by Bill Murray

Two minutes after the explosion the fire station alarm rang. The firefighters who scrambled from sleep to the scene, along with the regular overnight shift at reactor four, were among the first fatally irradiated. Unquestioned heroes, they battled the blazes until dawn with no special training for a nuclear accident, in shirtsleeves, using only conventional firefighting methods. They walked amid flaming, radioactive graphite.

The power station fire brigade arrived first. Lieutenant Volodymyr Pravik, their commander, saw right away he needed help and called in fire brigades from the little towns of Pripyat and Chernobyl. When Pravik died thirteen days later he was a month shy of age twenty-four.

“We arrived there at 10 or 15 minutes to two in the morning,” said fire engine driver Grigorii Khmal. 

“We saw graphite scattered about. Misha asked: Is that graphite? I kicked it away. But one of the fighters on the other truck picked it up. It’s hot, he said. The pieces of graphite were of different sizes, some big, some small enough to pick them up….

“We didn’t know much about radiation. Even those who worked there had no idea. There was no water left in the trucks. Misha filled a cistern and we aimed the water at the top. Then those boys who died went up to the roof – Vashchik, Kolya and others, and Volodya Pravik…. They went up the ladder … and I never saw them again.”

Another fireman told the BBC, “It was dark because it was night. On the other hand, you could see and even recognize a person from 10 to 15 meters. It was if (sic) the sun was rising, but with a strange light.”

They climbed to the roof of what was left of reactor four, preventing fire from spreading to the other three reactors and so preventing what could have been a truly ghastly night. By 5:00 a.m. all the fires were out save for the one in the reactor. That fire burned for ten days. It took 5000 tons of sand, boron, dolomite and clay dropped from helicopters to put it out. Read more »

by Amitava Kumar

Every day that week a line formed outside the liquor store by noon. Those in line stood six feet apart, checking their phones, or reading a book, or looking up at the trees. Twelve people were allowed at a time into the liquor store.

A man and woman, wearing masks and gloves, arrived from different directions. The man, who might have been in his twenties and whose mask was blue colored, made a flourish with a gloved hand and let the woman take the place ahead of him. For a moment, he studied the back of the woman’s head. She had blonde streaks in her hair.

‘You weren’t answering the phone last night,’ the young woman said to him, turning. ‘Do you think it is easy for me to step out like this?’
Her companion hadn’t stopped smiling under his mask ever since she arrived.

He now said, ‘I’ve heard that the wait is longer in the line outside the CVS on South Hill Road. Your father must need medicines. Let’s meet there tomorrow.’

by Holly A. Case (Interviewer) and Tom J. W. Case (Hermit) 

The following is the continuation of an interview with Tom, a pilot who has largely withdrawn to a small piece of land in rural South Dakota. Parts I and II can be found here and here. 

Interviewer: I’d like to ask how you would tell the story of your inner jukebox—perhaps under the title “The Inner Jukebox: A Bildungsroman.”

Hermit: Ah, the inner jukebox, its bearings rusty and contacts dusty. That thing used to roll on an endless reel, telling me and shaping how I feel.

Music, I really used to think, is one of mankind’s greatest achievements. Now I just think less, it seems, or about different things. But even as I give music less thought, it surely is very special.

Music can fit a mood, bend or even break a mood, make a new mood, take you places—what a thing! But at the same time, there is always the chance of going missing as in other ways I have described. In no way have I shunned or avoided music, but I do not seek its warp-voyager quality any longer. I must say that I am not beyond being grabbed and taken for a ride from time to time, however.

The soundtrack you mentioned, I used to make so many playlists to fit time, place, and mood, and it never failed that by the time I had finished making the perfect playlist, it no longer fit those things. I might conclude that it has everything to do with the aforementioned coloring; that the more one truly accepts their immediate surrounding and circumstance, there might just not be a track cued up (unless on an elevator, help us).

All of that said, it can be counted on that I am nearly always narrating my plodding with ditties and tunes spontaneously coined.

Interviewer: On the subject of where the mind goes (and warp-voyagers), what are the thought patterns that recur in hermitude?

Hermit: This is perhaps the one area in which I struggle the most. Thought.

I said just before that I think less, or about other things now. Not true, that, upon reflection. I interact with my thoughts less, but there is no evidence that I think less. Thank you for reminding me. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Sarah Firisen

I’ve been telecommuting on and off for over 17 years. I first started working from home because I’d moved 150 miles away from the company I’d been contracting for over the previous 4 years. Back then, I worked in a small team that was part of a larger team in a huge corporation. My immediate boss was very supportive of my new working arrangement, but he had a peer, who even though she had no responsibility for my work, felt the need to have her say to their mutual boss. Her thoughts went along lines of, “how do we know she’s really working when she never comes into the office?”, to which my boss said, “well someone is getting all the work done, so if it isn’t  Sarah, who is it?”. This conversation seems almost quaint nowadays, when even before the current pandemic, a decent amount of the white-collar professional workforce worked at least occasionally from home. And now of course, we’ve all been thrust into a great social experiment to see just how productive, perhaps more rather than less even, the entire workforce will be working remotely. Everyone else is now catching up to what I’ve known for a long time: it’s pretty nice to not have to deal with the daily commute and that time can really be used more productively than fighting for space on mass transit; you have to be at least somewhat disciplined to make sure you only go so many days working in the same pjs you’ve been in all week; working from home can give you a lot of time to multitask life stuff like unloading the dishwasher while you’re listening to a conference call, but it can also be harder to draw boundaries between home and work life, and this takes some practice.  Read more »

I thought people will not believe me when I tell them that this tree is actually just a reflection of a tree on the very still surface of a lake, so I had my wife throw a small stone into the water as I took this photo on the last day before the countrywide lockdown of Italy on March 9, 2020.

by Dave Maier

I had planned to do another philosophy post this month, but I can hardly concentrate on such things about now and I bet you can’t either. Instead I’ve been hanging out on Bandcamp and blowing my savings supporting deserving artists and labels in this difficult time. What better time, in fact, to chill to some nice drony tuneage? Here’s a new set featuring mostly new discoveries but also a couple of potentially familiar names. As I recall, last time I worried that my sets had become too drony for a show traditionally dedicated mostly to space music, as Star’s End has been since the 1970s, when Berlin-school dinosaurs like Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream walked the earth, and I promised you some sequencers this time. And sequencers you shall have! (Even if not throughout.)

I also did a (rather more wide-ranging) set for International Women’s Day (all female artists, naturally) on March 8. I didn’t write up notes for that one (seach the names on Bandcamp to learn more, and of course lend your own support), but before I forget, here’s the link to the Mixcloud page for that set:

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

For mathematics, 1666 was the Annus Mirabilis (“wonderous year”). For the rest of humanity, it was pretty terrible. The plague once again burnt across Europe [1]. Cambridge University closed its doors and Issac Newton moved home.

Although only twenty-three years old, Newton was pretty well caught up to the state of the art in math and physics. Newton was brilliant, of course, but it also wasn’t so hard for an educated person to be at the cutting edge. After all, it was only thirty years earlier that Descartes and Fermat had introduced the notion of using letters (like x and y) for unknowns and had the insight that by plotting points on the xy-plane you could view algebra and geometry as two sides of the same coin.

With nothing better to do while quarantined at the family home, Newton settled back into the study of math and physics and, it turns out, ignited several world-changing revolutions in the process. Newton cracked open a 1000 page notebook he had inherited from his stepfather and got to work, recording his thoughts as he went. After reading Euclid’s Elements (still the gold standard after nearly 2,000 years!), Descartes, and the other books he had on hand, Newton began posing ever harder questions for himself which he then solved, inventing new math along the way.

Amazingly, Newton’s notebook (which he called his “Waste Book”) still exists! It is kept by the Cambridge University library along with thousands of pages of his other writings. In fact, you can read it for yourself online at the University’s website.

Some of the questions Newton posed could be considered standard, even for his day: computing roots, solving problems in geometry, and the like. Others are more open-ended: “If a Staffe bee bended to find the crooked line which it resembles.” or “To find such lines whose areas length or centers of gravity may bee found.”

In due course, Newton asks himself questions we recognize as the forerunners of calculus. Read more »

Kazuo Shiraga. Untitled 1964.

More here, here, and here.

by Anitra Pavlico

There has been much discussion lately of whether the COVID-19 pandemic will spell the end of globalization. It’s hard to get economists to agree on the meaning of the numbers, or foreign policy analysts to commit to a vision of the future in a world that changes from one moment to the next. Globalization means different things to different people and entities. Its many facets, and many narratives about those facets, complicate discussion about either a contraction or a resurgence of globalization. For corporations, it means access to inexpensive labor markets; for money managers, it means access to capital markets. For the typical business traveler, it may mean something as basic as greater choice of airlines and flight times for an international trip. For an optimistic humanist, it might symbolize enhanced international cooperation and a suppression of nationalism and xenophobia. For an environmentalist, it is marred by the dangerous policies that accelerate climate change. For a technocrat, it seems the obvious economic approach to accompany the paradigm of social-media-fueled connectedness, data collection, surveillance, and targeted marketing.

Regardless of what we talk about when we talk about globalization, most of the articles that I have seen over the past few weeks have posited that the coronavirus will mean the end of the current wave, just as the Spanish flu epidemic halted the wave of globalization that steamships, trains, and the telegraph ushered in. Soldiers returning home from fighting in World War I in 1918 helped to spread it. Nationalists’ fears of literal foreign “contagion” are not entirely unfounded, as the ease of international travel has certainly facilitated the spread of the current outbreak. The predicted reversal of globalization appears to be a sensible conclusion, as it would simply reflect the implosion of financial markets, shutdown of borders, grounding of planes, and freezing of lines of trade. Will it last, though? 

Stephen M. Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, writes a “realist’s guide” to the outbreak on the Foreign Policy website, suggesting that the realist approach, while it has had little to say in the past about public health or pandemics, may still shed some light on the future of globalization. Read more »

Dr. Patrizia Paterlini-Bréchot is a tenured Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology and Oncology at Paris Descartes University and head of a research team at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). She studied medicine at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she specialized in hematology and oncology. In 1988 she turned her focus on research in cell and molecular biology and published over 80 research articles and reviews in national and international scientific journals. She received numerous awards and honors including Best thesis in Medicine (1978), the Best research in Hematology (1979), Assistance Publique/Hôpitaux de Paris (1995, 2002), Technological development (2007), and European Inventor Award Finalist (2019). She is listed as an inventor on over 5 patents.

Azra Raza, author of The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Brooks Riley

by Brooks Riley

1. As the coronavirus continues to disrupt human life in many corners of the globe, a phrase from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah has wormed its way through the background noise of my attention span. It occurs in a Part III recitative usually sung by a bass with enough gravitas to shake the earth as well as the listener.

Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. . .

That mystery is now upon us, the mystery of how our world has changed ‘in the twinkling of an eye’—from rapacious consumerism to the maintenance of bare necessities, from globalization to localization and isolation, from ‘out and about’ to ‘home alone’—all because of a pathogen that reaches you faster than a package from Amazon.

. . .and we shall be changed.  This is the phrase that dominates the aria following that recitative. The repetitions and soaring musical variations of this line, like a deluge of mantras, suggest an epiphany that will be undeniable, invoking secular salvation through long-term permanent change. The question now is, can we rebuild the world anew when this coronavirus crisis is over?  Shall we be changed? More importantly, shall we change? And if we do, will it be for the better? Read more »

by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

We get half a sunny day every other day since Corona has coaxed us to quit public spaces. In the past fortnight or so, sunlight has been in short supply just as masks, disinfectant spray and toilet paper. When the sun is out, it’s no ordinary gift; it brings a rush of joy that wipes out not only the free-floating, dystopic COVID -19 anxiety, but also the other recent traumas we’ve faced as a family. Indoors, socially-distant by three feet, hunched over our phones for news of loved ones, we forget it is spring, but mornings the sunlight hits the windows feel as if God has turned on the power-wash setting: one is shocked into vigor, tricked into optimism. On such a day, I step down the patio threshold as if pulled by a magnet; just out of the shower and still combing my wet hair, I’m suddenly aware of another gift— soap.

In recent months, my husband and I have been involved in taking care of our critically ill parents; each of them has somewhat recovered by now but our heads are still swimming with hospital visits, devastating scenes of witnessing the pain, discomfort and breach of privacy of those we love the most in this world. We step forward and offer what meager solace or cure we can muster but we are aware of limits. We’ve seen more needles, tubes, blinking-, beeping- monitors, procedures, more bruises on our loved ones’ skins in two months than our whole lifetimes. Reality is clothed in the clinical language of unpronounceable drugs, softened and made bearable by a sister, who, as a doctor, filters and translates it into the personalized language we need in order to participate in healing.

During this time, Corona has become a growing threat; fatigued and stressed, we wash and wash our hands in the hospital, at home, and come back to hold our parents’ hands; soap lingers in the air. We have not held their hands for as long as this since we were children. We are aware that any of us could be carriers of the deadly virus, also that distancing is antithetical to caregiving. And now, under lockdown, the thought occurs to me that our sadness and theirs is lessened by touch and contamination is lessened by soap. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

Here’s a story that is almost certainly not true, even though I have heard it many times. A philosopher, or anyway a philosophy professor, is on an airplane listening to a businessperson explain what they do. There’s a lull in which the businessperson asks, “By the way, what do you do?”

“I’m a philosopher,” the philosopher answers.

The businessperson responds, “Oh, really? What are some of your sayings?”

One person who told me this story said that the philosophy professor responded, “To be is to be the value of a bound variable.” Which is a Quine joke, if you really want to get into it.

Here’s why I feel pretty confident this story is not true. I have heard it several times, from several different people, none of whom claim it happened to them, rather it always happened to an unspecified friend of theirs. A philosopher’s urban legend, I think.

But the fact that it gets repeated means something. What’s the lesson supposed to be? Probably, a little, we are smarter than people in business, which I am not endorsing, but mostly, we don’t really do sayings, which I would endorse in a qualified way. But do people think that we do that?

Here’s the question I get asked most often when I tell a nonacademic person that I teach philosophy, if I get a question at all. People ask me what the meaning of life is.

They are usually not serious. But sometimes they are. I used to say, “I don’t do that kind of philosophy.” Which is true, mostly. Occasionally, when really, sincerely pressed, I have said, “I don’t know, but I think it would be a really great if we could all try to be a little nicer to each other.” When they are not serious, like other nerds my age, I go with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. The answer to “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” is, in case you didn’t already know, “42.” The issue is, “What’s the question exactly?”

But, anyway, like I said, I mostly just used to say that I don’t do that kind of philosophy. Then I came to the University of Iowa and the first class I was assigned to help teach was “The Meaning of Life”. So. I guess I do do that kind of philosophy. Read more »

Empty main street of Brixen, South Tyrol, at midday in mid-March, 2020, because of the lockdown.