Brad Jolliff and Mark Robinson in Physics Today:

On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited in the command module Columbia. “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” became one of the most iconic statements of the Apollo experience and set the stage for five additional Apollo landings.

Each of the Apollo missions explored carefully selected landing sites and conducted a variety of experiments to probe the lunar interior and measure the solar wind. Well-trained astronauts made geologic observations and collected samples of rock and regolith, the impact-generated layer of debris that composes the lunar surface. Over a half century of study, the samples have revealed abundant information not only about the Moon’s origin and history but also about the workings of our solar system.

Results from the Apollo 11 mission established key paradigms of lunar and planetary science.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse at IAI News:

I once had a friend named Alice who suddenly decided to attain optimum physical fitness. She committed to a strict regime and almost instantly achieved extraordinary results.The trouble was that she spent so much time exercising that she neglected her friendships, abandoned her hobbies, and forfeited all occasions for socialising. She pursued health at the expense of everything else she valued.

Alice and I eventually lost touch, but to this day I wonder what the point of it was. What good is health when it’s pursued at such a cost? We seek to be healthy mainly because we want to enjoy worthwhile experiences, participate in rewarding activities, and sustain fulfilling relationships. In short, being healthy is good because it enables us to devote ourselves to other valuable things. These other projects are part of the point of being healthy.

We do not live well by health alone. As important as health is, its pursuit must be confined to its proper place in our lives. Thus in thinking about Alice, we reach for terms like obsession and compulsion. When it is pursued at the expense of everything else, health itself becomes pathological. Health’s overdoing is its undoing.

There’s a surprising lesson lurking here about democracy.

More here.

Stephanie Hanes in The Christian Science Monitor:

A Forest Service report published last year found that across the U.S., populated areas lost about 175,000 acres of trees per year between 2009 and 2014, or approximately 36 million trees per year. Forty-five states had a net decline in tree cover in these areas, with 23 of those states experiencing significant decreases. Meanwhile, urban regions showed a particular decline, along with an increase in what the researchers call “impervious surfaces” – in other words, concrete.

But not, it turns out, in Baltimore. Here, the net tree canopy coverage has increased.

…Trees have been in cities, of course, for centuries. Documents from early New England settlements include rules and regulations about how residents should make use of trees growing on town commons. Many municipalities appointed tree wardens to make sure everyone followed the law. Even the modern concept of urban forestry has been around since the 1960s, when officials in the Johnson administration looked toward nature, and trees in particular, to help revitalize urban landscapes that they perceived to be crumbling. But in recent years, scientists say, demographic trends have shifted attention toward the urban forest in a new way.  Across the world, there is a rapid and increasing movement of people from rural areas to cities. In 2009, the United Nations estimated that 3 million people worldwide moved to a city every week. By 2015 more than half of the world’s population lived in urban areas, according to the U.N., with the number of city dwellers expected to grow from 3.9 billion to 6.7 billion by 2050.

More here.

Jim Everett and M Crockett in Scientific American:

The inhabitants of Westeros and Essos repeatedly face versions of a classic moral dilemma: When is it morally permissible to cause harm in order to prevent further suffering? Philosophers have debated moral dilemmas like this for over a thousand years. “Utilitarian” theories say that all that matters for morality is maximizing good consequences for everyone overall, while “deontological” theories say that some actions are just wrong, even if they have good consequences. The tension between deontological and utilitarian ethics can be seen in the origin story of Jaime Lannister’s sobriquet “Kingslayer”: When the “Mad King” Aerys Targaryen orders for the entire city to be burned, massacring the many thousands of citizens that live there, Jaime violates his sacred oath to protect and serve his lord and instead slits the king’s throat. Utilitarian theories would praise Jaime’s decision to kill the Mad King, because it saves many thousands of lives, while deontological theories would prohibit killing one to save many others.

When psychologists study utilitarianism, they focus almost exclusively on sacrificial dilemmas like the one Jaime faced. This is what we call“instrumental harm”—asking people whether, for example, they think it’s morally acceptable to harvest a healthy person’s organs to save the life of a dying patient. Game of Thrones is replete with such examples: for instance, when Olenna Tyrell organizes the murder of Joffrey Baratheon; when Daenerys invades Slaver’s Bay to free the slaves, and when Jon Snow, in the series finale, murders Daenarys to prevent her from killing more innocent people. As Tyrion presciently remarks of Daenarys in the final episode, “She believes her destiny is to build a better world…. Wouldn’t you kill who stood between you and paradise?” This could well be a utilitarian motto: to create paradise for all on earth, some might need to suffer.

More here.

Stephen Ellis at the NYRB:

In 1955, de Kooning was at one of several artistic peaks. By then, he had completely internalized his synthesis of Cubist structure, including Picasso’s Surrealist variations, with Pollock’s innovative materials and expansive scale. Soutine had shown de Kooning how to charge his refined line with a juicier, more muscular gesture. For twenty years, he’d experimented with the stuff of paint—using commercial house paints, additives like plaster, sand, and charcoal, and every gradation of viscosity from watery washes to lava-like accretions of pigment. This arsenal of effects was now at his spontaneous command and he unleashed it in a series of ambitious abstract paintings that evoke cityscapes or highway vistas. In Composition, the addition of sand or other grit to the paint creates a drag against the canvas, shifting the emphasis from the speed of the stroke to its driving force. It’s as if his hand accelerated hard in first gear in thick, rough passages and then shifted in a heartbeat to fourth, leaping ahead as the suddenly liquid paint splashed across the surface. If you’re not interested in this kind of wild ride, de Kooning isn’t for you.

more here.

Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

Now the raucousness begins in earnest, as Ives renders the Independence Day parade—a drunken, lurching revel with horses on the loose and church bells clanging and a fife-and-drum corps playing intentionally off-key (recalling those lusty if decidedly amateurish New England bands Ives knew so well from his youth). There are quotations galore, some 15 of them, from such popular tunes as “Battle Cry of Freedom,” “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” “Yankee Doodle,” “Reveille,” “Marching Through Georgia,” and “Dixie,” in addition to “Columbia, Gem of the Ocean,” which the trombones deliver with gusto, though many of the tunes are distorted, distended, or truncated. All of these fragments furiously collide with each other, creating an exhilarating swirl, a feeling of polyrhythmic, harmonic chaos. The underlying philosophy here is a democratic ideal, that everything has its place in a piece of music: high art and low, consonance and dissonance, simplicity and mind-boggling complexity—everything goes. So complicated is the score that a second conductor is needed (in some performances, even a third). And in truth, Ives himself never knew if he’d ever hear this work performed. As he later wrote, “I remember distinctly, when I was scoring this, that there was a feeling of freedom as a boy has, on the Fourth of July, who wants to do anything he wants to do. … And I wrote this, feeling free to remember local things, etc, and to put [in] as many feelings and rhythms as I wanted to put together. And I did what I wanted to, quite sure that the thing would never be played, and perhaps could never be played.”

more here.

Gillian Moore at Literary Review:

The Gustav Mahler industry, in particular, is vicious in its representation of Alma as a self-serving narcissist who exaggerated her own role in the life of the great man, massaged the facts and was even, on account of her affair with Gropius, responsible for his death at the age of fifty. She was, the legend goes, an artistic gold-digger in whose eyes a man’s sexual attractiveness increased in proportion to his artistic ‘greatness’. But in this, as in so many other matters, Alma didn’t help: during a three-year affair with Oskar Kokoschka, which became darker and stranger as time went on, she told him that she would marry him only when he had created a masterpiece (she never did). And why at the end of her life, after marrying three well-known artists, did she revert to the name of the first? Was it because she reckoned that Mahler was the most important, the ‘greatest’ of the three?

Against this backdrop, it’s rather welcome, and unexpected, to read Cate Haste admit in the foreword of her new biography, ‘I like Alma’. 

more here.

The Pinch

I said out loud for the first time ever, I want to deface a car. I
wanted other things too, as it happened — the things I wanted were
so specific.

You see I was looking at the bodies all day. The unrolling skins of
the politicians. Due to recent developments I could see every pore,
and a moistness at the corner of the eyes.

I thought I would like to make that moistness.

The speaker of the house came on, I thought I want to forcibly
remove every piece of beard from your body.

The counselor to the president came on, I thought I am going to
unbend you like a Barbie knee, until you make that creak.

These were new thoughts. Before, it had always been myself that I
imagined: slashed to ribbons, pressed to the griddle, spinning on
the tip of a sword. Peeled like a grape for a haunted house.

But now the feeling had been let out. A pure pinch between two
fingers, and shocking how soft it was.

A brazen desire to deflate the turtle, to surprise him to the point of
squealing, to pop the lenses out so he couldn’t find his way to
school.

To rip the suit off stitch by stitch and burn it in one of those cans
that homeless people and gang members are always warming their
hands over. In the movies.

Where do you buy baseball bats, I asked.

Is there a store that sells only the red spray paint.

The secretary of education came on, I saw her clinging to an
oversized novelty pencil as she went over Niagara Falls. I had
somehow engineered this, through my cleverness.

Read more »

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international 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 a few 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. Please click on “Read more” below.

New posts below!

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Viv Groskop in Literary Hub:

The author of Fathers and Sons and A Month in the Country was easily the most colorful and hedonistic figure in Russian literary history. He had a longtime mistress who was an opera singer he followed around Europe. He was grumpy, volatile, and camp. He threw an inkwell at his mistress when she annoyed him and told the actress Sarah Bernhardt that she reminded him of a toad. One time, when he forgot to turn up to a tea party he wrote in his letter of apology that he couldn’t come because his thumbs were too small.

He had a love-hate friendship with Tolstoy. When they were on good terms he was well-known amongst Tolstoy’s children for being the fun uncle. He would entertain them by dancing jigs for them and by impersonating a chicken whilst he was eating soup. (I say this but I am also in the throes of a violent argument with the Russian translator of my book about whether Turgenev was impersonating the chicken whilst he was eating the soup or whether he liked to do impressions of soup-eating chickens. Either way, Turgenev could be fun.)

More here.

K. C. Cole in Quanta:

The flashier fruits of Albert Einstein’s century-old insights are by now deeply embedded in the popular imagination: Black holes, time warps and wormholes show up regularly as plot points in movies, books, TV shows. At the same time, they fuel cutting-edge research, helping physicists pose questions about the nature of space, time, even information itself.

Perhaps ironically, though, what is arguably the most revolutionary part of Einstein’s legacy rarely gets attention. It has none of the splash of gravitational waves, the pull of black holes or even the charm of quarks. But lurking just behind the curtain of all these exotic phenomena is a deceptively simple idea that pulls the levers, shows how the pieces fit together, and lights the path ahead.

The idea is this: Some changes don’t change anything. The most fundamental aspects of nature stay the same even as they seemingly shape-shift in unexpected ways. Einstein’s 1905 papers on relativity led to the unmistakable conclusion, for example, that the relationship between energy and mass is invariant, even though energy and mass themselves can take vastly different forms.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

From America to the Philippines, the rise of populist movements reveals a yearning for belonging and identity that liberalism cannot satisfy. The emergence of non-liberal economic powers such as China calls into question the postwar ‘liberal order’. Putin, FTeditor, Lionel Barber, told Radio 4’s Today programme, ‘feels he is on the right side of history’. Many liberals fear that, too. Hence the global impact of Putin’s comments.

The real issue, though, is not that social attitudes have become more illiberal, but that liberalism has been unable to address the fundamental issue of the relationship between the individual and society even as that issue has become one of the most salient.

More here.

Caroline Eden at Literary Hub:

Odessa is a young city by European standards, but what it lacks in historical gravitas it makes up for with its splendid architectural bones and worldliness. Cosmopolitan from its inception, its life began when Neapolitan officer General Don Jose de Ribas seized a Tatar-built fort, Hadji Bey, from the Turks in 1789. His conquest complete, de Ribas asked Catherine the Great if she liked the Grecian name Odessos. She did, but only once she’d feminized it to “Odessa.”

Subpar roads connecting Odessa to Moscow played to the city’s advantage, with the port offering easier access to Europe, the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas via the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles Strait. From the outset outward looking, Odessa refused to rely on the empire in the north, instead always looking to the sea for its fortune. This benefited its inhabitants greatly. De Ribas reveled in the world that began to open up, one that allowed small pleasures like drinking European wine and eating mastic-laced sweets.

more here.

David Wootton at Lapham’s Quarterly:

This problem is particularly acute in our modern consumer economy, in which political institutions, the economic system, and popular culture are all now primarily dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. This has had the perverse effect of creating a world of frustration and disappointment in which so many discover that happiness is beyond their grasp. The economy fails to deliver for the majority but urges everyone to spend beyond their means. We engage in “retail therapy,” spending for the momentary gratification of acquisition. We encounter advertisements that wrap themselves around us like a blizzard of snow, each promising that if we spend, and go on spending, we will be rewarded with endless delights. This spending helps drive climate change, which threatens to make the planet uninhabitable. Moreover, our sense of who we are seems to be increasingly detached from reality; we live out fantasy versions of ourselves, playing our own private form of air guitar. To constantly pursue something you can never catch is a form of madness. We have built this madness into the very structure of our lives. Every society in the world aims at economic growth, and every society encourages the endless accumulation of wealth. When it comes to wealth, we have great difficulty in saying enough is enough, because it is hard to know when we can safely say we have enough to face down every possible catastrophe.

How then have we come to build a whole culture around an impossible, futile, self-defeating enterprise?

more here.

Andrei Codrescu at The Paris Review:

At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America’s best-known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and Stevenson have entered the established literary canon and are still read for duty and pleasure. Lafcadio Hearn has been forgotten, with two remarkable exceptions: in Louisiana and in Japan. Yet Hearn’s place in the canon is significant for many reasons, not least of which is how the twentieth century came to view the nineteenth. This view, both academic and popular, reflects the triumph of a certain futuristic Modernism over the mysteries of religion, folklore, and what was once called “folk wisdom.” To witness this phenomenon in time-lapse, sped-up motion, one need only consider Lafcadio Hearn, the Greek-born, Irish-raised, New World immigrant who metamorphosed from a celebrated fin-de-siècle American writer into the beloved Japanese cultural icon Koizumi Yakumo in less than a decade, in roughly the same time that Japan changed from a millennia-old feudal society into a great industrial power.

more here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable gills. Once released, it moves to protect itself—it grabs discarded seashells and swiftly arranges them into a defensive dome.

Thanks to acts like these, cephalopods—the group that includes octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish—have become renowned for their intelligence. Octopuses, for example, have been seen unscrewing jar lids to get at hidden food, carrying coconut shells to use as armor, barricading their den with stones, and squirting jets of water to deter predators or short out aquarium lights. But why did they become intelligent in the first place? Why did this one group of mollusks, among an otherwise slow and dim-witted dynasty of snails, slugs, clams, oysters, and mussels, evolve into creatures that are famed for their big brains? These are hard questions to answer, especially because cephalopods aren’t just weirdly intelligent; they’re also very weird for intelligent animals. Members of the animal kingdom’s intelligentsia tend to be sociable; indeed, the need to remember and manage a complex network of relationships might have helped drive the evolution of their brains. Smart animals also tend to be long-lived, since a large brain both takes a long time to grow and helps an animal avoid danger. Apes, elephants, whales and dolphins, crows and other corvids, parrots: They all share these traits.

Cephalopods do not. With rare exceptions, most of them are solitary animals that aren’t above cannibalizing one another when they meet. Even those that swim in groups, like some squid, don’t form the kinds of deep social bonds that chimps or dolphins do. Cephalopods also tend to live fast and die young. Most have life spans shorter than two years, and many die after their first bout of sex and reproduction. This combination of short lives, solitude, and smarts is unique to cephalopods. And according to a recent paper by Piero Amodio from the University of Cambridge and five of his colleagues, the traits are all linked to a particular development in the octopus’s evolutionary history: Its ancestors lost their shells.

More here.

Ashley Yeager in The Scientist:

“Anytime we take Tylenol because we have the flu and we feel terrible, that’s actually you playing with tolerance,” says Stanford University microbiologist David Schneider, Ayres’s former advisor. By quieting the immune reaction that is making you feel sick, “you’re making yourself feel better, even though you might not be affecting how much of a pathogen is in your body.” As they come to appreciate that disease tolerance exists in animals, including humans, researchers want to tap into its mechanisms—analogous to the way they are tapping into the immune system to develop disease-fighting immunotherapies. Specific kinds of supplements, as Ayres has shown in mice, may be one solution. And bacteria that live in the body as part of its micro­biome have been shown to help mice tolerate malaria, Salmonella, and pneumonia infections. “During infection, we all appreciate that there are these immune defenses that largely are designed to get rid of an invading pathogen, and that’s been thought to be the only or main way that we deal with infections,” says Ruslan Medzhitov, an immunologist at Yale School of Medicine. “What’s being appreciated more recently . . . is that there is also this other mechanism, so-called tolerance to infection, where instead of trying to get rid of a pathogen we change something about the body, about the physiology, and that lets us tolerate the presence of a pathogen.”

Until about a decade ago, researchers had largely overlooked the idea of disease tolerance in animals. But the physiological strategy didn’t go unnoticed among plant biologists. In research dating to the late 1800s, for example, scientists described how one variety of wheat crop infected with a fungus called leaf rust fared better and produced more grain than other infected wheat crops.² Follow-up studies spanning the 20th century and into the 21st suggested that plants have internal ways to tolerate infections in addition to defending against them with immunity. These findings led researchers to wonder if a similar sort of tolerance exists in animals.

Researchers reported the first hints of disease tolerance in humans in 2006, when they found that people who have a type of alpha thalassemia, a blood disorder that typically reduces hemo­globin production, are somehow protected against the severe iron deficiency associated with a malarial infection. In a study published the following year, disease ecologist Andrew Read, then at the University of Edinburgh, and his former postdoc Lars Råberg found that certain strains of mice had genetic variations that boosted their tolerance to the malaria parasite Plasmodium chabaudi. Those mice had improved health, the researchers noted, but comparable numbers of P. chabaudi cells in their bodies to those in mice that weren’t as tolerant to the infection.³

More here.

—from “Nikes”

Just as the President
who could only say, “If I had a son
he’d look like Trayvon”

instead of, “If I had a son
he’d look just like me.” So often
the body is used

as a way to mediate chaos.
Just like the Statue of Liberty
looked “just like Trayvon”

but America couldn’t not swim
under the body of a black girl
& still feel free. And yes

this is a vulgar elegy. I ask:
What is it in you, that they
don’t want to look like you?

by Shayla Lawson
from I Think I’m Ready To See Frank Ocean
Saturnalia Books

Trayvon Martin