Man working on a project to lay fast optical-fibre internet cable in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in November, 2019.

by Bill Benzon

I’ve been binging on TwoSet Violin for the last month or so. Of course the duo is not, as my title suggests, in the business of music education. But you will learn, or be reminded of, a great deal about (mostly) classical music by listening to them. They are, rather, musical comedians – or is it comedic musicians? Whatever it is, it’s not musical comedy, which is a theatrical genre. Brett Yang and Eddie Chen met and became friends while they were still in high school in Australia. They started posting videos to YouTube in 2013, gave up their orchestral jobs in 2016, and first toured the world with a stage act in 2017. Most of what they do in their YouTube videos would not, however, transfer to stage.

On stage with Hilary Hahn

The following video, however, shows a segment from their stage act.

They undertake to play a Paganini caprice with the help of Hilary Hahn. All three are spinning hula hoops while playing.

Hilary Hahn, of course, is a top-tier classical soloist and, as such, makes her living in a cultural sphere that is far removed from the vaudeville stage, which is ultimately where this kind of act comes from. She is not a regular part of their stage act, though she has been on stage with them a number of times and has been on several of their YouTube videos. On one of those occasions she played a piece while spinning a hula hoop, which is one of the various Ling Ling challenges that show up in their videos. Read more »

by Gerald Dworkin

At least since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 the issue of Conscientious Objection  (henceforth CO) has been an important one in the context of Catholic hospitals and women patients.  Such hospitals object to the provision of abortions, contraceptives, sterilization, fertility care, and “gender-affirming care” such as hormone treatments and surgeries.

In 1973 the Church (the Senator not the institution!) Amendment was passed. This stated that individuals in institutions receiving federal funds may not be required to perform sterilization or abortions contrary to their religion or conscience. No such individual shall be required to perform or assist in any health service program or research activity if such program or activity was contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.

In 1997 when Medicare Advantage was passed it included a restriction that no such plan, nor any Medicaid-managed plan, was required to “provide, reimburse for, or provide coverage of a counseling or referral service if the organization objected to the service on moral or religious grounds.”

In 2010 the Patient Protection and  Affordable Care act said a State could prohibit abortion in qualified health plans. It also introduced a new restriction. Government-funded institutions may not discriminate against individuals or institutions on the basis that such institutions do not provide any health care item or service for the purpose of causing, or for assistance in  causing, the death of any individual such as by assisted-suicide. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

As I’ve tried to convey over the years here at 3QD, mathematics is the bee’s knees. Like most apologias for mathematics, many of my essays tend to fall into one of two categories.

The extrinsic: on math’s usefulness in real-world applications like internet searches, GPS technology, compression and recovery of images, encryption, the handling of large data, and the like. This is the reason my relatives (and most of my students) think math is worth learning.

The intrinsic: on math’s beauty, universality, timelessness, ability to amaze and inspire awe, its endless depth and richness, and its ability to spark joy and fun. This is what drew me (and some of my students) to study math and still motivates me today to teach and do research.

But there is a third quality of mathematics which I’ve never quite been able to articulate. I’ve only managed to sneak up on it from time-to-time. This is the humanity of mathematics. For some, humanity may seem more the purview of literature, music, art, psychology, sociology, or philosophy. Not mathematics. They would be wrong, though. Read more »

Begin

flames are the feathers of this bird
but I’m not calling the fire brigade
—life burns life

this is a particular bird
whose flame is multitudinous red
with flamboyant nuance:
high-frequency colorwheels thrown in
and well-played purple notes of a bass line
in its wings

—but “multitudinous” fails to tell the tale
of this bonfire bird,
a bird blown by algorithmic winds
at the keystrokes of a friend
lands blazing on my screen and sits
—this birdblaze with redgold beak
sharper than human wit

what do you say when a thing like this comes to light
which exceeds sunshine acid visions?
makes them lame

how to state the spectral luxury of this bird,
to see it, out on a limb, its satiating color
which some pure mind has wrought?

I could say, “Rufous-Backed Kingfisher”
or “Ceyx rufidorsa”

but how to really say it?
how to paint it?
how to see it?
how to hold it in mind’s eye?

don’t try, begin
.

Jim Culleny
12/11/18

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

The United States continues to be virtually the only developed country which does not guarantee any paid time off work to new parents. A study recently released by the New America think tank explores the “complicated, confusing, and uneven leave landscape for workers,” and the behaviors that result. The federal Family and Medical Leave Act entitles workers only to unpaid time off, and many employers and workers do not fall even within that mandate. While some employers, and public insurance programs in some states, do offer paid family leave, such benefits were found less likely to be available to lower-income households and to workers without college degrees.

According to the New America researchers, nearly half of the parents they surveyed reported taking no leave after the birth or adoption of a child. The weight of this finding is underscored by the definition the researchers used for “leave” – namely, anything “more than a day or two off work,” paid or unpaid. The mothers and fathers who reported taking no leave had not, in other words, taken even three days off work.

As documented in a previous report from New America, job-protected paid family leaves are associated with improved physical and mental health for both children and parents. This new research could therefore serve as yet another reminder of the deleterious effects of the family leave policies we have had, and continue to have, in the United States.

What a shame then, to see the study treated as if its primary contribution was to have turned up a previously unappreciated form of gender discrimination. The headline in HuffPost was this: “Even When Men Take Parental Leave, They’re Paid More, New Study Finds.” Great click-bait, and also completely misleading. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Rorschach on the River Li. Yangshuo, China, January, 2020.

Digital photograph.

More on Karst landscapes here, and here.

by Anitra Pavlico

My experience is what I agree to attend to. —William James

While you might not break into a neighbor’s house to log onto your Facebook account if your internet were down, a case can be made that many of us are victims of at least a moderate behavioral addiction when it comes to our smartphones. At the playground with our kids, we’re on our phones. At dinner with friends, we’re on our phones. In the middle of the night. At the movies. At a concert. At a funeral. (I was recently at a memorial service for my friend’s mother, and someone’s cell phone rang during my friend’s reminiscence.)

In his recent book Digital Minimalism [1], Cal Newport argues that we need a philosophy for how to approach the use of digital technology. Ad-hoc measures such as disabling notifications and installing apps that monitor our screen time are missing the point. Instead of working backward from an immersion, Newport says, we should examine our lives without technology first and figure out how technology can serve our values and interests in the least intrusive way. Unlike digital maximalists, who try every new app and gadget and try to shoehorn them into their lives, digital minimalists ruthlessly screen each new tool before using it. Newport portrays maximalism as the technology philosophy that “most people deploy by default–a mind-set in which any potential for benefit is enough to start using a technology that catches your attention.”  Read more »

Michelle M. Le Beau, Arthur and Marian Edelstein Professor of Medicine, is a leading authority in hematologic malignancies. Her groundbreaking research led to the identification of the recurring cytogenetic abnormalities in hematological malignant diseases, in defining the clinical, morphological, and cytogenetic subsets of leukemias and lymphomas, and in identifying the genetic pathways that lead to myeloid leukemias. She is currently a member of the Board of Directors of the American Association for Cancer Research, the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the American Society of Hematology. Her current research focus is on therapy-related acute myeloid leukemia.

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 Tim Sommers

What if most speech is worthless? Or, rather, what if most speech that purports to count as a contribution to “free expression” is mostly worthless? Take the internet. What’s on it? Lots of great information and great journalism and even art. But, also, pornography. Lots of pornography. Between 15% and 80% of net traffic is porn, depending on which study you believe. But if you count semi-nude pictures, it’s got to be at least…well, a lot. Lots of cat pictures, too. Then there are the blogs and comment threads and likes and dislikes. Even where these are about significant topics, most of opinions expressed are repetitive assertions of a fairly narrow range of already well-known opinions. And then there’s the insults, the invectives, and general nastiness. I am not against porn. I am not even against insults per se. What I wonder though is, whatever value porn, for example, has for you, or whatever expressive relief you get from typing insults, should we think that these things ought to count as worthy the high value and high level of protection we ordinarily afford free speech? Maybe. Maybe, not.

There seems to be a lot of agreement that “free speech” is in crisis – on campuses, on the web, or on social media. But not a lot of agreement about what the crisis is supposed to be. There seems to be a lot of agreement that regulating, or interfering in any way, with free speech is bad. But not a lot of discussion of exactly what is bad about it. It sometimes seems that “freedom of speech” is just an empty phrase to be filled in by whatever you happen to think that it would be good not to have interfered with. (Maybe, you’ve encountered the internet joke that suggest you can now argue for anything by saying “what you want to argue for” and then asserting “Because freedom!”) And so, the “crisis” sometimes seems to be just people you don’t like interfering with something you do like. (Have you ever heard of a conservative pundit complaining about a liberal speaker being “de-platformed” or vice-versa?) My point is, unless we engage with what is good or bad about freedom of speech, it’s going to be hard to evaluate what the crisis is and whether we can regulate our way out of it. So, let’s start there. Or, rather, here: What is free(dom of) speech? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Brooks Riley

When Vienna‘s Albertina Museum exhibition of works by Albrecht Dürer ended in January 2020, it seemed quite possible that several of the masterpieces on display might never again be seen by the public, among them The Great Piece of Turf. This may sound like a dire prediction for a fragile work that is routinely exhibited every decade or so, but as the UN announced recently, we may already have passed the tipping point in the race to save our world and ourselves. A decade from now we may be too engaged in the struggle to survive to focus our attention on a small, exquisite watercolor created 500 years ago.

Up to now, Dürer has been one of the many diversions that have lured me away from thinking about the climate crisis. At this moment in history, when focusing on the future of the planet is required, we are deluged by distractions than didn’t exist 30 years ago when the climate warnings began to escalate. We cram our free time with clickbait high and low, binges of movies and TV shows on streaming platforms, all-you-can-hear on Spotify, endless slide shows, political sideshows, not to mention all the other interests we may have that are accessible via Google or Wikipedia. Online shopping diverts us further, feeding desires ahead of needs. The outcry of scientists and the activism of Time magazine Person of the Year Greta Thunberg have done little to pry us from our pleasures.

The climate crisis will not wait for us to put down our devices and devote serious thought or action to the issue. As a species, we react more to major events than to chronic conditions. The climate crisis is not an event, it’s a slow-rolling inevitability that will play out in differing catastrophic scenarios, to be labeled events only when they occur. Meanwhile, this gathering storm hums along in the background of our lives as we go about business as usual—not unlike death, another inevitability whose faint background noise accompanies us throughout our lives. Read more »

Last Night I Dreamt I Was in Kashmir Again

“May our Chinar last a thousand years,”
Grandfather said, clenching a cigar.
“Chi means What, Nar: Fire: What fire!”

Rustling boughs reigned above the tin roof
of our home where I was born a Scorpio
at midnight. It’s Fall. Each leaf burst into

a flower. We gathered the remains of dyes
to create fuel for winter, sprinkling water
on burning leaves, palms brushed ashes

together, packing cinders in a clay pot
matted in bright wicker, his kangri.
“Symbol of our culture,” he said,

cloaking it between his knees under
a loose mantle, his phiran, three yards
of brown houndstooth made by Salama,

the beloved tailor at Polo View, solely
for Grandfather who said the embers
warmed his bones. “We are all bones

under the houndstooth,” my father said.
He’s sun-withered, pouring morning tea
from a samovar alone beside an amputated

trunk. What’s father doing in Kashmir,
have they annulled the Partition?
But he still parts his hair in the center.

A Himalayan glacier ruptured its bank.
Signal towers sunk, our tin roof as well.
My valley was again a lake it used to be.

I was a shikara. I was a crewel curtain
embroidering the shikara I once was.
Barrenness had become a thousand things.

By Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit

Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, at twilight a couple of days ago.

by Ali Minai

For the last three years, I have struggled with a dilemma: As a reasonable, quite liberal person, what should I think of my 60 million fellow Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, and the vast majority of whom continue to support him today? Normally, a personal dilemma is a private thing, not a topic for public airing, but I feel that this particular problem is one the vexes many others – perhaps even a majority of Americans, as more of us voted for Hillary Clinton and many did not vote at all. Since that bleak day in November 2016, an unspoken – and sometimes loudly spoken – question hangs in the air: What kind of “deplorable” person would vote for Donald Trump?

By now, it is clear to any reasonably sentient person that Donald Trump is a venal, corrupt, narcissistic individual with no shred of human decency or moral principle. From his first announcement where he called Mexicans rapists and criminals, to the Access Hollywood tape exposing his habit of groping women, the mocking of a disabled journalist, the xenophobic Muslim ban, calling white supremacists “very fine people”, the abduction and caging of innocent children, the destruction of environmental protections, the denial of the climate threat, the shredding of all ethical norms, the open defiance of laws, the appointment of racists and thugs to high office, the pardoning of war criminals, the decimation of government institutions and policies, the betrayal of allies, the subversion of American democracy, the celebration of despots, and blind obedience to Vladimir Putin – and much, much more – everything Trump has done has established him as a person of truly monumental vice. And yet, something like 40% of American voters still support him reliably, including many who have been grievously hurt by his policies and know that they have been hurt. Why? And how should those who cannot stand Trump relate to them? Read more »