Sughra Raza. Power in The Sky.

Digital photograph, Porto Alegre, 2014.

by Joan Harvey

Nightfall. Outside a low elongated cave entrance a small group of humans sit waiting on stone ledges facing the dark aperture. Kestrels begin to soar close in the late evening sky. Snakes too are gathering below, we’re told, but they aren’t in view. This is Bracken Cave, 20 miles from San Antonio, where 20 million bats, females and their pups, literally hang out. We’ve come from Austin, through miles of pick-up truck dealerships and mini-malls. At first our driver couldn’t find the cave, which is not open to the public, but eventually, guided by people from Bat Conservation International, the nonprofit that owns and protects the cave, we arrived. At dinner we were filled with Texas barbecue and many bat facts, and now everyone is quiet. Waiting. A strong odor permeates the air. Slowly small dark beings emerge, then more and then more, thousands shooting off, darkening the sky. So many they can be seen on radar, and a nearby Air Force base has to shut down each evening as the bats would interfere with flights. We watch the procession very quietly, each feeling in their own way this strange life form that is connected to us and yet so different, familiar and yet unfamiliar, this webbed mammal, this flying thing that has so engaged our imaginations.

Bats are beings who go too high, shooting up into the air — the species from this cave, the Mexican free-tailed bat, can fly at altitudes over 10,000 feet— but also too low, swooping down to face level, or, when they return from their nocturnal hunt, diving like furry missiles into the low entry of the cave to avoid the waiting predators. They’re fast, faster than birds, holding the horizontal speed record at over 160 kilometers (99 miles) per hour. As mammals they’re more closely related to us than birds, and they live almost everywhere we live, yet we rarely see them, and most of us know almost nothing about them. They’re nocturnal, dusty, silent, though when they fly by us in the thousands we can hear a low rush of wings like the rumble of water over rocks. Read more »

Dr Bruce Chabner has had immense experience in the discipline of cancer drug discovery and development. During his career at the National Cancer Institute, he worked as a Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology, Chief of the Clinical Pharmacology Branch, Director of the Clinical Oncology Program, and Director of the Division of Cancer Treatment. His research significantly added to the development of high dose chemotherapy regimens and standard therapies for lymphoma. Additionally, his research led to the development of Taxol. He currently serves as a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Clinical Research at the MGH Cancer Center at Massachusetts General Hospital.

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?

Driving Lolita in the World’s Most Militarized Zone

A boy, I hid
in grandpa’s study.

An art dealer
he loved books

with gilded edges,
Aristotle to Zola

all stuck together
in the humidity.

I snuck Lo out
to his black Chevy

rifled for the dirty bits
(should ’ve looked harder, I guess),

drove her away for a spin
teen tunes swirling in my head

I Want to Hold Your Hand.
A crackdown in downtown ‑—

mothers hid their young sons.
“We fear they’ll take them away.”

A soldier rained pellets
on a nymphet’s face,

light of her mother’s eye.
“Moji,” nymphet said,

“Nothing can be seen,
as far as the eye can see.” Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

The roof of Notre-Dame de Paris, lost in the fire of April 15, 2019, was nicknamed The Forest because it used to be one. It contained the wood of around 1300 oaks, which would have covered more than 52 acres. They were felled from 1160 to 1170, when they were likely several hundred years old. It has been estimated that there is no similar stand of oak trees anywhere on the planet today.

Even in the twelfth century, sourcing the wood for cathedral construction was not always easy. When the Basilica of Saint-Denis was under construction in the mid-twelfth century, it was assumed that the nearby forests could not supply the wood needed for the project because they were depleted. Abbot Suger reportedly found a local stand of timber suitable for the job and attributed his discovery to faith and divine intervention. Causes of medieval deforestation include clearing of land for agriculture and the expansion of urban areas. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Jeroen Bouterse

For better or worse, Dutch 20^th-century postwar literature comes with a canon of three authors: Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch, and W.F. Hermans. There, you learned something today. Other than this factoid, however, this post is not going to be a lecture about the landscape of Dutch literature, or even the literary qualities of these authors. I am introducing them because I am going to use two of them, and one in particular, to illustrate a point about discourse involving the landscape of science – that is, the distinction between the sciences and humanities.

The notion of a separation between the sciences and humanities usually revolves (again, for better or worse) around C.P. Snow’s famous Rede lecture. In this lecture, Snow tentatively suggests that what he calls the ‘scientific culture’ is probably more left-wing than the ‘literary culture’, as well as more progressive (scientists “have the future in their bones”). In his time, he saw his technocratic ideals represented best by the Labour party, to which he served as scientific advisor. In the 1970s, however, Snow (as chronicled by historian Guy Ortolano)[1] would drift away from the Labour party, and express himself in increasingly negative terms about all the nonsense one had to put up with as a liberal these days. Before his death in 1980, he expressed his sympathy for neo-conservative ideas.

According to Ortolano, Snow was one of multiple Anglophone intellectuals who reconsidered their political alignments in the 1970s. Nor does this necessarily imply that Snow betrayed or radically revised his own previous opinions. These, it seems, remained technocratic and meritocratic, and precisely therefore problematic in the face of a more egalitarian and anti-elitist ‘New Left’. Read more »

Ivy on a large concrete wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol in October, 2019.

by Marie Gaglione

I’m freaking out almost all the time, I’d say. I wouldn’t even limit my angst to my waking hours, because lately my dreamscapes have been rife with post-apocalyptic battle royale scenarios. I’m not writing this with any kind of proposed solution or discernible purpose beyond adding another frightened voice to the void, I just don’t think I can write about anything else until I work through some of this. I find that crafting my fears into essays works as a kind of filing system: I’m still afraid of the thing, but now there is a title and and my thoughts are at least ordered by paragraphs. 

This essay is about technology, probably. I waffle on the theme only because I think blaming existential panic on cell phones is stale, but I’m pretty sure it’s accurate! Let me make my case. I’ve opened Mario Kart Mobile Tour on my phone three times since starting to write this and I’m not yet on my third paragraph. And I’ve already raced all the races and gotten enough stars to pass each cup. And I still keep opening the app. This week it’s Mario Kart, but before that it was Love Island The Game and before that it was Tamagotchi (and Solitaire and Candy Crush and and and). I don’t have a Twitter and I rarely open Instagram so presumably the games are just the most enticing apps I have, but it’s still gross how long I spend with my shoulders tightened, neck tensed, and thumbs exercising. I feel like a loser. And I justify all the time, pretending like I’m having such deep thoughts in the background as I throw red turtle shells. I try to map life onto the racing track; I look for metaphors as I complete a lap and am satisfied with exercising the poetic side of my brain for the day. 

We’re living in a world of infinite content. I tire of one game, there are eight hundred more with subtle variations. I finish a TV show, the streaming network has thirty more recommendations. Every movie, every show, every clip or song or soundbite – it’s all within reach if you can connect to the internet. Which now you can do even on an airplane. I’m worried about it. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. Brexit is classic fantasy politics, premised on the delightful optimism that if the UK were only freed of its shackles it would easily be able to negotiate the best deals imaginable.

The great appeal of fantasy politics is that you it puts you in complete control. Using the power of your imagination, you get to control not only what you will do but also how everyone else will react. Sometimes you also control laws of nature, such as economics or even physics. Unsurprisingly, this kind of politics tends to go your way. Decisiveness is the only quality needed for your actions to succeed. Everyone recognises your awesomeness and competes to serve your interests, whether motivated by admiration or fear.

Why is fantasy politics so popular these days? One reason is that it is so much easier than real politics. In real politics we try to address multiple, intersecting, complicated collective action problems – like the high cost of housing or sexism in the labour market – while at the same time grappling with the deep diversity of beliefs, values, and interests within and between societies. Real politics is a difficult and time-consuming activity that usually requires dissatisfactory compromise with reality and what other people want. It is much easier to make-believe our way to our favoured outcomes, i.e. as Boris Johnson put it after the 2016 Brexit referendum, “Our policy is having our cake and eating it.” Read more »

High and Blue Enough

plums on limb tips
across a grassy slice of space
have just begun to taste the sunny juice
that tips the scale of day —a star
that sprays its golden light across turning
leaves above our arbor vitae emeralds,
brushy backboned sentinels twenty feet tall
we planted there when they were three

sun is out of frame to right
but I visualize the mountain’s hump
of brown and ruddy trees it glides above

I visualize the red blaze I see
when time is ripe enough

I visualize the particles and waves
by which light in space behaves

space that’s wide enough
and deep and true enough

space that’s sweet and bright enough,
high and blue enough,

infused with life enough
to make all this possible

and now an aspen flicks an arbor vitae
its hellotouch of  jittering leaves
in vacuum’s breeze

Jim Culleny
10/12/19

Aliza Nisenbaum. The History Lesson, 2017.

” … depicting Carmen and José, second-generation American citizens in Queens. Framing the painting are images from a 1950s-era Mexican coloring book.”

Oil on linen.

More here, here, and here.

by Abigail Akavia

On permanent display in the MFA in Boston is a bust by Oskar Kokoschka, “Self-Portrait as a Warrior.” The sculpture is a dramatic head with bulging features: bridge of the nose, cheek bones, and creased brows. The eyeballs are painted azure blue, the parts around them bright orange. The head’s wrinkled features are highlighted by an unnatural yellow and raw red, which make it look like exposed flesh. The mouth is open. It is this last feature in particular that I found striking: the man portrayed lets out a “violent scream,” as Kokoschka himself puts it in his biography. The portrait, ridiculed when it was first shown in 1909 and later condemned by the Nazi regime as “degenerate,” is an image of torment. This artist-warrior figure of anguish, and the question whether (or how) he is giving voice to his suffering, reminded me of the ancient Greek hero Philoctetes.

A famed archer, Philoctetes was one of the warriors that embarked on the initial expedition against Troy. On the way, he was bit on the foot by a snake. The wound festered and became putrid; Philoctetes screamed in pain so badly that the fleet could not carry out the required sacrifices to the gods. Philoctetes’ suffering presence, in short, was so repulsive and disruptive that the Greeks had to get rid of him. They abandoned him on the island Lemnos, where he remained for ten years, periodically visited by bouts of pain. In the version of his story that has come down to us, a tragedy by Sophocles first performed in 409 BCE, Lemnos is uninhabited. The only thing keeping Philoctetes alive on this desolate place is a magical bow he inherited from his friend Heracles (i.e. the legendary Hercules), with which he preys on wild beasts and birds. Ten years after first leaving him there to fend for himself, the Greeks learn by prophecy that Philoctetes and his bow are necessary to take Troy down. Odysseus sets out to Lemnos to bring him back, with the help of the young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. Odysseus, forever conniving, deduces rightly that Philoctetes would sooner die than help the Greeks, and concocts a scheme in which it is Neoptolemus’ job to trick Philoctetes into joining him.

To make a long story short, things do not quite go as planned, especially from the moment Neoptolemus witnesses Philoctetes’ excruciating pain. Sophocles’ play is a plot-twisting, complex exploration of the power of language in its various manifestations—sophistry, lies, pleas, inarticulate cries, and poetic invocations, to name some of the drama’s expressive linguistic media. What becomes of humanity when language is used to defy its proclaimed ends? Can language help restore trust and reintegrate into human community a man that has been so traumatized, physically and emotionally, that he can no longer envision camaraderie—no longer imagine any existence other than his beastly exile? Can this trauma be voiced, and responded to, in language? Read more »

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a physician-scientist with a persistent scientific and clinical interest in acute myeloid leukemia, hematopoiesis, novel therapeutic drug development and cancer biology. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell. Dr. Mukherjee’s research lab at Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center studies the biology of blood development malignant and premalignant diseases such as myelodysplasia and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). His goal is to develop new drugs against diseases. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.

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 Samia Altaf

I could not believe my luck when I woke up this morning. It had rained last night, but this morning the sky was blue the breeze gentle,and the wild grass along the smelly sluggish, open sewer that meanders through the swanky Defense Housing Authority—home to lush golf courses and palatial villas—past the gates of the elite Lahore University of Management Sciences, was audaciously green. The mango tree in the front yard of my mother’s  house—quiet after a fertile summer of exuberant fruiting—balances the crow’s nest full of chattering chicks in its gently swaying branches. All God’s creations bask in the mellow sunshine. No more the snow and ice and cold of Eastern US. For these weeks, it’s going to be this bliss in Lahore. I was glad to be me, and to be alive. I say to myself “Thank God I am on this side of the earth, rather than under it.” What a beautiful world. So much to see and so much to do. I could live like this for a hundred years like William Hazlitt, who claimed to have spent his life “reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.” I’ll add eating to that list, at the top of it, fried eggs and buttered toast.

In addition to the sunshine and the crows, and trees waving gently in the breeze, there are books to read, newspapers to follow, old trunks to sort through and the joy of restoring broken things. And now, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, music to listen to, movies to watch, many enlightening videos to engage with. This is no time to die! Although it seems unlikely, I have been hooked onto Gayatri Spivak since I heard her speak here in Lahore some years ago. That formidable woman and her harangue about the subalterns, a word I associated with the military, which I was quite intrigued to learn that evening applies to me as well. Not a word of what she says about subalterns makes sense to me but I love to hear her speak. She really is something. She said things that evening, to a crowded hall of Pakistani college students, activists and others, about Derrida and Gramsci —names I  heard for the first time. Read more »