by Tim Sommers

A 2011 survey by Michael Norton and Dan Ariely, of Harvard’s Business School, found that the average American thinks the richest 25% of Americans own 59% of the wealth, while the bottom fifth owns 9%. In fact, the richest 20% own 84% of the wealth, and the bottom 40% controls only 0.3%. An avalanche of studies has since confirmed these basic facts: Americans radically underestimate the amount of wealth inequality that exists – and the level of inequality they think is fair is lower than actual inequality in America probably has ever been. As journalist Chrystia Freeland put it, “Americans actually live in Russia, although they think they live in Sweden. And they would like to live on a kibbutz.”

Thomas Piketty ramped up the inequality debate, a couple of years later, with “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, a massive 250-year survey of wealth inequality. He discovered that r > g. That is, the rate of return on investment is always greater than growth. The rich really are getting richer – and the poor? Well, not so much. The post-war middle-class, Piketty warned, may well have been a historical anomaly. Economic inequality is likely to get worse – and never get better – without coordinated international action. The good news is that not one, but two, serious candidates in the current Democratic Presidential Primary are endorsing versions of Piketty’s “Wealth Tax” – Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. (And, by the way, the English-translation of Piketty’s latest book, “Capital & Ideology” is due out in March.)

So, what should the distribution of wealth be? What does justice have to say about wealth inequality? Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

We are all aware that from amongst the vast diversity of life forms that inhabit the earth, human beings are exceptional. But while human beings are capable of inexhaustible creativity and goodness, they also have the potential to commit the most heinous acts and demeaning of fellow human beings. Accounting for such a phenomenon in the human condition and the committing of abominable acts towards their own species, is an issue that perplexes many. Perhaps the answer to such a question can be found by studying the genes or analysing the brain functioning of the perpetrators, but that could involve investigating entire populations who knowingly condone or participate in such acts. A simpler answer could be that human beings have yet to evolve into a species that is incapable of acts of inhumanity. David Livingstone Smith’s book Less than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others offers us insight into the processes  that lead to the  designating of fellow human beings as ‘subhuman’ and makes possible the potential for human beings to perpetrate acts that can only be considered as evil.

Crucial to Livingston Smith’s argument is the concept of dehumanisation.He defines the term as ‘the act of conceiving of people as subhuman creatures rather than as human beings’, and it has two components: thinking in terms of what people lack, and as thinking of them as less than human. While people might be dehumanised in different ways, as for example, the objectification of women, Livingstone Smith is concerned with the dehumanisation of peoples that enables the perpetration of genocide, slavery, and war. Read more »

A couple of years ago I accompanied my friend (and 3QD colleague) Morgan Meis to Basel, Switzerland, so he could look at this painting called The Fate of the Animals by Franz Marc as part of some research he was doing for a book. I took this photo of him and thought it made a nice visual metaphor for looking back at this past year which will conclude tomorrow. Happy New Year, People!

Avery Singer. Untitled (Monday) 2017.

Acrylic on canvas stretched over wood panel.

More here, here, and here.

Dr. Mustafa Çetiner is well-known for his research in Hematology and has published numerous articles in different national and international journals and three books on Hematological Malignancies. He was the chairman of the Turkish Hematology Society Bone Marrow Deficiency Scientific Subcommittee during 2014-2018. He is a member of many national and international associations, including Turkish Hematology Association, American Society of Hematology, European Bone Marrow Transplantation Registry. He is one of the founders of the Cancer Fighters Association and is currently a board member and vice president. Dr. Çetiner is currently working as Professor of Hematology at Acibadem Maslak Hospital in Turkey, Istanbul.

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 Charlie Huenemann

GENIE: AT LAST! Esteemed Master, you have released me from the ancient lamp! Out of my boundless gratitude, I shall grant you three wishes!

TRAVELER: No thanks, I’m good.

GENIE: Wait, what?

TRAVELER: I’m good. No granting of wishes needed. Have a nice day.

GENIE: But, Master, you must understand that you can wish for anything it is in my power to grant – and let me tell you, that power is enormous!

TRAVELER: I’m sure it is. But I’ve heard all the stories about you genies and the way you grant wishes, and I’d like no part of it.

GENIE: What do you mean, Honored Master?

TRAVELER: Well, you genies are tricky. I might wish to play the piano, but you’ll grant it and then stick me out on a desert island, or you’ll make me deaf so I can’t hear my own playing. Or I’ll wish for a pile of money, but then I’ll go to jail for tax fraud, or the money will be in some outdated currency. Or I’ll ask for a great army to command, and you’ll give me an army of frogs. So no thanks, I’ll have no part of it. Too risky!

GENIE: Well … true, that sort of thing has happened from time to time. But only when there is a lesson to be learned. And let me say that sometimes it is the wisher’s own fault for not being more specific! Like the man who wished to be a great opera singer – how was I supposed to know he didn’t want to be a soprano? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Mary Hrovat

The indicators that people use to track and understand their moods include exercise, diet, sleep, and many others. I’ve been thinking recently that my library activity surely must be correlated with my mood. I’m a frequent user of two libraries, and my checkouts and returns have a fairly small and regular ebb and flow. Overlying these minor fluctuations are larger and more diffuse patterns that I think offer clues to my inner state.

Reading the clues can be complicated. If there’s a connection between mood and library activity or reading, it’s not clear-cut. But that’s true of various other markers that people track. For example, sometimes I get a lot of exercise because I’m filled with energy and relish the physical pleasure of walking and observing. At other times, a high step count reflects the fact that I’m restless and anxious; part of me is hoping that if I walk far enough, I can out-walk my problems or maybe even myself. Sometimes I push myself to get out a lot even if I feel exhausted and sick at heart, because I hope the exercise will lighten my mood or help me sleep. And sometimes, of course, I walk a lot because there are many errands to run, and I don’t drive.

The depression questionnaire they use at my doctor’s office asks about seemingly contradictory things; one question asks whether you’ve either lost your appetite or been overeating, for example, and another asks if you’re sleeping more or less. I don’t know if that means that depression can either enhance or suppress appetite, or whether people respond to depression by shunning food or seeking comfort from it, or (most likely) a little of both. It can be very hard to tell symptoms from attempts to treat symptoms. Read more »

by Rafiq Kathwari

A Jewish grandfather and a Muslim man walk into a New York delicatessen….and 55 years later the Muslim man writes a trailblazing autobiography.

He’s scrawny when he leaves his native home in the Vale of Kashmir, a disputed land in the Himalayan foothills between India and Pakistan. He dodges an impending war. He has no formal passport, just an official residency permit which expired many years ago.

Yet, he takes a chance and, amazingly, boards the last flight from Delhi to Lahore before war breaks out.…it’s an electrifying moment among many, some heartbreaking, some joyful, others human, all too human.

Those moments lead one to believe that the young man was destined for the future of his adopted home, America, where his grit and pluck, his trysts with good luck, his innate belief in common sense all combined to feed his fire within before the fire could feed on him.

Read, how many years ago the Jewish grandfather saw the hunger in the eyes of the Muslim man and sent him on a Mission Impossible to Washington D.C.

Muslim man made the impossible possible, earning the trust of his Jewish mentor who, soon after, handed over the captaincy of his quintessentially Yankee company— Ethan Allen (named after a hero of the American Revolution) — that he had founded during the Great Depression to the young Muslim man named Farooq — which in Islamic tradition means “The Redeemer” or “the one who distinguishes between right and wrong.”

Read how Farooq brought his only previous role as captain (of his college cricket team in his native Kashmir) to bear upon his new captaincy of Ethan Allen in Danbury, Connecticut, its headquarters. Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

This semester I’ve been teaching a first year seminar entitled “Propaganda”. It is, unfortunately, a very timely topic.

The course draws first year students from across the spectrum of majors — some up-and-coming humanities majors, but also economists, natural scientists and engineers. Because of that mix, and because of the fact that I can’t really expect that many of the students have been exposed to philosophical thinking in their pre-college careers, I try to use the course as an opportunity to introduce the students to a little bit of how philosophy is done.

Having taught the course over a few iterations now, I’ve had an opportunity to observe a few different reactions on the part of my students to the bit of philosophy that we engage in in the course. There’s some dismissiveness, of course, on the part of some of the students, but I’ve also noted surprise on the part of some of the students in response to my own stance about how modest the fruits of philosophy often are.

I think that many of the students expect me to claim more for philosophy and what it can achieve. Perhaps they expect me to declaim dramatically that there is no such thing as truth. Instead, I’m more than happy to assert a variety of truths: that human-caused global warming is a genuine phenomenon, for example, or that vaccines don’t cause autism, or that human beings are the result of evolution by natural selection. But I also take pains to try to expose the assumptions on which those assertions of mine rely. And I also try to trace how different assumptions — including about what counts as good evidence — might lead someone to have different beliefs.

What I hope to achieve with the way that I deploy philosophy in the course is to get students to appreciate the value of intellectual humility. I want them to recognize how rigorous and exacting intellectual humility can be. It involves excavating the hidden premises that underlie our beliefs. It is also compatible with maintaining our belief in the truth of those premises, while at the same time acknowledging that those who accept different, incompatible premises, will arrive at different beliefs. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

When you opened the door to the apartment where I grew up, you could see all the way to the end of the living room and the large window that spanned its width, an entryway-less structure typical of apartment buildings in Tel Aviv. Our living room was particularly long, though, so that my father’s desk, which sat close to the window but facing the middle of the room, felt far enough away to be considered its own space, set apart from the bustle of a three-kids household that was also my mother’s in-home clinic. Add to the physical distance my father’s ability to immerse himself in whatever he was reading, ignoring anything that was not a direct address to him (one of those universal dad superpowers, my mothering self now knows), and he was almost completely cordoned off from the rest of us when he was sitting at his desk, as if behind a door ajar.

Even when his reading lamp was the only light on in the big room, it was possible to consider his almost immobile figure as not quite there. When my first boyfriend stepped into the apartment for the first time, however, he most definitely recognized my father’s dimly-lit, looming professor-like presence at the edge of the room. He was what you would call “a good kid”—I, in hindsight, have taken to defining him, even at 19, as a mensch—and he took the prospective meeting with my dad seriously. My father, for his part, preferred to act as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. He put down his glasses, looked up to say a short hello, and then resumed his reading, a combination of simply holding on to his business-as-usual seat at his desk, deliberately extending the gift of privacy to his late-bloomer daughter, and a possibly unconscious urge to avoid the awkwardness of the encounter.

Maybe he also knew, in a parental sixth-sense which I used to think only my mother had but of which I can now also imagine a paternal version, that this very nice guy wasn’t the love of my life—that he was not going to sweep me away, there was really nothing to worry about. So there was no menacing handshake, no steely look into the young man’s eyes to force him to own up to his mythically filthy intentions and metaphorical abduction of my father’s youngest, no once-over to assess his prospective ability to provide for me. In short, no forced and embarrassing macho face-off.  Read more »

Martin Roth. “from may to june 2012 i grew grass on rugs in a castle”.

” …This state of in-between is central to his Persian rugs on which grass grows “on the ‘dust of history’.” They were inspired by philosopher Michel Foucault’s examination of “heterotopias,” spaces that both exist and do not exist. Since the designs of carpets were first patterned after gardens, Foucault wrote that “the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space.”

More here and here.