bears his name.

More here.

Robert Pogue Harrison at the New York Review of Books:

Professionally trained Dante scholars—I am one of them—believe we have special access to The Divine Comedy’s deeper layers of meaning, yet judged by Dante’s criteria, we are self-deceived. In Inferno 9, Dante challenges his audience with a direct address:

You readers, who are of sound mind and memory,
Pay attention to the lessons woven into the fabric
Of these strange poetic lines.

Who among the members of the Dante Society believes in good faith that he or she possesses the “sound mind” that Dante appeals to here? No one reconstructed the Christian doctrines that supposedly underlie the Comedy’s veils of allegory more piously than the great American Dante scholar Charles Singleton. Yet Singleton was an agnostic who took his own life, and one hopes for his sake that he was right when he declared, “The fiction of the Comedy is that it is not a fiction.” If the poem contains an arcane truth that is predicated on faith—not only in the medieval Christian God but also in Dante’s version of history, with its Holy Roman Emperors and all—then none of us will ever gain full access to it.

more here.

Meditation on a Grapefruit

To wake when all is possible

.

by Craig Arnold
from: Poetry, Vol. 195, No. 1, October, 2009

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

One of the chapters in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynmanis titled “Alfred Nobel’s Other Mistake.” The first being dynamite, of course, and the second being the Nobel Prize. When I first read it I was a little exasperated by Feynman’s kvetchy tone — sure, there must be a lot of nonsense associated with being named a Nobel Laureate, but it’s nevertheless a great honor, and more importantly the Prizes do a great service for science by highlighting truly good work.

These days, as I grow in wisdom and kvetchiness myself, I’m coming around to Feynman’s point of view. I still believe that on balance the Prizes are a very good thing, and generally they honor some of the very best work in physics. (Some of my best friends are winners!) But having written a book about the Higgs boson discovery, which is on everybody’s lips as a natural candidate (though not the only one!), all of the most annoying aspects of the process are immediately apparent.

More here.

Holly Case in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Joseph Djugashvili was a student in a theological seminary when he came across the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a Bolshevik revolutionary. Thereafter, in addition to blowing things up, robbing banks, and organizing strikes, he became an editor, working at two papers in Baku and then as editor of the first Bolshevik daily,Pravda. Lenin admired Djugashvili's editing; Djugashvili admired Lenin, and rejected 47 articles he submitted to Pravda.

Djugashvili (later Stalin) was a ruthless person, and a serious editor. The Soviet historian Mikhail Gefter has written about coming across a manuscript on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck edited by Stalin's own hand. The marked-up copy dated from 1940, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany. Knowing that Stalin had been responsible for so much death and suffering, Gefter searched “for traces of those horrible things in the book.” He found none. What he saw instead was “reasonable editing, pointing to quite a good taste and an understanding of history.”

Stalin had also made a surprising change in the manuscript. In the conclusion, the author closed with a warning to the Germans lest they renege on the alliance and attack Russia. Stalin cut it. When the author objected, pleading that the warning was the whole point of the book, Stalin replied, “But why are you scaring them? Let them try. …” And indeed they did, costing more than 30 million lives—most of them Soviet. But the glory was Stalin's in the end.

The editor is the unseen hand with the power to change meaning and message, even the course of history. Back when copy-proofs were still manually cut, pasted, and photographed before printing, a blue pencil was the instrument of choice for editors because blue was not visible when photographed. The editorial intervention was invisible by design.

More here.

Shaj Mathew in Guernica:

Chemical weapons have been deployed in Syria. After over two years of fighting, the conflict between rebel forces and the government of Bashar al-Assad shows no signs of abatement. Foreign powers may intervene. And yet, the sonorous voice of Adunis, the Syrian-born writer widely considered the world’s foremost Arab poet, has largely been silent. He did write an open letter to Bashar al-Assad in June 2011, but he was roundly criticized by fellow Arab intellectuals as being too soft on the dictator. Perhaps stung by this criticism, he has offered little comment since then.

His absence hasn’t prevented a new vein of Syrian poetry from emerging out of this uprising; a poem by Najat Abdul Samad, translated by Ghada al-Atrash for al Jazeera, epitomizes this movement’s jarring, visceral realism: “I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy/ they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood./ Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration…/ I bandage it with the outcry: ‘Death and not humiliation.’”

That said, according to fellow Syrian poet Maram al-Masri, “people are waiting for opposition poems from Adunis. He does a little, but for me and for a lot of people, we feel disappointed. It’s not enough. We need the fathers of modern Syrian poetry to speak out.” More damningly, the Iraqi littérateur Sinan Antoon told the Guardian that the Arab Spring has “consigned Adunis, the self-proclaimed revolutionary, to irrelevance.”

More here.

Stuart Whatley in LA Review of Books:

How does a marketplace of ideas operate? Most who use the phrase today would say they’re speaking figuratively; a free market itself is a liberal ideal, positing that rational self-interest on the part of individuals will, collectively, lead to the best outcomes. In the realm of ideas, the maxim that “the market knows best” seems promising, but it doesn’t always work out that way. As Cass Sunstein, one critic of the metaphor, notes, valid information can be elusive in an open exchange because of various cognitive biases and information cascades:

Rumor transmission often involves the rational processing of information, in a way that leads people, quite sensibly in light of their existing knowledge, to believe and to spread falsehoods […] the processes that underlie the “marketplace of ideas” sometimes work poorly, because they ensure that many people will converge on falsehoods rather than truth.

Or, as Stendhal observed long ago, “petty despotisms reduce to nothing the value of public opinion.”

Beyond Sunstein’s heuristic critiques, markets in the real world are susceptible to monopolistic machinations, asymmetrical information, and distortions from government, industry, speculation, and malfeasance. It is important to remember that the marketplace of ideas is a market, and it fails as a metaphor for anyone lacking a starry-eyed view of markets themselves. It is not the “contest of opinion” Thomas Jefferson once described in his first inaugural address; there is an aspect of business to it, and with this, certain consequences.

In fact, the metaphor of a market for ideas isn’t really a metaphor at all. It’s a description of public relations, the one industry where ideas are actually supposed to be bought and sold; it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, then, to learn that it was PR men who helped to bring the “marketplace of ideas” into common usage in the first place.

More here.

Dear Reader,

Here's your chance to say what you want to the large international audience of highly educated readers that make up the 3QD audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

You would have a column published at 3QD every fourth Monday. It should generally be between 1000 and 2500 words and can be about any subject at all. To qualify for a Monday slot, please submit a one or two paragraph bio and a sample column to me by email (s.abbas.raza.1 at gmail.com) as an MS Word-compatible document, or a URL if what you want us to look at is available online, which I will then circulate to the other editors and we will let you know our decision by about November 4. If you are given a slot on the 3QD schedule, your sample can also serve as your first column if it has never been published anywhere in print or online before. Feel free to use pictures, graphs, or other illustrations in your column. Naturally, you retain full copyright over your writing.

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

Several of the people who started writing at 3QD have gone on to get regular paid gigs at well-known magazines, others have written well-received books. Even those who have not, have written to us saying that it has been a uniquely rewarding experience. If you have a blog or website of your own, please help us to spread this invitation by linking to this post.

The deadline for submissions is 11:59 PM New York City time, Sunday, October 13, 2013.

Yours,

Abbas