Going Home

He came Home. Said nothing.
It was clear, though, that something had gone wrong.
He lay down fully dressed.
Pulled the blanket over his head.
Tucked up his knees.
He’s nearly forty, but not at the moment.
He exists just as he did inside his mother’s womb,
clad in seven walls of skin, in sheltered darkness.
Tomorrow he’ll give a lecture
on homeostasis in megagalactic cosmonautics.
For now, though, he has curled up and gone to sleep.

by Wislawa Szymborska
from View Within a Grain of Sand
Harcourt Brace, 1993

Alex Hern in The Guardian:

What if AI isn’t that great? What if we’ve been overstating its potential to a frankly dangerous degree? That’s the concern of leading cancer experts in the NHS, who warn that the health service is obsessing over new tech to the point that it’s putting patient safety at risk. From our story yesterday:

In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that ‘novel solutions’ such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as ‘magic bullets’ for the cancer crisis, but ‘none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem’.

A ‘common fallacy’ of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create ‘additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy’.

‘We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,’ the paper concludes.

Published in the Lancet Oncology journal, the paper instead argues for a back to basics approach to cancer care. Its proposals focus on solutions like getting more staff, redirecting research to less trendy areas including surgery and radiotherapy, and creating a dedicated unit for technology transfer, ensuring that treatments that have already been proven to work are actually made a part of routine care.

More here.

Bradley and Luskin in Evolution News:

In recent years, MIT physicist Jeremy England (pictured above) has gained media attention for proposing a thermodynamic energy-dissipation model of the origin of life. England’s view was summarized when he famously said that the origin and evolution of life “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” He continued, “You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant.”¹Another physicist, ID theorist Brian Miller, has responded to England’s research.

Miller points out that the kind of energy that dissipates as a result of the sun shining on the Earth or other natural processes cannot explain how living systems have both low entropy (disorder) and high energy. As Miller puts it: “These are unnatural circumstances. Natural systems never both decrease in entropy and increase in energy — not at the same time.” Living cells do this “by employing complex molecular machinery and finely tuned chemical networks to convert one form of energy from the environment into high-energy molecules” — things that cannot be present prior to the origin of life because they must be explained by the origin of life. Without this cellular machinery to harness energy from the environment and drive down entropy, England’s energy-dissipation models cannot do the task they’ve been handed. As Miller said, England’s model cannot account for the origin of biological information, which “is essential for constructing and maintaining the cell’s structures and processes.”

More here.

Sarah Jaffe at The Baffler:

Raising Expectations is as much tell-all as organizing manual, but it was Jane’s second book, published in 2016—by an academic press, no less—that turned her into as much of a household name as any labor organizer can be in what she called “the new Gilded Age.” No Shortcuts, based on her dissertation, is a distillation of her argument for organizing rather than what she called “shallow mobilizing”; for high-participation, democratic unions; for the value of training and sharing skills; and, though this is less often remarked upon, for the importance and power of care workers’ unions in a world that still too often thinks “real” workers are men in hard hats.

The decline of deep organizing, she argued, is the real cause of the decline of progressive, or left, power. By organizing, once again, she meant building “a continually expanding base of ordinary people, a mess of people never previously involved, who don’t consider themselves activists at all.”

more here.

Dearest Reader,

Thanks to your support, in a few weeks, on July 31st to be exact, it will have been exactly 20 years since I started 3QD with a poem by Constantine Cavafy. Not many small websites last this long, especially in the increasingly difficult media landscape and the onslaught of information begging for our attention from multiple channels: social media, WhatsApp, email, etc., etc. But you have trusted and appreciated our efforts to bring you only what is interesting and important. We couldn’t have kept going without you and we’ve had fun doing the work that we do. So on behalf of all of us, thank you!

We are going to be making some significant improvements to the site over the next few weeks. I will write to you again to explain more when we are ready to go live with the changes. I am excited about this. For more on the history of 3QD, read this excellent profile by Thomas Manuel, “Why the Web Needs the Little Miracle of 3 Quarks Daily” in The Wire.

Now help us keep going for another 20 years, and please click here now. We’ve always kept 3QD free but the donations and subscriptions from people like you are what have kept us going (and always allowed those who can’t afford a subscription, like students, to access all of 3QD free of charge). We really do need your help more than ever to keep human-curation alive in this AI- and algorithm-dominated digital age.

Yours ever,

Abbas

NEW POSTS BELOW

The following writers each picked 10 books for the New York Times:

Stephen King, Min Jin Lee, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Bonnie Garmus, Nana Kwame Adjei‑Brenyah, Junot Díaz, Sarah Jessica Parker, James Patterson, Elin Hilderbrand, Annette Gordon‑Reed, Rebecca Roanhorse, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Jonathan Lethem, Sarah MacLean, Ed Yong, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Paul Tremblay, Nick Hornby, Scott Turow, Daniel Alarcón, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Lucy Sante, Gary Shteyngart, Anand Giridharadas, Jessamine Chan, Michael Robbins, Alma Katsu, Megan Abbott, Joshua Ferris, Ann Napolitano, John Irving, Tiya Miles, Jami Attenberg, Stephen L. Carter, Sarah Schulman, Elizabeth Hand, Dion Graham, Jeremy Denk, Morgan Jerkins, Michael Roth & Ryan Holiday.

See the books they picked here.

Åsmund Folkestad at Extra Medium Please:

Over several years now, a single question has refused to leave me: what is beauty? Triggering it was a series of aesthetic experiences so intense that I count them among the most significant moments of my life. They felt supercharged with meaning, yet what they meant I could not tell. After a couple years of scratching my head, I still cannot claim to understand them. Nevertheless, I believe I have taken a step towards understanding what beauty is.

Many a great tome has been written by philosophers on beauty. I wish I had read them. However, all I’ve read is one of these Oxford University Press booklets: “[Subject]: A Very Short Introduction”. Why then should you bother to listen to me? I will give you three reasons.

First, while certainly interesting, I am not most compelled by the philosophical route to this question. Instead, I find the evolutionary perspective most illuminating. This shifts the question, however. I’m a theoretical physicist thinking about black holes for a living, so again, why should you bother listen to me? This leads me to my second reason…

More here.

Quico Toro in Persuasion:

For weeks, pundits have been speculating that France’s snap legislative election could blow up in President Emmanuel Macron’s face—and boy did it. Only it’s blown up in a way nobody expected. Instead of the much-feared far right victory, the election will probably force the centrist president into an awkward coalition with the left, an exercise likely to leave both sides badly bruised.

Macron had called the snap poll long before he was legally mandated to, following the far right’s surprise win in last month’s European election. Then, Marine Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National Rally had stunned Paris by coming first in France, with 31% of the vote. Macron reacted by dissolving the legislature three years ahead of schedule and calling a snap poll, seemingly to shock French voters into rethinking.

More here.

Pranay Sanklecha at Aeon Magazine:

‘Why did you decide to study philosophy?’ asked the Harvard professor, sitting in the park in his cream linen suit.

‘Because I want to find out how to live,’ I said. ‘I want to find out what matters and I want to live my life accordingly.’

He smiled affectionately, leaning forward in his deck chair.

‘If you want to find meaning, Pranay, don’t study philosophy. Go fish, become a carpenter, do anything. But don’t expect to find it by studying philosophy.’

If by ‘philosophy’ we refer to the played-out game of academic analytic philosophy, he was right. But if by philosophy we refer to the mysterious human activity of searching for truth, to processes of thought and perception, to communal seeking, to genuine dialogue and true encounter, to the moment when our minds open and something true rushes in – if we refer to any of these things, then the professor from Harvard was about as wrong as one could be.

more here.

Arianne Shahvisi at the LRB:

Anyone who’d like to look a Nazi in the eye is working against the clock. An eighteen-year-old member of the Nazi Party in 1945 would now be coming up to a hundred. Soon there will be none left. When the film director Luke Holland was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2015, he was interviewing the last surviving Nazis to build an archive of their first-hand accounts of complicity. He kept going as his health declined. One of my colleagues was Holland’s haematologist, and a few of us were invited to watch some unedited footage of German nonagenarians in dowdy sitting-rooms recounting, with nostalgia, unease or insouciance, their involvement in the operation of the Nazi state. Afterwards, another colleague broke our stunned silence with the remark: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’ At first I thought she meant we were lucky to have not been Jewish, disabled, Romani or gay in Germany in the 1930s, but she meant we were lucky not to have been Nazis.

The phrase ‘there but for the grace of God’ is generally attributed to the 16th-century Protestant martyr John Bradford, on seeing convicts being led to execution. He wasn’t referring to the misfortune of their being murdered by the state, but to their having been weak-willed enough to commit capital sins.

more here.

Jessie Kindig in The Point:

One June afternoon, I found myself idling about a meadow at the top of a forest in the northwest of the Pacific Northwest. I ate a rough lunch and slept, hands in pockets and cap on face. When I awoke, the sun was still high and the bees buzzed and the meadow kept its drowsiness on me—and so I opened a book of essays I’d been carrying around for the better part of a week and turned to Henry David Thoreau’s 1862 essay “Wild Apples,” one of his last, a praise song to extended metaphor. 

The essay opens plainly with exactly what it is, a conjecture that “the history of the apple–tree is connected with that of man.” Thoreau launches into a history of the apple, beginning with its classical lineage in Greece and Rome—fruit the gods competed to procure—and on through a discussion of the natural history of this most “humanized” of fruits. The cultivated apple, he says, emigrated with humans to the Americas—but the true wild apple is the indigenous crab, which Thoreau holds above all others. Wild apples, he says, are best taken with the “sauce” of the “November air”; indoors, they are too sour for words. The tang and smack of the wild apple is an acquired taste, not for farmers or townsfolk but meant for the special outsiders: errant boys, walkers like Thoreau, the Indian or “the wild-eyed woman of the fields.” Thoreau prefers an apple forest of cultivars gone to seed (as he so understands himself) growing alongside the indigenous crab apple: in this he finds a good American cider. But it certainly did not appear that things were headed that way in 1850, and so the essay is a lament. His notes on the truly wild apple are from memory rather than recent observation. Trees, by the mid-nineteenth century, are no longer free but are private property requiring purchasing, and so farmers are apt to claim the forest of the crab apple for farmland and grow cultivars in a “plat” by the house, where no saunterers, scalawags, witches or “Savages” may gain the gleanings. Says Thoreau: so goes the wild apple, so goes society.  

More here.

Andrew Zalisky in Science:

In 19th century New York City, Theodore Gaillard Thomas enjoyed an unusual level of fame for a gynecologist. The reason, oddly enough, was milk. Between 1873 and 1880, the daring idea of transfusing milk into the body as a substitute for blood was being tested across the United States. Thomas was the most outspoken advocate of the practice.

At the time, severe bleeding was often a death sentence. Blood transfusion was practiced, but it was something of a crapshoot. Medical science was still 3 decades removed from discovering blood types. Patients who received mismatched blood suffered discolored urine, itching, and a sometimes-fatal complication: hemolytic shock, wherein their own immune systems attacked the transfused cells.

Doctors in the U.S. were looking for something less risky to stabilize a hemorrhaging patient. Thomas was sure milk was the answer. In 1875, he injected 175 milliliters of cow’s milk into a woman suffering from severe uterine bleeding after an operation to remove her cancerous ovaries. At first, he wrote, the patient “complained that her head felt like bursting.” She soon developed a high fever and an abnormally high heart rate, but recovered a week later. Thomas subsequently performed seven separate milk transfusions, publishing his results in several medical journals, and predicted their “brilliant and useful future.”

More here.

I’ve Been

trying all day
to remember that feeling
when you first meet someone

how a match
gets struck
on a rock

how you carry that fire
through each little task
and all day

the people you pass
notice the lights on
notice someone is home.

by Kay Cosgrove
from Ecotheo Collective

A. S. Hamrah in Bookforum:

EMILY NUSSBAUM, THE PULITZER-WINNING television critic and New Yorker staff writer, ends her well-researched, somewhat grueling book on the history of reality television, Cue the Sun!, with a reminder that critics have historically dismissed reality TV as a fad. Yet reality TV has not gone away. It’s more than just a fad, she writes, because “in the end, all our faces got stuck that way.”

It’s a strange phrase to insert out of nowhere. Parents say it when their kids make funny faces—keep it up and your face will get stuck that way. The idea here, I guess, is that we-the-audience, all of us, including those critics who dismissed it, wear the childish face of reality TV because we participate in it as a matter of course, whether we want to or not.

More here.

Lois Parshley at The Lever:

In early May, Google announced it would be adding artificial intelligence to its search engine. When the new feature rolled out, AI Overviews began offering summaries to the top of queries, whether you wanted them or not — and they came at an invisible cost.

Each time you search for something like “how many rocks should I eat” and Google’s AI “snapshot” tells you “at least one small rock per day,” you’re consuming approximately three watt-hours of electricity, according to Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, a research company exploring the unintended consequences of digital trends. That’s ten times the power consumption of a traditional Google search, and roughly equivalent to the amount of power used when talking for an hour on a home phone. (Remember those?)

Collectively, de Vries calculates that adding AI-generated answers to all Google searches could easily consume as much electricity as the country of Ireland.

More here.

Ted Olson in The Conversation:

In early 1824, 30 members of Vienna’s music community sent a letter to Ludwig van Beethoven petitioning the great composer to reconsider his plans to premiere his latest work in Berlin and instead debut the symphony in Vienna.

Beethoven had lived in Vienna since 1792, when he left his hometown of Bonn, Germany, to pursue a career as a composer. Beethoven rose to world renown, but by the 1820s he had fallen out of favor with Viennese arts patrons who, at the time, were drawn to the sounds and styles of Italian composers.

Beethoven had not appeared before a Viennese audience in a dozen years, but he was moved by the letter’s sentiment and agreed to debut his new work, Symphony No. 9 in D minor, in the city. The premiere performance was on May 7, 1824, at Kärntnertor Theater.

More here.

Luke Harding in The Guardian:

For four years, the Ukrainian writer Oleksandr Mykhed lived in the town of Hostomel, not far from Kyiv. Weekends were idyllic. He and his wife, Olena, would have brunch in a cafe, walk their dog, Lisa, in the forest, and eat prawn curry for dinner. Often, Mykhed started to clean the flat and got distracted. He would pick a book from his library and read a dozen or so random pages. Or he browsed their collection of Ukrainian art.

This agreeable existence came to a halt on 24 February 2022, when Moscow launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine. The couple lived close to Hostomel’s airport. Russian paratroopers tried to seize its runway. Mykhed’s parents – professors of literature – were living down the road in the neighbouring city of Bucha. They watched from their balcony as enemy helicopters clattered above them, an imperious scene that could have come from Apocalypse Now.

The same evening, Mykhed and his wife fled their home.

More here.