Amber Dance in Knowable Magazine:

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer is devastating news. Though it makes up only about 3 percent of cancers in the United States, it’s one of the deadliest, and on track for a dark achievement: By 2030, it’s expected to kill more people in the United States than any cancer except for lung cancer. This apparent paradox is arising because screening and treatments for other cancers have surged ahead, while pancreatic cancer has remained tricky both to identify and to treat.

Nonetheless, there’s reason for hope, says Anna Berkenblit, chief scientific and medical officer for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network in El Segundo, California, which supports research and helps patients. Scientists are testing new medicines that disable drivers of cancer that were once considered undruggable. They’re training patients’ immune systems to attack tumors once thought to be invisible to the body’s defenses. And they’re harnessing artificial intelligence to catch pancreatic cancer in early, vulnerable stages.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

When brain organoids were introduced roughly a decade ago, they were a scientific curiosity. The pea-sized blobs of brain tissue grown from stem cells mimicked parts of the human brain, giving researchers a 3D model to study, instead of the usual flat layer of neurons in a dish. Scientists immediately realized they were special. Mini brains developed nearly the whole range of human brain cells, including neurons that sparked with electrical activity, making them an excellent way to observe and study the human brain—without the brain itself.

As the technology advanced and brain organoids matured, researchers coaxed them to grow structural layers with blood vessels roughly mimicking the cortex, the part of the brain that handles reasoning, working memory, and other high-level cognitive tasks. Parallel efforts derived organoids for other parts of the brain. Mini brains can be made from a person’s skin cells and faithfully carry the genetic mutations that could cause neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism. The lab-grown blobs also provide a nearly infinite source of transplantable neural tissue, which in theory could help heal the brain after a stroke or other traumatic events. In early studies, organoids transplanted into rodent brains formed neural connections with resident brain cells.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Robert Ito in The New York Times:

Park Chan-wook is one of Asia’s most famous directors, an auteur beloved as much for his complex, often critical visions of his home country of South Korea as for scenes of stomach-churning horror. But when Park started work on “No Other Choice,” he really wanted to direct it as an American film, so much so that he spent 12 frustrating years trying to get financing from Hollywood studios. The source material, Donald E. Westlake’s 1997 horror thriller novel, “The Ax,” was based in the United States, “so it just felt very natural to me,” he said. “I didn’t put too much other thought in it.”

Beyond the novel’s suburban East Coast setting, the plot and lead character also felt particularly American to the Korean director: a manager of a paper company has his life upended by corporate downsizing, and to secure a new job, he sets about murdering his rivals in increasingly gruesome ways. “This is a story about the capitalist system,” Park said. “I thought it would be best told in America, since America is the heart of capitalism.”

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post:

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

César Morales Oyarvide in Phenomenal World:

In his famous 1918 essay “The Crisis of the Tax State,” Joseph Schumpeter captured the essence of fiscal sociology, arguing that “The spirit of a people, its cultural level, its social structure, the deeds its policy may prepare—all this and more is written in its fiscal history … He who knows how to listen to its message here discerns the thunder of world history more clearly than anywhere else.” In Mexico, however, this principle seems to have been suspended. There the Schumpeterian thunder is not heard. The project of the Fourth Transformation (4T), launched by Andrés Manuel López Obrador in 2018 and passed down to Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo last year, has sought to reorganize domestic political power, and it has had considerable success—redefining the national narrative and restructuring public spending priorities. Yet it has not significantly altered the tax structure built by previous governments.

This fiscal silence is even more surprising in light of the experiences of other leftist administrations in Latin America. In Bolivia, Evo Morales combined strategic nationalizations with an aggressive expansion of the fiscal apparatus. In Brazil, successive PT governments broadened the tax base while transferring income to the poorest citizens. Despite grappling with high levels of informality and low trust in state institutions, these projects understood that without new resources, it would be impossible to create new social rights. The 4T, by contrast, has tried to square the circle of distribution without serious tax reform.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

James Wolcott in Sidecar:

2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses, with Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white cover portrait of the artist posed with her jacket slung over her shoulder, Frank Sinatra-style – ‘the most electrifying image I had ever seen of a woman of my generation’, exclaimed Camille Paglia, who reckoned it one of the most powerful portraits since the French Revolution. The record inside the cover sleeve hasn’t wilted either, retaining its classic status as a declaration of desperado intent, from the boppy ‘Redondo Beach’ to the trippy ‘Birdland’ to the unfolding vistas of ‘Gloria’ and ‘Land (of a Thousand Dances)’, where Patti could truly stretch out her skinny arms and fan out her fingers to spread the word. (As the choreographer Paul Taylor once quipped, that’s the definition of lyricism: long arms.) To celebrate the album’s fiftieth, Patti and her band have been touring triumphal live concert versions of Horses across the US and Europe, the rapturous reception at the London Palladium somewhat mottled when Patti brought out Johnny Depp for the encore anthem ‘People Have the Power’, Depp draped and layered in hipster duds in his continuing role as America’s premier hobosexual. Irate fans and commentators on both sides of the Atlantic squawked betrayal, trying to reconcile the populist idealism of Patti’s music and persona with jamming on stage with an alleged spouse abuser and celebrity prima donna who owns a private island in the Exumas.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Zheng Xiaoqiong in Equator:

Introduction by Kaiser Kuo

I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in a collection of Chinese worker poetry skillfully translated by Eleanor Goodman (2016). What struck me then about her poetry, and what remains true in this prose selection, is Zheng’s attentiveness to the texture of migrant-worker life. She restores dignity not through political theatrics, but through rigorous sensory detail: the clang of metal, the sting of dust, the smell of dirty socks, the fluorescent fatigue of factory nights, and cramped dormitories where shirtless men play cards and chainsmoke. She records the world as it is felt by the people who move through it. In doing so, she opens a space in which they can be seen as individuals – complicated, vulnerable and never reduced to symbols.

These subjects are caught in a trap that has structured millions of lives over the past four decades. On one side lies the village: impoverished, agrarian and socially stifling. On the other lies the city: dazzling and modern, but also cold, precarious and brutally indifferent. Zheng’s writing captures the psychic tension of that in-between space – the feeling of being suspended between two worlds, belonging fully to neither. She resists both the standard, agency-stripping sweatshop narrative and the counternarrative of migrant labour as liberation from rural drudgery.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

M. Keith Booker at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

EDITOR MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI has recently made something of a specialty of compiling collections of stories inspired by the work of his favorite writers, including Cornell Woolrich and J. G. Ballard. In his newest anthology, he has gathered 24 original (commissioned) stories inspired in one way or another by the life and work of Alfred Hitchcock. Such a collection is no surprise given the ongoing prominence in American film culture of Hitchcock’s work and of Hitchcock as an individual. Indeed, while it has now been a century since the release of the first feature film he directed and nearly half a century since his last, Hitchcock remains one of the most widely recognizable names (and silhouettes) in cinema history. In addition, the concept of the “Hitchcockian” is so well established that it provides a perfect starting point for such a themed collection.

It is little wonder, then, that Jakubowski has been able to assemble quite an impressive array of authors who are celebrated in various fields, especially crime and mystery fiction. The stories in the collection are excellent reads in their own right, though Hitchcock’s ongoing aura is such that the real fun resides in discovering exactly how each author has decided to carry out the “inspired by” charge they were given.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Louis Rosenberg at Big Think:

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Yoanna Koleva at The Hedgehog Review:

Tragedies, wars, and scandals are transformed into Instagram moments. The instant horror strikes—a terror attack, a catastrophe—social-media platforms erupt with ritual phrases: recycled mantras of “We will take immediate action,” “We condemn…,” “We stand in solidarity….” Rarely do these words lead to deeds. A Ukrainian flag by a profile picture. A #StandWithPalestine sticker. This simplified #empathy and performative #goodness are measured in likes, hearts, and views.

One of the more striking examples of a promise turned meme is the West’s support for Ukraine. Since the beginning of the war, all the tears, embraces, and sympathy for Ukraine, all the declarations of unity and fraternity, have come paired with emphatic but often unfulfilled promises of military support or NATO membership.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Joachim Pissarro interviews Jeff Koons at The Brooklyn Rail:

Rail: I’d like to spin the thread of porcelain and ceramic as a material culture that runs throughout your works.

Koons: My grandparents had porcelain figurines. When I was a kid, I would play with them and I would be so excited. It was titillation, really. And the excitement that comes from this, that excitement is equal to any experience anybody else could have, even looking at a Michelangelo. You can’t really define how one is of more value, because as a young child you don’t know those hierarchies, but you do feel excitement, stimulation. I like that porcelain is a material that was democratized and became ceramic. So even my family could have porcelain when you know this came originally from the emperor’s kitchen. So the concept of porcelain—or ceramic—to me they are very close. I don’t make a distinction.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Jeremy Denk at the NYRB:

Erik Satie was the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I, crammed with aspiring bad boys. He took up pieties and profaned them. He took up blasphemy and somehow blasphemed against that. His music is ingeniously confounding. It received no shortage of vicious criticism, and Satie responded in kind. A postcard to the critic and composer Jean Poueigh began, “Monsieur Fuckface…Famous Gourd and Composer for Nitwits.” He lost the ensuing libel suit, adding to his eternal financial woes. Among his many achievements, he’s near the top of the (long) list of self-destructive classical composers.

The most appropriate essay about Satie would itself scandalize, forcing readers to laugh while being ridiculed, all the while summoning the spirit of the age. Perhaps a series of bot tweets or AI semitruths? In that spirit I asked ChatGPT to opine on Satie and modernity, and in seconds it homed right in on my intended angle: Satie as antidote to the pretensions of classical music.

more here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Olivia Farrar in Harvard Magazine:

The race to send humans to Mars is underway. That’s the sense conveyed by certain politicians and wealthy entrepreneurs, who have spoken broadly about creating a Red Planet outpost. The website of the U.S. federal space agency, NASA, echoes that optimism, citing its work on “many technologies to send astronauts to Mars as early as the 2030s.”

That goal is staggeringly ambitious. Setting aside the astronomical price tag (and the question of who would foot the bill), a trip to Mars would represent a massive leap in the science of space exploration. The International Space Station (ISS), in operation for more than two decades, orbits just 250 miles above Earth. Mars lies more than 250 million miles away—roughly a thousand times farther than the Moon. The journey alone would take six to nine months. On Mars, the challenges would multiply. The planet has an ultra-thin atmosphere—its density is just 1 percent that of Earth’s—combined with a gravitational force that’s less than half as powerful as Earth’s and temperatures that can drop to -225 degrees Fahrenheit. To survive, astronauts would need to create entirely new habitats, with protective shelters and sustainable food sources.

More here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.