by Joseph Shieber

Bertolt Brecht, the German poet and playwright, was born on this day 122 years ago, February 10, 1898.

Fearing persecution by the Nazis for his writing and leftist political views, Brecht left Germany in February 1933, shortly after Hitler assumed the German Chancellorship.

At the time that he wrote the poem “Frühling 1938 / I”, Brecht was living in exile on the Danish island of Fyn.

Frühling 1938 / I (German)

Heute, Ostersonntag früh
Ging ein plötzlicher Schneesturm über die Insel.
Zwischen den grünenden Hecken lag Schnee. Mein junger Sohn
Holte mich zu einem Aprikosenbäumchen an der Hausmauer
Von einem Vers weg, in dem ich auf diejenigen mit dem Finger deutete
Die einen Krieg vorbereiteten, der
Den Kontinent, diese Insel, mein Volk, meine Familie und mich
Vertilgen mag. Schweigend
Legten wir einen Sack
Über den frierenden Baum.

Spring 1938 / I (English)

Today, early Easter Sunday
A sudden snowstorm came over the island.
Snow lay between the budding bushes. My young son
Brought me to an apricot sapling at the house wall,
Away from a verse in which I pointed with my finger at those
Who prepared a war that may well mean, for
The continent, the island, my people, my family and me,
Extermination. Silent
We placed a sack
Over the freezing tree.

Translation: Joseph Shieber

by Emrys Westacott

“In unity is strength!” This is one of the foundational maxims repeated by progressive forces everywhere. As history has often demonstrated, though, unity is easier to affirm than to achieve. And the consequences of failing to achieve it can be dire.

Germany 1932

The direst of all dire examples of progressive disunity helping to bring about a horrendous outcome was that which allowed Hitler to attain power in Germany in 1933. Here are the results of the November 1932 general election:

Nazi Party  33.1%
Social Democrat Party 20.4%
Communist Party  16.9%
Catholic Centre Party 12.4%
German National People’s Party 8.3%
Bavarian People’s party 3%

The Social Democrats and Communists combined received more votes than Hitler’s Nazis. But in the early 1930s, even though the threat posed by the Nazis was becoming increasingly dangerous and apparent, those opposed to them could not form a united front. The Social Democrat leadership viewed communists and fascists as essentially the same, and they chose to support the right-wing Hindenburg government as a “lesser evil” to (and as a bulwark against) Hitler. The communists labelled the Social Democrats “social fascists” and also rejected the idea of collaboration against the Nazis. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor. Less than eight weeks later, Germany was a dictatorship. Many of those who couldn’t work together to oppose Hitler would soon find themselves suffering and dying together in Nazi concentration camps. Twelve years later, more than seventy million people lay dead, victims of World War II, and much of Europe lay in ruins. Read more »

Christa David. I Am My Own Shelter, Thanks?. 2017.

Mixed media.

More here, and here.

by Abigail Akavia

A. E. Stallings’ long poem “Lost and Found” (from her 2018 collection Like) delivers a mesmerizing meditation on loss in its various and myriad forms. I first encountered it read out loud, like a true epic, and I was gripped, astonished at once by the breadth of the journey Stallings invites us on as by the intimacy of its landscapes. A journey from the prosaic, to a Virgilian terrain of shadows and truths, and back again. 

The protagonist of this journey is a poet-mother—can we just agree to call her Stallings?—who starts off on her hands and knees, crawling on the floor in search of a lost toy. In her dream that night, she is led by a woman—she later learns it is divine Mnemosyne herself, Memory, Mother of the Muses—on a guided tour through “the valley on the moon / Where everything misplaced on earth accrues, / And here all things are gathered that you lose.” I found it a delightfully feminist act on Stallings’ part, to cast herself as a hero who crosses the threshold between our world and the beyond, in order to come back to the land of bills and paperwork and lunches waiting to be packed for school, armed with wisdom. A journey that reveals and affirms her position in this mundane world as a poet, a “sieve” who lets the moments pass through her, an artist noticing and writing them down. Read more »

Jaroslaw Maciejewski, MD, PhD is a Chairman of Translational Hematology and Oncology Research at the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute, and a professor of medicine at Lerner College of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University. He is also Associate Director for Translational Research and Co-Leader, Hematopoietic and Immune Cancer Biology Program, Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Maciejewski is recognized for his leadership in finding better treatments and a cure for bone marrow failure diseases.

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

Some months ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I went to my bank’s ATM in the main market close to where I live in the Defence Housing Authority, Lahore’s latest fancy suburb, which is organized and managed by the military. 

The market, usually bustling, was quiet that day. There was barely anyone around, and no one at all where I was, at the end of the building. When I came out after withdrawing my cash, I saw a rickshaw parked between me and my car. The rickshaw driver was leaning out of his vehicle, his eyes red, hair dirty and uncombed, his clothes mismatched (a shirt of sorts, alternate buttons missing, and scruffy cloth trousers); he looked completely demented. He was looking intently at me. 

Oh no, I thought. This is a holdup. There is no one around except the two of us, and this fellow knows I have just taken money out of the ATM and have to go past him to get to my car. I tried to be brave, and, clutching my purse tight, said in a gruff voice, “I do not need a rickshaw, I have my car right here.” 

He stepped out in front of me, forcing me to stop, and said in Punjabi, “I am not offering you a ride, I need your help.”

“What kind of help?” I asked, stalling while contemplating a quick dash past his left side. 

“My wife is sick and I need money for the doctor.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mindy Clegg

The Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame recently announced this year’s inductees; the Doobie Brothers, T. Rex, Nine Inch Nails, the Notorious B.I.G, Depeche Mode, and Whitney Houston, with the Ahmet Ertegun Award (for members of the industry who are not the talent) going to Jon Landau and Irving Azoff. Not too long after, the usual recriminations emerged; for example Judas Priest was on the list of bands for inclusion that did not make the cut this year. Richie Faulkner, guitarist for the classic metal band expressed his contempt for the institution on hearing the news. Some grumbled about Houston’s induction, as she was not a “rock” musician.¹

Each year when new inductees are announced a fresh round of anti-Hall of Fame rhetoric bursts forth on blogs and in comment sections. There are some good reasons to criticize the process—plenty of foundational artists have been ignored, the fringes that have given rock its longevity are often glossed over, plus there has been a clear preference for white male artists over others. These rarely make up the bulk of the complaints though. I would argue that critics have missed the point of the institution (with the exception of John Lydon, perhaps). Rather than existing to promote an accurate history of popular music in the age of its mechanical reproduction and to celebrate one critical genre of music, the organization exists for one primary purpose: to promote the industry narrative of popular recorded music. This fact shapes all aspects of the induction process and the spectacle of each ceremony. Read more »

Socrates’ Complaint About the New Technology of Writing

This discord of words
left in our heads by dead men—their
twisted syllables—this braid is
coming loose again. Those yet-unborn will be

the guardians of our thoughts.
They will be the hearers of many.
They will have learned nothing.

***

Now what we had by heart
no longer belongs to us.

The things we find (blossoms unfurling beside
the road) we catalogue and collectively
keep.
We write them down as a memorial.

***

Though there are times
when we see into the blankness

beyond this world to Olympus—that rush of light—

when we try to write it, the vision
becomes a few chords cradled on a mountain wind.

And if you who are yet to live
ask us what it is we’ve seen—if you reach for me—even
in a dream—you will wake to your own world’s
empty wind and the silence
that comes after speech—.

by Amanda Beth Peery

Surprisingly, one of my wife’s rose bushes outside our house started to bloom in January.

by Eric J. Weiner

Slave Play is a comedy of sorts. It should be played as such. —Jeremy Harris

Jeremy Harris is a dark and stormy cocktail of Dave Chappelle, Augusto Boal, Boots Riley, and James Baldwin. The dark comedic energy that drives Slave Play, Harris’s provocative Broadway show about racism, sex, kinky fetishism, white supremacy, interracial relationships, slavery, the Antebellum South, post-colonialism, and psycho-sexual drama therapy, is the sort that makes you cry while laughing, tremble with anxiety, giggle from embarrassment, and question the sources of your own laughter. Slave Play riffs darkly on how black and white people in America live intimately together yet are essentially apart. Carrying the historical burdens of slavery and white supremacy into the 21^st century, Harris shines a dark therapeutic light onto areas of our racial relations that are vibrating with pain and festering with pleasure.

Sitting restlessly within the tradition of black comedy while echoing Augusto Boal’s lesser known work Rainbow of Desire, Harris’s play pushes against some boundaries while obliterating others. He has created not a safe space but what one of the actors, Irene Sofia Lucio, calls a “brave” space:

I think that we’re all into safe spaces right now. But we might need more brave spaces, where people speak their truth and we start to lean in and listen to things that make us uncomfortable instead of walking away from each other. In a brave space, when you feel discomfort, you’re supposed to sit with it and acknowledge that that’s part of the process towards growth.

Slave Play’s provocative brew of dark humor, like the best Chappelle Show sketch, cuts deep into the social marrow of race and identity in America. During the presentation of the 2019 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor to Chappelle, Sarah Silverman commented that Chappelle’s “critical thinking is his art.” In a similar way, Slave Play is Harris’ critical thinking as dramatic black comedy. Read more »

by John Schwenkler

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

Several years ago I taught an undergraduate course that I gave the unfortunately profound-sounding title “Know Thyself: A Philosophical Investigation of Self-Knowledge”. In it, we mainly read a range of texts that explored in different ways the topics of self-knowledge and self-discovery, illuminating the way that it can be an achievement to know oneself in the face of the manifold barriers to doing this.

What made this course different from the ones I was used to teaching was that our readings were drawn principally from literary fiction and non-fiction rather than traditional philosophical writings. It was, however, entirely in keeping with the sort of teaching I was accustomed to in that the overarching focus of the course was entirely theoretical—a fact that came to my attention when one of my students observed that she’d expected that the course would have something to do with the practical task of achieving self-knowledge, rather than the abstract question of what self-knowledge is. When I heard this question, I laughed inside—what a bizarre idea, and indeed a dangerous one, to try in a philosophy course to figure out who one is!

But of course it was my position, not hers, that counts as the bizarre one if one considers the nature of philosophy against the background of its history. Socrates, for example, took up general questions about the nature of knowledge, justice, piety, and so on as part of a life that aimed at improving the lives of his fellow Athenians. Aristotle began his Nicomachean Ethics with the remark that a philosopher should come to ethical theorizing “not in order to know what virtue is, but in order to become good, since otherwise our inquiry would have been of no use”. René Descartes summed up his philosophical project in a short work titled The Discourse on Method, which describes a moral and intellectual code that he undertook to follow in order to use his reason rightly. And so on. For these philosophers, the idea that philosophy was an abstract discipline that could be approached without an eye toward real-life consequences would have been truly unfathomable. It’s only in the context of the modern university, where philosophy is conceived alongside mathematics, biology, psychology, and so on as one among many academic subjects, that self-knowledge could be seen as a philosopher’s subject-matter rather than her essential task. Read more »

Zanele Muholi. Ntozakhe II, Parktown, Johannesburg. 2016. 

Gelatin silver print.

More here, here, here, and here.

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. 

Interviewer: Have you ever experienced something annoying that got transformed by hermitude into something at least harmless if not good?

Hermit: Right. Sure. I used to be annoyed by wind, now I like the thing. Used to prefer summer to winter, now that has reversed. Rain will ruin a hermit picnic as quickly as it will a regular person’s, but usually with nice enough after effects. Perhaps my best example at the moment is what happened when I started sleeping with very minimal heat in winter, just above freezing. It was miserable at first, but I got used to it. The thing what amazed me most is that I lost weight (the opposite of what I was used to during winter) burning calories to keep warm, alongside consuming far less fuel for heating my living space. An apparent win-win. So obvious, but it never had crossed my mind.

Interviewer:  What’s so great about wind, and after-rain from the hermit point of view? And what does it mean to “get used to” almost freezing?

Hermit: Only the obvious things. The wind cools and makes difficult the movement of flying insects in the warmer months, and is easily dealt with in winter by dressing appropriately. The rain, you know, rainbows, plants love it, etc..

And I’ve so far kept my space just above freezing for the sake of the liquids. Tried dipping below once, determined I lose more liquids that way as they burst their containers, also destroyed my water filters on that one. There is likely a physiological process which allows one to get used to the cold, but I think it is as much a mental acclimatization. Easier to get used to the cold than the heat, in my experience. In the end, so long as your fingers still work, all is well. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For Eva, mère & fille; and for Tom

Yesterday was James Joyce’s birthday. His one-hundred-and-thirty-seventh. Or would have been, if he hadn’t died, in Zurich, in January 1941, but were instead swelling the ranks of the current generation of supercentenarians, their increasing longevity bedeviling the demographics departments of local life insurers. Joyce is buried in Fluntern Cemetery on Mount Zurich, his grave marked by a wry-looking seated effigy, like a jocular, unaccommodated Lincoln Memorial; he is further commemorated in the eccentric orthography of the names of the city’s two rivers, the Limmat and the Sihl, in a plaque mounted on the point at which they diverge downstream from the Swiss National Museum, where the letter “i” in both names has been replaced with a “j”.

As it happens, February 2 is also my Aunt Eva’s birthday. A native of Montreal, my mother’s sister now lives in that city again, after a peripatetic career spent in the service of Canadian diplomacy, among other pursuits, in London, Ottawa, Tokyo, Vientiane, Paris, Bangkok and Beijing. The family gathered not long ago, in a disconcertingly Kon Tiki-themed chalet in rural Ontario, to celebrate a significant edition of Eva’s birthday: in advance, at New Year’s, since that was when most members of our large extended family could take time off. And so on that occasion we were also all presented by Eva’s eldest, eponymous daughter with that year’s family calendar.

My cousin Eva and her husband have been assembling and self-publishing the calendar annually, at or around Christmas, for some time now, and its arrival by post marks the beginning of the year for many of us now resident in places far from the family’s base in eastern Canada. Each year’s calendar is typically given a theme, which determines the visual element at the head of each month – recent themes have included revolutions, architectural features of European capitals, and the family’s Jewish ancestry, the last with facsimiles of antique portraits of various great-grandparents; this year’s theme is birth practices around the world. But what particularly distinguishes this project, gives it its pleasantly idiosyncratic aspect, is the mingling of the dates of birth of our family members, printed on the appropriate days of the year, with the birth anniversaries of historical personalities and the dates of significant events. Read more »

Dr. Robert A. Gatenby is the pioneer of Integrative Mathematical Oncology making Moffitt Cancer Center the only one in the world that has completely integrated mathematical modeling and computer simulations into basic science and clinical research. His goal is to use mathematics to examine the physiology of a tumor, including factors such as phenotypic evolution, intracellular communication pathways and interactions with the microenvironment including therapies. He is currently the chair of the Moffitt Cancer Center Department of Diagnostic Imaging and Intervention Radiology with over 400 publications to his name.

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 Michael Liss

The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the property interests of the country, and upon the successful Management of which so much depends. —George Baer, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, during the Coal Strike of 1902.

Whenever I read yet another article about intramural warfare in the Democratic Party over which candidate will be progressive enough for the Progressive wing, I think about that quote.

Know your enemy, know yourself. Do contemporary Progressive politicians really know either? The “old” Progressivism, which reached its zenith in the period between 1896 to 1916, was primarily a social and political reform movement. Faced with the excesses of the unbridled capitalism of the Gilded Age that had preceded it, it did not look first toward redistribution. Rather, it took aim at the pervasive rot that was created as immense wealth was being made in businesses like mining, railroads, shipping, steel, meatpacking, and finance, often at the expense of the working man, the farmer, and the small businessman. From this, it drew its moral force.

We should acknowledge that those fortunes were the product of the efforts of real visionaries, larger-than-life figures like Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, James J. Hill, the Armour and Swift families, J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and Carnegie. Talent aside, though, their successes were enhanced by the sharpest, most predatory tactics, of the type described in Ida Tarbell’s The History of The Standard Oil Company, a 19 part series in McClure’s Magazine, which chronicled the rise of Standard Oil. Business was not for the faint of heart, and the most successful businessmen were monopolists who went from strength to strength, squeezing every competitor, and every last dollar, out of every transaction.

No matter how entrepreneurial the businessman, no matter how rich the oilfield, no matter how coldly efficient the operator, it couldn’t have been done without grease. Corruption was literally everywhere. Read more »

by Bill Murray

Banners waved, the converted preached and hawkers peddled hats, buttons, “Impeach This” sweatshirts and dodgy conspiracy theories. The sky hung sullen, frozen in the shade of dull cutlery. A big screen kept those outside Drake University’s Knapp Center apprised of the slow boil inside.

Fire safety officials began to turn away an overflow crowd two hours before the start of Donald Trump’s Iowa MAGA rally last Thursday. The Presidential interloper came to crash the Democrats’ caucuses, and MAGA fans glowed with an intensity rather like coyotes circling the Democrat’s family pet.

Welcome to Des Moines, where unmarked satellite trucks troll snowy streets, coffee houses and hotel lobbies are broadcast-ready, and legions of reporters and crew and a few political tourists have swept up and besieged an entire town.

The candidates still standing are punch-drunk. Former Congressman John Delaney called it quits as flakes fell across the capital Friday morning. Even without Delaney, a relentless event-holder, the Des Moines Register’s candidate tracker listed 64 events over the campaign’s final weekend.

Saturday, while Pete Buttigieg worked the National Cattle Congress Electric Park Ballroom out in Waterloo, candidates Yang, Klobuchar and Steyer held rallies in brew pubs, and Joe Biden harangued a community center. And that was all before noon. By then, Buttigieg was on to his second event, at the coliseum in Oelwein. Read more »