Debbie Koenig in WebMD:

Isaac Chatiner in The New Yorker:

In her 2019 book, “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil,” the philosopher Susan Neiman examines the different ways in which Germany and the United States have confronted their past sins. Neiman, who grew up in the American South and now lives in Berlin, describes how Germany has reckoned with the Nazi era, through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and various forms of reparations. Indeed, just as the Nazi period has become the ultimate example of unadulterated cruelty, postwar Germany has become the paradigmatic example of a country that has fully considered its past. Could something similar be possible in the United States? As Neiman’s book seeks to answer this question, it also serves as a conscious attempt to “safeguard” Germany’s confrontation with history, at a time when the far right is on the rise there, as it is in many countries.

Leanne Ogasawara in the Dublin Review of Books:

A man finds himself in Antwerp with nothing to do. Then he remembers, among other things, that this is the town where the painter Peter Paul Rubens made his home. At first, this annoys him, because he has no interest whatsoever in the painter. But then he thinks, why not write a book about Rubens.

Why not, indeed?

Essayist and critic Morgan Meis sets out to develop a new style of writing about art, one that is informed by a passionate looking. One could argue that this is not new, that Meis is returning to a time when intellectuals had charmingly erudite conversations about paintings, history, and music. Not only could they bedazzle at a cocktail party, but they could write about it too ‑  art inspired by art. Meis’s long essay about one particular Rubens painting reminded me of William Golden’s classic discourse on Thermopylae or John Pope Hennessy’s study of the “Best Picture in the World”. For in the examination of the particular we are able to ponder deep truths. And like the greatest essayists before him, Meis is scholarly but not encyclopedic, meandering instead of direct.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become creative, what is happening in their brains during the creative process, and what kinds of creativity does the audience actually enjoy? David Rosen and Scott Miles are both neuroscientists and musicians who have been investigating this question from the perspective of both listeners and performers. They have been performing neuroscientific experiments to understand how the brain becomes creative, and founded Secret Chord Laboratories to develop software that will predict what kinds of music people will like.

More here.

Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, John McWhorter, and many others, in Harper’s Magazine (also published in Le monde, Die Zeit, La Repubblica, and El País):

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

More here.

Editor’s Note: We at 3QD stand fully behind Steven Pinker. Please also see this public statement published today in Harper’s, Le monde, Die Zeit, La Repubblica, and El País with signatories such as Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, John McWhorter, and many others.

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

If there were ever a time for liberals and progressives to put aside their internal squabbles, you’d think it was now. The President of the United States is a racist gangster, who might not leave if he loses the coming election—all the more reason to ensure he loses in a landslide. Due in part to that gangster’s breathtaking incompetence, 130,000 Americans are now dead, and the economy tanked, from a pandemic that the rest of the world has under much better control. The gangster’s latest “response” to the pandemic has been to disrupt the lives of thousands of foreign scientists—including several of my students—by threatening to cancel their visas. (American universities will, of course, do whatever they legally can to work around this act of pure spite.)

So how is the left responding to this historic moment?

This weekend, 536 people did so by … trying to cancel Steven Pinker, stripping him of “distinguished fellow” and “media expert” status (whatever those are) in the Linguistics Society of America for ideological reasons.

Yes, Steven Pinker: the celebrated linguist and cognitive scientist, author of The Language Instinct and How the Mind Works (which had a massive impact on me as a teenager) and many other books, and academic torch-bearer for the Enlightenment in our time. For years, I’d dreaded the day they’d finally come for Steve, even while friends assured me my fears must be inflated since, after all, they hadn’t come for him yet.

I concede that the cancelers’ logic is impeccable. If they can get Pinker, everyone will quickly realize that there’s no longer any limit to who they can get—including me, including any writer or scientist who crosses them.

More here.

Hilton Als at The New Yorker:

As a boy in Brownsville and in Bed-Stuy, I was tormented by the question of protection, because, of course, I, too, wanted to be protected. Like any number of black boys in those neighborhoods, I grew up in a matrilineal society, where I had been taught the power—the necessity—of silence. But how could you not cry out when you couldn’t save your mother because you couldn’t defend yourself? Although I had this in common with other guys, something separated me from them when it came to joining those demonstrations, to leaping in the air when black bodies were threatened. My distance had to do with my queerness. The guys who took the chance to protect their families and themselves were the same guys who called me “faggot.”

For a while, I thought their looting and carrying on had to do with enacting a particular form of masculinity: if white men and cops could wreak havoc in the world, why couldn’t they?

more here.

Sarah Ditum at Literary Review:

What is to be done with hope? Ali Smith is a great artist of possibility. Think of the role chance plays in her work, from The Accidental to How to be Both’s thrillingly shuffled structure that meant you had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the contemporary narrative first or the historical one. But these are bleak times – from Smith’s perspective, anyway, which I should state here is broadly my own too.

This perspective is that of the dejected liberal for whom life in the past half-decade has been a succession of shocks punctuating the grand underlying horror of global warming, so that every time I make the mistake of thinking ‘well maybe democracy/the press/the public sphere will be OK’, I free up my brain to think about forty-degree summers instead and then I feel worse. Sometimes I wonder if the particular love I have for Smith’s post-Brexit writing has anything to do with the lofty ideals of sympathy I like to think apply to fiction or is really just the pleasure of looking in a flattering mirror.

more here.

Notes from the Camino de Santiago Compostela

Outside a bar in Santillana del Mar, I am drinking café con leche where
the bella donnas & bleeding hearts decant the eye with the same pitch
as your arms swelling Alberta. The Torture Museum only charges 3.50 Euro
to cruise iron maidens, punishing shoes.   There’s rumor of human femurs
fashioned as ritual trumpets across the street & these cobblestones throb
with the eternal question:  “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” (Clash fan?)
Pot-bellied pigs punctuate our days & sifra by starlight.  Hawks & wind &
the rocking lemons of Cantabria!   Weeks of foot after foot. We eat fish & mushrooms
at noon beneath cowbells & dowsing rods—a bit like sitting below your own divine
guide.  You might wonder:  Where’s that phial of Mary’s milk, the foreskin of Jesus,
splinters from Calvary?  They elude me.  I pick field flowers for you & Cooley
in Cigüenza on a day lost to construction:  Bright tape & gravel, the blah blah blah
of hard hats obscuring this ancient way.  Each morning, the cliffs of Finisterra
prepare themselves in blue.  This costa del morte, this end of the world.  We will burn
rough bread, an emery board; we will drink an earthy red to what will be.

by Lea Graham
from Four Poems From the End of the World
@ The Typescript

Camino de Santiago Compostela

Aaron Hirsh in Nautilus:

Many historians have noted the intimate connection between the theory of natural selection and the ascendant political and economic views of the society in which Darwin was a well-placed member. The Victorian elite were committed to the idea that the unfettered competition of Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s free market would drive economic and social advancement. In Darwin’s theory, they found nature’s own reflection of the social system they favored. As J.M. Keynes put it, “The principle of the survival of the fittest could be regarded as a vast generalization of the Ricardian economics.”

Yet while this observation has often been made in relation to Darwin’s work, the theory of thermodynamics has largely escaped similar contextualization. Perhaps physics, in all its rigors, is deemed less susceptible to social involvement. In truth, though, Darwinian and thermodynamic theories served jointly to furnish a propitious worldview—a suitable ur-myth about the universe—for a society committed to laissez-faire competition, entrepreneurialism, and expanding industry. Essentially, under this view, the world slouches naturally toward a deathly cold state of disorder, but it can be salvaged—illuminated and organized—by the competitive scrabble of creatures fighting to survive and get ahead.

As with Darwin’s work, the extension of thermodynamic theory into areas where it did not strictly apply has often led to faulty conclusions. William Thomson himself stumbled into this pitfall when he tried to estimate the age of the Earth. It was a fraught and momentous question—How old is the planet?—because Darwin had just published On the Origin of Species, and the evolutionary process he had proposed required great stretches of time to produce the diverse and exquisite structures of plants and animals. In truth, no one had yet developed those elements of evolutionary theory that permit a well-informed estimate of how long the evolution of life on Earth must have taken. Yet somehow, Darwin had a sense, and he figured it must have taken at least a billion years.

More here.

Apurv Mishra in Scientific American:

A patient suspected of having cancer usually undergoes imaging and a biopsy. Samples of the tumor are excised, examined under a microscope and, often, analyzed to pinpoint the genetic mutations responsible for the malignancy. Together, this information helps to determine the type of cancer, how advanced it is and how best to treat it. Yet sometimes biopsies cannot be done, such as when a tumor is hard to reach. Obtaining and analyzing the tissue can also be expensive and slow. And because biopsies are invasive, they may cause infections or other complications.

A tool known as a liquid biopsy—which finds signs of cancer in a simple blood sample—promises to solve those problems and more. A few dozen companies are developing their own technologies, and observers predict that the market for the tests could be worth billions. The technique typically homes in on circulating-tumor DNA (ctDNA), genetic material that routinely finds its way from cancer cells into the bloodstream. Only recently have advanced technologies made it possible to find, amplify and sequence the DNA rapidly and inexpensively.

More here.

Haider Shahbaz in The Caravan:

I was slightly nervous before my first meeting with the author Mirza Athar Baig, in the winter of 2017, at the Big M restaurant in Lahore’s Shadman Market. I had recently signed a book deal for my translation of his 2014 Urdu novel Hassan’s State of Affairs, and I was meeting him to discuss the first round of edits.

When I entered the restaurant, he was already at a table, waiting for me. I was embarrassed about being late, but this would happen every time I met him. Baig is impeccably punctual in a city that runs perpetually late. He was wearing a grey suit, slightly big for his build, and an old leather bag was on the chair next to him. The manuscript of the translation I had sent was placed neatly on the table in front of him, and he was scanning it with what seemed to be perturbed eyes. His expressionless face appeared forbidding, but as I found soon enough, Baig easily bursts into laughter, adding an unexpected softness to his apparent stoicism.

The restaurant was nearly full the whole time we were there, but no one recognised Baig. People have long stopped recognising writers in this city, and even if they did, they probably would not notice Baig.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Cooking is art, but it’s also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can’t think of anyone better to talk to about the intersection of these fields than Kenji López-Alt: professional chef and restauranteur, MIT graduate, and author of The Food Lab. We discuss how modern scientific ideas can improve your cooking, and more importantly, how to bring a scientific approach to cooking anything at all. Then we also get into the cultural and personal resonance of food, and offer a few practical tips.

More here.

Andy Martin in The Independent:

We weren’t always racists. We were always mean, murderous bastards, of course. Rape, slaughter, and slavery were once fairly normal and frequent. The plot of Taken has been rehearsed over and over again throughout history. Rousseau’s “noble savage” was a loner, self-sufficient, a hunter roaming about the woods having little contact with anyone else. But the point about the noble savage is that she did not exist. It’s a recent invention, a retrospective myth. The truly solo human just doesn’t survive for very long. We’ve always been tribal. We had to be if we wanted to stay alive. And the main problem for tribes was other tribes. Hell is other peoples, plural.

The Ramayana, the ancient Sanskrit epic, tells of a beautiful young woman being abducted. The hero of the story, Rama, has to go kill a lot of bad guys to get her back again. Homer’s Iliad, composed around the same era, tells of Helen being taken by Paris to Troy and the Greeks launching a war against the Trojans to get her back again. The greatest fighter according to Homer is Achilles (played by Brad Pitt in the movie).

But it should be noted that Achilles refuses to fight for most of the epic poem on account of Agamemnon (who is on his side) taking possession of his woman Briseis, whom Achilles has already acquired elsewhere in a previous successful raid.

More here.

From Art Radar:

In a short video documentary produced by the Tate Modern in London, the artist talks about her exhibition, “Letters from Home,” which opened on 28 March 2013. Through personal letters, the exhibition illustrates an immigrant’s disconnection from his or her homeland.  In the Tate video interview, Zarina discusses how working with letters from her sister, Rani, has helped her to preserve her sense of identity. “It’s almost like writing your life’s story, and it’s not just my life’s story. It’s the story of all immigrants. And that’s where the home comes in, the idea of home, and maps and floor plans,” she says. “I just made my personal life the subject of my art, so I have to write about what I have gone through”.

The video juxtaposes images of New York, where Zarina has lived and worked since 1973, with the Urdu-inscribed prints that illustrate both her physical and emotional journeys. The first artwork in the video is a detail of Atlas of My World (2001), in which a jagged black line separates India from Pakistan. “I really don’t have a family in India,” Zarina notes. She states that the significance of her family’s forced move from India to Pakistan, a result of the 1947 Partition, was not something that she fully comprehended until many years later.

Zarina’s style derives from the blending of cultures that she has experienced in her travels and studies. She completed a degree in Mathematics in 1958, but soon fell in love with printmaking. After training in woodblock printing in Bangkok and Tokyo, Zarina also studied intaglio in Paris. In Zarina’s workspace, bits of paper, covered in Urdu and cut into geometric strips, await placement in her various artistic projects. The plywood engravings she has used in the printmaking process are seen at her workbench. The softness of the wood is what attracted Zarina to the medium: “I just like the texture of the wood; I like the way you dig in.”

Zarina often uses writing as the subject of her work and is greatly influenced by the rich poetic history of her mother tongue, Urdu. “For me, the image follows the words and they all come from, they all have a reference somewhere, mostly in poetry,” she explains.

More here.

Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

The real saga of the Statue of Liberty—the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show—is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clue is the chain under Lady Liberty’s feet: she is stomping on it. “In the early sketches, she was also holding chains in her hand,” Edward Berenson, a professor of history at New York University, told me last week. The shackles were later replaced with a tablet noting the date of America’s independence. But the shattered chain under her feet remained.

The statue was the brainchild of Edouard de Laboulaye, a prominent French expert on the U.S. Constitution who also headed the French Anti-Slavery Society. After the Civil War, in 1865, he wanted to commemorate the end of slavery in the U.S., enshrined in the new Thirteenth Amendment, which, in theory, reaffirmed the ideals of freedom—this time for all people—first embodied in the Declaration of Independence. The now famous line—“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” from a poem by Emma Lazarus—wasn’t added until 1903, Berenson noted. The poem had been donated as part of a literary auction to raise funds for the statue’s pedestal. France donated the statue; the Americans had to raise the funds to pay for its pedestal. Long after Lazarus’s death, a friend lobbied to have the poem engraved on a plaque and added to the base. It has since associated the Statue of Liberty with a meaning that Laboulaye never intended.

One has to wonder what Laboulaye would think of America today, amid one of the country’s gravest periods of racial turmoil since the Civil War. Last month, a poll by Ipsos found that an overwhelming majority of people in fourteen countries, on six continents, support the protests that erupted across the United States after the murder of George Floyd. Russia, the fifteenth country in the survey, was the only place where a minority—about a third—backed the demonstrators.

More here.