by Shiban Ganju

An update and gratitude is overdue to the readers and editors of 3QD who supported the NGO, ‘Save a Mother’ in its infancy. Years have passed. So, what’s new?

Nothing seems to have changed in ten years since I visited this village – a dusty swathe of land, home to over eleven hundred people, who connect with the world via a newly built, one car wide, winding road. Cracks, loose stones and chunks of matted mud straddle its tarred surface. A sign at its junction with the main road, two kilometers away, reads: “Prime Minister’s Rural Road Plan”; an adjacent sign announces the name of the local muscle man who claims the credit for the new road. It reminds: we are in Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India, where muscle power grabs political power. The road ends near the village community hall – a newly built large concrete cube with dirty white walls showing new cracks. Our SUV stops. We have reached. The ride, after ten years, was a road show of frustrating pace of progress; change is imperceptible here – until we meet the women.

Over a hundred women, young and old, most draped in bright colorful Sarees, a few in black burqas without head cover, have walked from surrounding villages to participate in the review meeting. They look different: gone are the veils and bashfulness; they are vocal and animated. A twenty years old articulate college student, who is a trained health activist, conducts the meeting. She introduces herself and other health activists, who take turns to recount their experiences and of their neighbors. The embellish their stories with songs about preventive health – all written and created by them. And then they hang big paper charts on the wall displaying hand written numbers to buttress their claims: maternal deaths are rare, girls do not marry before the age of eighteen, contraceptive use has increased and they campaign for equal treatment for girls. This is new – not what I had seen ten years ago.

Then, I was not sure how we would convince the women to adopt a few simple steps to curb rampant maternal deaths. (Detox Body or Mind?) (Save A Mother). We were novices. We borrowed wisdom from a few rural doctors and took inspiration from social workers who had been pioneers in the field of maternal health. Their integrity, sacrifice and charisma had propelled their success. But these leadership qualities were not replicable. We wanted to develop a frugal model of maternal mortality reduction by working with the community, especially women but had no established theoretical scaffold to hold us steady.

Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Bullshit is sticky, and by trying to stamp on it you spread it. Because its appeal is directly to the emotions, rational critique is beside the point, while virtuous outrage is as effective as support in sending it viral.

The term bullshit was introduced in its current sense by the philosopher Harry Frankfurt in 2005, and has been the subject of a rash of books since Trump's emergence as a force to be reckoned with. I have chosen this particular volume as my jumping off point, because I am familiar with the author's UK perspective, and because the author himself, as a contributor to Buzzfeed, is part of the revolution in electronic publishing that has made bullshit so much easier to propagate.

Lying is lying; bullshit is different

Lying is misrepresentation of reality. Bullshit is something far more serious. Bullshit invites us to follow the leader into a world of subjectivity, where reality comes second to what we choose to believe. Bullshit is the delegitimisation of reality, designed to make rational discussion impossible. It is the triumph of assertion over reality.

This book names names. Boris Johnson (for more on Johnson's chronic mendacity, see here) the Daily Mail (which is world's largest news website, because of focus on celebrities), the Canary,¹ Brexit, the Daily Express, and, of course, Trump. He also mentions others who have helped spread bullshit, including his own readership. I had planned to write a piece simply based on the book, when the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica story broke. I cannot claim to do that story justice, with new material surfacing daily, but will try to show how the separate themes involved relate to each other. Bullshit, fake news, targeted messages, and the manipulation of opinions, including yours and mine, are now inseparable, as recent disclosures show.

In which connection, let me urge all readers who have not yet done so to check and adjust their Facebook settings; you will find my own detailed instructions here, and CREDO's here. When I did this, I was horrified at how much information I was allowing to be harvested, and by whom, not only about my own preferences but about those of my friends.

I, too, have spread bullshit. As in the false claim, which I passed on unexamined,² that a close family member of a senior Conservative politician had shareholdings in a scandal-ridden company that has been strangely successful in securing government contracts. Here we have the distinguishing features of bullshit. Highly emotive, tailored to appeal to a certain audience, effective clickbait, difficult to ignore, a plausible and indeed in this case well-warranted central concern, and an allegation so sticky that the very act of refuting helps spread it (which is why I have not named names here, although I am sure that many readers could supply them).

As a safeguard against such behaviour I have now taken the Pro-Truth pledge, which includes a commitment to fact-checking information before passing it on.

Indignantly calling out bullshit plays into the hands of its producers, but it is difficult to resist the temptation. We all enjoy drawing attention to the wickedness of our opponents. The added attention that bullshit brings makes it lucrative to give it coverage, and thereby help it spread. Hence the enormous amount of coverage given to the Trump campaign in 2016, when media deeply opposed to him gave him billions of dollars worth of free advertising.

Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

In 1968, James Watson published “The Double Helix”, a personal account of the history of the race to discover the structure of DNA. The book was controversial and bracingly honest, a glimpse into the working style and personalities of great scientists like Francis Crick, Lawrence Bragg, Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling, warts and all. The vividness of Watson’s recollections and the sometimes almost minute-by-minute account make his memoirs a unique chronicle in the history of scientific autobiography.

After Watson’s book had been published, the physicist Freeman Dyson once asked him how he could possibly remember so many details about events that had transpired more than a decade ago. Easy, said Watson: he used to write to his family in America from Cambridge and had kept all those letters. Dyson who had been writing letters to his parents from the opposite direction, from America to Cambridge, asked his mother to keep all his letters from 1941 onwards.

The result is “Maker of Patterns”, a roadside view of the remarkable odyssey of one of the finest scientific and literary minds of the twentieth century. Letters are a unique form of communication, preserving the urgency and freshness of the moment without the benefit and bias of hindsight. They recall history as present rather than past. One wonders if the incessant barrage of email will preserve the selective highlights of life that letters once preserved. Dyson’s letter collection was initially titled “The Old One”. The allusion was to a famous letter from Einstein to Max Born in which Einstein noted his dissatisfaction with quantum theory: “Quantum mechanics demands serious attention. But an inner voice tells me that this is not the true Jacob. The theory accomplishes a lot, but it does not bring us closer to the secrets of the Old One. In any case, I am convinced that He does not play dice”.

Publishers sometimes change titles to suit their whim. Perhaps the publisher changed the title here because they thought it was presumptuous to compare Freeman Dyson to God. I would concede that Dyson is not God, but it’s the metaphor that counts; as these letters indicate, he is certainly full of observations and secrets of the universe. The letters contain relatively little science but lots of astute observations on people and places. Where the science does get explained one senses a keen mind taking everything in and reveling in the beauty of ideas.

Read more »

by Max Sirak

(Audio version for your earballs!)

TV gets a bum rap.

Like any tool or technology – it's neutral. Television is neither good nor bad, healthy nor un-. We, the users of such tools and technologies are the lucky pronouncers of such designations and definitions, based upon their use.

Binge-watching, albeit easy, certainly isn't evil. Excessive? Sure. Bad for the retention and recall? Probably. All I can say for certain is, after watching 12 seasons of the CW's Supernatural over the span of a couple months, the details of all the Winchester's exploits are a bit foggy.

My guess is the fuzziness has to do with the way memory functions. Sleep plays a big part in the consolidation memory. So, the more episodes you watch in a row between sleeps, the blurrier the particulars become.

Anyway – back to the point.

TV is what you make it. And, while it certainly seem like the air waves have never been fuller of monster-hunting melodrama, ridiculous "reality", negative news, and polarity politics, there are beacons of lucid light.

Read more »

by Holly A. Case

Szeged is a Hungarian university town near the border with Serbia where I spent my third year of college abroad in 1995-1996. When I arrived for the first time with a year's worth of luggage, the traffic in and out of the train station included a rail-bus that carried people in and smuggled goods out. A college friend from Belgrade knew Szeged as a grocery stop for cheese, catsup, juice, and gasoline, and wondered why on earth I wanted to spend a year abroad there. The wondrous strangeness of provincial towns near troubled borders is impossible to explain to people from the fast-talking capitals, yet these are the weighty time-space benders that have always attracted me: Klagenfurt, Szeged, Mardin…

There was money to be made selling gas to the embargoed Serbs in 1995, but since it entered illicitly inside the tanks of private cars to be siphoned out just across the border, none of it passed through the train station. I saw its effects later, where I rented a room in an apartment just down the street from the station for seventy dollars a month. The house, with greenhouse and rabbit farm (off-site), was connected to another whose owners had their fingers in countless post-communist pies, of which smuggling gas into Serbia was only one. My rent was deliberately lower than it might have been so long as I gave English lessons to the son of the family, who in his mid-teens was already doing so well that he didn't feel English was necessary.

Read more »

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait at Schiphol, April 7, 2018.

Digital photograph.

by Sarah Firisen

My grandmother had 7 sisters (and a couple of brothers who died young and none of us remember), my great-grandmother had 10 siblings. This past week, I attended reunions with 22 of the descendents of these ancestors, on two continents (New York and London). At these joyful family gatherings we told stories, reminisced about family craziness and shared old photos that we had all brought to lunch. Most of my second cousins have managed to find their grandmothers’ wedding photos and have posted them on our Facebook group and we’ve all been trying to identify which young bridesmaids were which sister. We’ve dug out photos of bar mitzvahs and weddings. We’ve worked collectively to put names to faces. It’s been great. But it occurs to me that my great grandchildren won’t get to do much of this. They’ll get to do other things, things that I can’t even imagine technology will enable, but not this. I have photo albums from when I was a kid and a wedding album. And my kids have some photos from when they were young, before smartphones and Facebook became so ubiquitous. But except for photos that I intend to frame and display, I haven’t had a photo printed for at least 10 years. And my children don’t even know how to get a photo printed (that’s not strictly true, my 17 year old took a photography class and knows how to use a darkroom, but I’m sure has no idea how to use Shutterfly because the idea of printing out a photo rather than posting it on Instagram is alien to her).

In response to my last piece on 3QD, a colleague, Josh, wrote the following thoughts to me: “Roots. Are at our very core. We can live without them for short periods, but to have soul, you have to listen to a record, not just hear an iphone stream, you have to turn the page of a book, not just flip an ipad, you have to hold the tattered edges of an old family picture and see the soul in their eyes to grab the essence of time capture. “

Increasingly, we don’t have photos to become tattered, new books to become dogeared, let alone records. Is my colleague Josh right, are we losing our roots and our souls? Something that is easy to forget is that many people would have said this when the phonograph was first introduced, or the first cameras. There have always been luddites, sometimes with legitimate concerns about technology, sometimes with just fears of the new. There have always been people worried that new technology will change fundamental things about who we are as people and how we interact with each other, and believe that those changes will only be negative. I don’t think the question is, “will we grow different roots with digital photos”, but rather, why is it that these “roots” are necessarily inferior? The albums that I scoured for photos yesterday were buried in a box in the back of a closet. I haven’t looked at any of them in years. My children don’t even realize I have most of these photos. But in our digital, social media lives, we’re sharing our photos all the time. One of my more favorite Facebook features is when it shows you photos of this day on x year and it shows me some adorable photo of my kids when they were little or reminds me of a great trip I was on. Often, I repost these photos and tag my kids. I know that some people will say that most of us overshare, and perhaps we do, but, just as with my cousins’ sharing of photos of our grandmothers on Facebook, this kind of sharing can do its part to fortify relationship bonds. Years ago, I would have brought those photos to lunch, everyone would have passed them around and that would have been it. Now, I’ve digitized them, posted them on our Facebook group and we have online discussions about them including in cousins who weren’t able to attend the reunions, we give these photos a life beyond a dusty photo album in the back of a closet.

Read more »