Conditional quasi-greedy bases in Hilbert and Banach spaces

We show that, for quasi-greedy bases in Hilbert spaces, the associated conditionality constants grow at most as $O(\log N)^{1-\epsilon}$, for some $\epsilon>0$, answering a question by Temlyakov. We show the optimality of this bound with an explicit construction, based on a refinement of the method of Olevskii. This construction leads to other examples of quasi-greedy bases with large $k_N$ in Banach spaces, which are of independent interest.