Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Musa al-Gharbi at Symbolic Capital(ism):

Symbolic capitalists are strange people. Actually, it might be more apt to say we are particularly WEIRD. In decades-worth of empirical studies carried out across the globe, anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his collaborators have documented many ways people from Western, Highly-Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies diverge systematically from most others worldwide. For instance:

• • People from WEIRD societies tend to be much more future-oriented than other people: We prioritize patience, discipline, efficiency and planning. We valorize hard work (as something to be celebrated for its own sake rather than something that often simply must be done in pursuit of other objectives). We view time in a linear way, hold faith in ‘progress,’ and try to actualize progress according to our visions for the future.
  • People from WEIRD societies tend to be very focused on individuals — including and especially ourselves: We ruminate on the mental and emotional states of ourselves and others. We try to analyze others’ apparent motives and dispositions. We work to cultivate and affirm a sense of self (as distinct from others). We value the ability to exercise choice and determine our own future rather than conforming to traditions or expectations. We tend to overvalue our own stuff, to have a strong sense of possession and entitlement with respect to what is ‘ours,’ and more regularly display overconfidence in our own socially-valued abilities.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Stephen Smith at The Guardian:

What do TS Eliot, the Coen brothers, Dorothy Parker, Mel Brooks, Clive James and Woody Allen have in common? The answer is that they all admired SJ Perelman, the droll New York prose stylist and Oscar-winning screenwriter. There’s a crowded field in the sweepstakes for the best writer you’ve never heard of, but the form book suggests that Perelman would place, at the very least. He wrote for Hollywood and the New Yorker in the middle of the 20th century, when smart, wisecracking American humour was the laughter heard across the globe. He collaborated with the Marx Brothers on Monkey Business and Horse Feathers and received his Academy Award for Around the World in 80 Days. There was an SJP bossing Manhattan when Sex and the City was just a bubble in a cosmopolitan.

Now some of Perelman’s work has been republished. Cloudland Revisited: A Misspent Youth in Books and Film brings together essays in which the mature Perelman returns to the dime store novels and schlocky movies that he enjoyed in his teens.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian:

The man who may very well become the vice-president of the US once told Fox News that the country is governed by a dastardly deep state comprised of cat lovers. His exact words from the 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson:

We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too. And it’s just a basic fact if you look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC – the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it.”

…To be honest, I doubt that Vance really believes that “childless cat ladies” run the US. I also don’t know if he really believes that you only have a stake in the future if you procreate. Vance, after all, is a man who doesn’t really seem to believe anything. As has been much discussed, this is a guy who once called Donald Trump “America’s Hitler” and who now has no problem standing shoulder to shoulder with him.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Albert Li in Science:

It sounded like the right thing to do. I was a first-year Ph.D. student in educational psychology, and my research adviser told me I should consider practicing open science—“being open and above board,” as he put it. He suggested I make my first-year research project a preregistered report. We would publish our planned methods and analysis in advance, an approach meant to minimize questionable research practices such as cherry-picking of results. I found myself at a crossroads. On one hand, the promise of enhancing transparency and reproducibility was compelling. On the other, I was frightened about potential negative repercussions.

An ethos of secrecy had colored my academic training up to that point. When I was an undergraduate student in China, a respected mentor cautioned, “Do not rush to publish your data in preprints, as others might scoop your ideas. Do not share your code, as it invites scrutiny and criticism. And try not to share your raw data—it makes us vulnerable.” He insisted that nothing leave the lab—not data sets, code, methodologies, or even the challenges we encountered. In papers we published, I wrote that the data remained confidential or was only available upon reasonable request, knowing that we would often opt not to share. The arrangement made me feel a bit uneasy, but I mostly accepted it as the way things had to be done to protect against intellectual theft.

But when I moved to the United States to pursue my Ph.D., the value of open science began to grow increasingly clear.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Alec Wilkinson at the NYT:

In “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” Kate Kitagawa, a mathematics historian, and Timothy Revell, a science writer, intend by reasoned and scholarly means to overthrow the “assumption that the European way of doing things is superior.”

Their book begins with prehistoric counting methods (one of the earliest was based on the number 60, unlike our own base-10 system) and goes on to the fourth-century Alexandrian women Pandrosion, a geometer who solved the difficult problem of doubling the volume of a cube (ancient mathematicians lacked the algebra that makes this straightforward), and Hypatia, who wrote mathematical commentaries, including on Apollonius’ “Conics,” an investigation of circles, ellipses and other shapes. Kitagawa and Revell speculate that Johannes Kepler, who described the orbits of the planets in the 17th century, may have been influenced by her contributions.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Temples of Smoke

Fire shimmied and reached up
From the iron furnace and grabbed
Sawdust from the pitchfork
Before I could make it across
The floor or take a half step
Back, as the boiler room sung
About what trees were before
Men & money. Those nights
Smelled of greenness & sweat
As steam moved through miles
Of winding pipes to turn wheels
That pushed blades and rotated
Man-high saws. It leaped
Like tigers out of a pit,
Singeing the hair on my head,
While Daddy made his rounds
Turning large brass keys
In his night-watchman’s clock,
Out among columns of lumber & paths
Where a man and woman might meet.
I daydreamed some freighter
Across a midnight ocean,
Leaving Taipei & headed
For Tripoli. I saw myself fall
Through a tumbling inferno
As if hell was where a boy
Shoveled clouds of sawdust
Into the wide mouth of doubt.

by Yusef Komunyakaa
from New American Poets of the ’90s
David R. Godine, publisher, 1991

John Simpson in The Guardian:

Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the early 1990s, when she was writing about the danger that Russia’s post-communist implosion would one day present for the west, after Boris Yeltsin left office. She talked even then about the need for Nato to build up its defences against the time when Russia would be resurgent; while I, having spent so much time in the economic devastation of Moscow and St Petersburg, thought the best way for the west to protect itself was by being far more generous and welcoming towards Russia. Events have shown which of us was right, and it wasn’t me.

Autocracy, Inc. is deeply disturbing; it couldn’t be anything else. But Applebaum’s research is as always thoroughgoing, which makes it a lively pleasure to read.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Grace Wade in New Scientist:

A newly identified brain pathway in mice could explain why placebos, or interventions designed to have no therapeutic effect, still relieve pain. Developing drugs that target this pathway may lead to safer alternatives to pain medications like opioids.

If someone unknowingly takes a sugar pill instead of a pain reliever, they still feel better. This placebo effect is a well-known phenomenon in which people’s expectations lessen their symptoms, even without effective treatment. “Our brain, on its own, is sort of able to fix the pain problem based on the expectation that a medication or treatment might work,” says Grégory Scherrer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

To understand how the brain does this, Scherrer and his colleagues replicated the placebo effect in 10 mice using a cage with two chambers. One chamber had a burning hot floor, while the other didn’t. After three days, the animals learned to associate the second chamber with pain relief.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Yascha Mounk at his own Substack:

Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider stratum of society, the affluent and highly educated have resorted to different status symbols to signal their superior standing. This is why luxury beliefs—jargon-heavy political slogans calling for positions that are widely unpopular among the general population—have substituted for luxury goods.

The concept of luxury beliefs achieved a feat shared by few neologisms: it entered “the discourse.” It is now frequently invoked on social media. It has been used in a key speech by a British Home Secretary. It has its own Wikipedia page.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Ed Simon at Lit Hub:

My desire to write a cultural history of the Faust legend goes back a few years earlier than my pilgrimage to the Deptford churchyard, around the time that I attended an adaptation of the play entitled faustUS staged by the theater collective 404 Strand in my hometown of Pittsburgh. Basing the script on the shorter, so-called “Text A” of Marlowe’s play, a tauter and more cryptic work that cuts the slapstick that mars more traditional productions of Doctor Faustus, the performance was hallucinatory, ritualistic, psychedelic, incantatory. A work of conjuration. With the audience invited to sit in an ad hoc theater-in-the-round constructed on the stage of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater, we all faced a rusted iron-cage in which the action of the play would be set. I was in the front row.

My most distinctive memory of that performance was the actor who played Faust, shirtless and sinewy, glistening with sweat beneath the oppressive stage lights, hoisting a shaggy, bestial mask of a horn-twisted ox over his head, and wildly gesticulating to thrash metal so loud that my fillings were humming, the necromancer then taking a full loaf of white bread out of its antiseptic bag and shredding it into the gapping maw of the bovine mask, bits of spongy whiteness spraying onto all of us sitting in the front row.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

H. Alan Scott in Newsweek:

If you ask Bette Midler how she got her part in the new film The Fabulous Four, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her legendary status as a performer, or that she’s an Oscar-nominated actor. “I think they needed a ham, a big ole ham. So, I got that part.” Midler plays Marilyn, a widow getting remarried who rekindles a friendship with her three college girlfriends, played by Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally. “No actor doesn’t like to chew the scenery, even if they don’t admit it. So, to have the permission to pull out all the stops is always great.” What was also great was working with her three costars. “Working with these these girls…girls, girls, oh my God, we’re 100! These women! Working with these women was really an eye-opener because everybody’s process is different.”

Part of what makes Midler’s performance so fun is that it gives longtime fans of hers another taste of her Divine Miss M stage persona, albeit through Marilyn. “Sometimes when I meet people, they expect me to be her, and I’m not her. I’ve got her, and then I’ve got me. And since I’ve taken a step back from that truly active life of touring and stage shows, I find myself getting quieter and quieter. I know people want her to come back. I do love her. And in a way, she’s still tweeting, but in real life, you can’t be on 24/7. You’ll die. You’ll just die.”

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

A climate scientist who was demoted for speaking out by the administration of former US president Donald Trump is seeking an investigation into her case and demanding changes to personnel policies to prevent similar retaliation against others in future. Her supporters say the proposed reforms could help her agency, the US Geological Survey (USGS), as well as others safeguard science in the event of a second Trump administration, which many fear will be even more efficient than the first at sidelining science and scientists.

“This is not about what happened to me, it’s about what could happen to others,” Virginia Burkett, the scientist, told Nature, emphasizing that stronger protections are needed regardless of who wins the US presidential election in November. Burkett, whose position and salary as chief scientist for climate and land use at the USGS have been upgraded under President Joe Biden, laid out her allegations in a 200-plus-page complaint filed today with a federal watchdog agency that represents whistleblowers. She is represented by the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, a non-profit organization based in New York.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

A.W. Moore at the LRB:

Ludwig Wittgenstein’​s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book he published during his lifetime, is one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. It might have been expected, when it first appeared in 1921, to have limited appeal. It is very much the work of a philosophers’ philosopher, forbiddingly technical in places and esoteric throughout. Yet it has gone on to capture the public imagination as few other philosophical classics have.

It consists of 525 sections, or ‘propositions’, ranging in length from four words to about a page and a half of text and diagrams. Each is given a decimal number, with the numbers indicating subordination and interconnection. Thus propositions 2.21 and 2.22 are comments on proposition 2.2, which is itself a comment on proposition 2, which is one of the seven top-level propositions. The propositions have an aphoristic quality. They are written with great compression, hardly any examples, and little explicit argument. They are for the most part general and abstract. Wittgenstein makes few concessions to his reader. But there is something undeniably awe-inspiring about their cumulative effect and about the concision with which they encapsulate his elaborate system of thought.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, in New England

It is what he does not know,
Crossing the road under the elm trees,
About the mechanism of my car,
About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,
About Mozart, India, Arcturus,

That wins my praise. I engage
At once in whirling squirrel-praise.

He obeys the orders of nature
Without Knowing them.
It is what he does not know
That makes him beautiful.
Such a knot of little purposeful nature!

I who can see him as he cannot see himself
Repose in ignorance that is his blessing.

It is what man does not know of God
Composes the visible poem of the world.
…………………………. . . . Just Missed him!

by Richard Eberhart
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books. 1962

Tracy Fessenden in The Conversation:

Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher in the hallway, unrecognized and unattended. Her estate amounted to 70 cents in the bank and a roll of bills concealed on her person, her share of the payment for a tabloid interview she gave on her deathbed.

Today, Holiday is revered as one of the most influential musical artists of all time. Time magazine named her 1939 recording of “Strange Fruit” the song of the 20th century. “In this sad, shadowy song about lynching in the South,” Time wrote in 1999, “history’s greatest jazz singer comes to terms with history itself.”

Abel Meeropol, a New York City teacher and songwriter who used the pen name Lewis Allan, wrote “Strange Fruit” after seeing a photograph of a lynching that shocked and haunted him: “Black body swinging in the Southern breeze / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Ethan Siegel at Big Think:

Perhaps the greatest quest in particle physics, for perhaps half a century now, has been to find a discrepancy between theory and experiment when it comes to the Standard Model. One fascinating place to look is at the magnetic moment of the muon: a heavy, unstable relative of the electron. A Fermilab experiment known as “muon g-2″ has revealed a discrepancy between theory and experiment at greater than the 4-sigma level: approaching the gold standard for discovery. But is this evidence for new physics?

According to a new theoretical calculation, the answer is no: it’s a flaw in the technique used by the majority of the theoretical community. Using new lattice QCD techniques, theory and experiment align, suggesting that the puzzle has finally been solved. Here’s how.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.