by Mindy Clegg

For many historians beginning their journey through graduate school, one question arises over others to prompt many sleepness nights: so what? We, as individual scholars, hope to formulate a unique choice of topics. But at times an advisor or the department might push you into a more mainstream and marketable topic, that turns heads but avoids toes. “So what?” has become shorthand for being able to show that your project helps other historians and the public understand historical processes or events in new ways. Historians tend toward a more conservative bent than our more anarchic colleagues over in English and Sociology departments or in Gender studies. It can be a steeper climb for bringing in perspectives or topics that are a bit more off the beaten path. Sometimes, a more modern historical focus or historical narratives that center on mass culture still get short-shrift, unless framed in particular ways—despite the enormous impact mass media and culture have in our world today.

The “so what?” question that historians must engage with provides the key explanation for this state of affairs. Mass and popular culture, I argue, offer a variety of ways to examine and think about history in the modern period. Understanding that impact is critical to understanding some of the key events of modern global history, from the top-down and bottom-up. Mass media and mass/popular culture have not been entirely ignored, but tend to be studied within particular contexts, such as the Cold War, to give them more legitimacy in historical studies. Often these are seen primarily in a top-down manner, for example as a vector for American empire, but there are other ways to see the spread of mass mediated popular culture. I argue here that especially in recent years, popular culture has been a location for rebuilding community in a world of capitalist individualism and for crafting new kinds of identities. How people have engaged with mass produced culture and have sought to create mass culture of their own (and control the means of production in the process) show some interesting cracks in the “society of the spectacle” facade.¹ In other words, how people make connection and meaning out of the culture in which they live matters. Read more »

Fruit, wires, mountain, rain in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in March of 2020.

by John Schwenkler

This is the fourth in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. The first three parts can be found here, here, and here.

γνῶθι σεαυτόν, the inscription over the Temple of Apollo at Delphi is said to have read: Know thyself. The maxim has the form of a command, suggesting that what it describes is something we often fail to do, and moreover that this failure is no mere cognitive lapse, but something that willful effort is required to overcome. As the philosopher Ursula Renz explains in her introduction to a recent volume of essays on philosophical conceptions of self-knowledge through history, many philosophers have taken self-knowledge to be an important part of achieving wisdom:

Some … even claimed that the acquisition of self-knowledge is the very end of philosophical inquiry; to engage in philosophy, they thought, is to explore and thereby to ennoble the self. [This] concern with self-knowledge was immediately practical. Not only is self-knowledge constitutive of the kind of things we are, but it crucially matters for the individual persons we are or want to become.

To modern ears, the command to know oneself suggests a concern with knowing who one is, in a sense of this phrase that we connect with talk of self-discovery and of the forging of an individual identity that defines one’s lifelong pursuits. But this conception of the command reflects an understanding of human individuality that the ancients arguably did not share, or at least did not credit the same importance as many of us give it today.

Shorn of that assumption, the command to know oneself is as much a command to know who–or what–we are: that is, to understand what we sometimes call the “human condition”, not just abstractly but rather in a way that recognizes this description as applying to oneself. Such knowledge is also bound up with the kind of articulacy about ourselves that I described in my first post in this series: the self-knowing person is able not merely to “go on” in the way that we do, but also to say what it is that our going on in this way consists in, and justify why it is that we go on in this way. Read more »

by Eric J. Weiner

What is commonsense to most people who received a K-12 public education in the United States is that every formal system of state schooling throughout the modern world is designed to educate its students to develop, what Charles Lemert calls “sociologically competencies” within whatever ideological system is dominating at the time of their schooling. People correctly assume that children going to school during the Weimar Republic, for example, were educated to function competently within that ideological system. Children who were in school during the reign of Chairman Mao in the People’s Republic of China were educated to function competently within that system. Children in China today are educated to be sociologically competent in China’s current government and economic system. Children in France, Spain, Portugal, Israel, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Iran likewise are educated to function competently in those systems. In the Soviet Union, children were educated to function within its version of communism. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, children were required to learn different civic knowledge and skills in order to be competent within the newly emerging political ideologies of reformed nation states.

For people educated in the United States, the connection to ideology and schooling is obvious except when it comes to their own perception of the kind of public schooling they and/or their children received. At most, people might blame the educational system for being too liberal or too conservative, but to recognize the constitutive connection between schooling and ideology goes too far. Ideology is something that defines other governmental and educational systems, not their own. Ironically, this points to the deep level of ideological indoctrination that state schools have helped to achieve over several generations in the United States. Fueled by the complimentary discourses of choice, individualism, and Judeo-Christian morality, the connection between ideology and schooling is hidden in plain sight behind a translucent veil of American exceptionalism. What we are left with is an education system that teaches students to believe in an illusion of freedom, while disciplining what Michel Foucault famously called docile bodies and obedient minds. Read more »

New Vinyl

…. —an Elegy

to take an album in your hands,
to feel its slight heft,
to unsheathe it from clear synthetic skin,
to slip it from its cardboard cover,
to scan its art, to flip it over, read,
then draw it from its inner sleeve
with care (platter’s rim to palm just so)
so as not to grease and soil
its lyric grooves with finger oil
which might later cause
a lead-riff stutter

to hold in hands —but only by its rim
between two palms— to catch the lightglaze
caroming from its onyx spiral
cast like hairs in onyx vinyl

to drop its center hole upon a hub
and, as it spins, to lift and move
its diamond-studded arm above
the leading edge of disk and set
with steady surgeon’s glance
its fine smart tip to spinning rifts
to do its oscillating dance—
its bouncing ride off microcliffs
that send vibrations out
as turning table shifts
and shadows scatter

….. ah! in that tick of space & time
music’s all that matters

Jim Culleny
2/15/18

by Rafaël Newman

Notwithstanding the spread of English as a global lingua franca, translation continues to be a vital component of international relations, whether political, commercial, or cultural. In certain cases, translation is also necessary nationally, for instance in countries comprising more than one significant linguistic group. This is so in Switzerland, which voted by an overwhelming majority in 1938 to add a fourth national tongue to thwart the irredentist aspirations of its Italian neighbor, and which in certain contexts is obliged to use a Latin version of its own name (Confoederatio Helvetica) to avoid favoring one language group over another.

With its four languages, three of them national and official – German, French, and Italian – and the fourth, Romansh, “merely” national, Switzerland is indeed obliged to do a great deal of translation, especially at the level of its federal ministries and law courts. Its commercial enterprises, too, typically depend on communication in at least one other language region than their own immediate location; and naturally, many Swiss businesses have a linguistically diverse national presence in any case, and thus require a polyglot corporate identity.

Culturally, although Switzerland’s linguistic regions tend to look to the “motherland” of their respective language in matters of tradition, the country’s creative class is by necessity international in its outlook, given the limited size of its domestic market; while its chief cultural funding agency, Pro Helvetia (bearer of a similarly non-partisan Latin appellation), spends a great deal of its resources on representation and “localization” abroad. And finally, since Switzerland’s economy is strongly geared to export, and because its lack of natural resources means that it has come to specialize in services and end manufacturing, those sectors, particularly the financial and pharmaceutical branches, are positively ravenous consumers of translation services, especially into the global tongues: Chinese, Spanish, and of course, above all, English.

No surprise, then, that those same sectors are presently lured by the cost-cutting Siren song of translation “solutions” based on artificial intelligence, whether for their in-house language services or from the agencies to which they outsource their translation orders. Read more »

Pope L. Failure Drawing #636 Far Above the Ocean. 2009-2010

Ink, acrylic, ballpoint pen, oil stick, marker and correction fluid on map.

More here, here and here.

by R. Passov

Recently, I watched a YouTube of a talk given by Jennifer Doudna. This past May, in front of some her UC Berkeley colleagues, Doudna shared, “a story … about some research … that led in an unexpected direction … ” producing “ … some science that has profound implications going forward…but also makes us really think about what it means to be human and what it means to have the power to manipulate the very code of life …”

It all started, Doudna explains, when she got a call from someone at Cal who said you don’t know me but you’re doing the type of research that’s connected to my work. Her colleague had noticed that “ …many types of bacteria in their chromosomes have a sequence of DNA that is a storage site for sequences that come from viruses that infect those cells.”

“These are the CRISPERS …” a record of the DNA from all prior infections, “… a genetic vaccination card for bacteria.”

Doudna is generous with praise, never missing an opportunity to share credit. One lucky lab member collected soil samples, then sequenced DNA from bugs in those samples looking for alternative CRISPER pathways. The result uncovered different flavors of the CRISPER-Cas immune system. Which got Doudna to thinking “… about the difference in the type of CRISPER systems in nature…” Read more »

Seema Singhal, M.D., is a Professor of Medicine (Hematology Oncology) and Chez Family Professor of Myeloma Research at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and Feinberg School of Medicine, Chicago Illinois. Dr. Singhal has conducted numerous clinical trials and published more than 230 publications describing her findings. She is the key opinion leader in Myeloma treatment and authored the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines for Myeloma Treatment.

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 Bill Murray

First thing we have to do, we have to find Robert.

The men smoking outside the concrete block terminal are not Robert so I ask around inside. The man behind the check-in counter might as well be collecting Arctic tumbleweeds. No flights are pending; no one is checking in.

He does not know Robert.

Together we lean over his counter to look down to the harbor. One boat is speeding away and there don’t seem to be any others. He flips his palms up and shakes his head, “I think you just go down there and wait. That is your only chance.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Benzon

Frank Foster leading and fronting the Count Basie Orchestra in 1994

I headed off to the State University of New York at Buffalo (aka UB) in the Fall of 1973. While I was going for my Ph.D. in English Literature, I was also interested in the school’s music offerings. I’d just gotten my trumpet out of “storage,” a year or so ago and I decided I wanted to sharpen my jazz chops. So I looked through the UB catalogue and noticed they had some guy named Frank Foster teaching jazz improvisation. I’d never heard of him. But, hey, I looked him up anyhow, you never know—played and arranged with Basie, Elvin Jones, Sarah Vaughan, “hmmm,” says I to my little-too-smart self, “maybe he’ll do.”

He did.

I forget just how I made my way into his improv workshop. While I was registered in the English Department and took courses there, there was no problem about showing up in Frank’s class and just hanging out. I didn’t even register for credit. Just showed up. (Maybe I officially audited the course, as it’s called, but I don’t really remember the arrangement.)

Frank had no problem with that. Neither did anyone else. Read more »

Driving to Innsbruck on the A22 Autobahn in fog in November of 2013.

by Tim Sommers

So, here’s a game. Try to imagine: “What unbelievable moral achievements might humanity witness a century from now?” Now, discuss.

“The trick, of course, is that if you can seriously contemplate its occurring, you are thinking too small, or so history suggest.” So says David Estlund who proposes “The Unbelievable Moral Progress Game” in his new book “Utopophobia: On the Limits (If Any) of Political Philosophy”.

The argument that political philosophy is, or theories of justice are, too often unrealistic is familiar enough. Estlund turns that argument on its head. He argues (among other things) that, at least sometimes, political philosophy is not unrealistic enough. Or, at least, that we should not be afraid to imagine the highly-unlikely, even the impossible, when thinking about what might be possible for us morally and politically.

Estlund’s previous book, “Democratic Authority”, besides being an influential, admirably clear, and widely read work on democracy is the source of the word. “Epistocracy.” It means the rule of the knowledgeable. You may have heard of it. He’s against it.

In “Utopophobia”, he takes head-on on a wide-variety of entertaining, often challenging, topics around the theme, obviously, of the wide-spread allergic reaction to utopianism in our culture. (In an earlier column, I used his “fallacy of approximation”. (“What if Equality of Opportunity is a Bad Idea?”) To simplify a bit, “It is not the case that where the first best solution is not available, the second best is always to be preferred.”) But this is not a book review. Let’s play the game.

There are real cases of unbelievable moral progress. Estlund mentions (among other things) the abolition of slavery and the legalization of same sex marriage. I asked a number of people for their thoughts on what the next great leap forward might me. (The list of those people is at the bottom.) This is some of what some of them said. Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

The translated versions from Tamil into English of Perumal Murugan’s two books, One Part Woman and the The Story of A Goat, weave stories of the complex life of the rural people of South India in an engaging and highly readable form.

Murugan’s use of imaginary language in both books effectively brings to life the rural context and lifestyle of poor farmers. Likewise, they are infused with subtle references to the caste system in India.  But while the caste system is a crucial issue that warrants the scrutiny that it gets, it is but one theme in Murugan’s complex novels; they are, in effect, thematically layered narratives  and they deal with the issues common to various degrees in most societies: the relationship between the individual and society and the state,the disciplining force of social norms and expectations and the extent to which religion plays a crucial role in the lives of the people.  In doing so, Murugan creates a fiction that has, at its core, a human essence which makes his novels highly accessible and relatable.   

In One Part Woman, Murugan explores the sad tale of a young couple, Kali and Poona, married for twelve years, and childless.  By choosing this topic as his main theme, Murugan has hit on a sensitive issue and he examines it from many cultural perspectives. Read more »