by Dave Maier

Here we have either a) a holiday gift guide; b) just another ordinary book roundup; or c) a bunch of mini-reviews each of which just didn’t have the oomph to deserve its own post. Answer provided below!

First up:

Theodore M. Bernstein – Miss Thistlebottom’s Hobgoblins: The Careful Writer’s Guide to the Taboos, Bugbears, and Outmoded Rules of English Usage (1971)

Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum – A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (2005)

I rarely read Columbia’s alumni magazine, but I did happen to see an interesting exchange (“Verbal Dispute”) in the Feedback section of the Fall 2019 issue. Apparently the cover of the previous issue had read “About 8 million tons of plastic ends up in the ocean every year,” and, perhaps not surprisingly, numerous quasi-literate chuckleheads had conveyed their righteous outrage at the offense to grammar so publicly displayed. Two are quoted; one explains to us that “‘Tons’ is a plural subject that takes the plural verb ‘end up,” continuing witheringly, “Are you a native English speaker? From California? [ooh, snap!] Are you intent on sabotaging Columbia or unqualified and irresponsible?” and so on.

The editor’s response is at once coolly civil and delectably devastating.

While it is certainly true that “end up” is the standard plural form, a singular verb is often used instead when the subject is a phrase that can be viewed as a single unit. This is particularly common when the subject is an expression of quantity or measure, as in “eight million tons.”

He then provides supporting examples from the above authors. I’ve listed the Huddleston and Pullum book I own; the actual quote is from their previous work, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (2002), on which the former is based. Their examples are simply brutal. (Try to say these sentences out loud with the plural form of the verb; you won’t even be able to.)

Twenty dollars seems a ridiculous amount to pay to go to the movies. Five miles is rather more than I want to walk this afternoon. Three eggs is plenty. [Yow.]

From Bernstein’s book (which I immediately ordered upon reading this):

You would not [or, you know, maybe you would, if you were a quasi-literate chucklehead] write “Three inches of snow have fallen,” because you are not thinking of individual inches; you are thinking of a quantity of snow that accumulates to that depth. Likewise you would not write “About $10,000 were added to the cost of the project,” because again you are thinking of a sum of money, not of individual dollars.

I’m tempted to quote as well what Huddleston and Pullum say about singular uses of “they,” because it also combines definitive analysis with deliciously polite snark, but let’s move on. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Godfrey points the Land Rover toward Ngorongoro Crater. The road is fine to lull the unwary, but before you know it there is one lane, then no tarmac, then mud and potholes and empty hills.

Close cropped with a natty little mustache, Godfrey is kempt, forties, paunch-softened,  with an easy smile. A veteran guide, he has been here before. Says it will take five hours to do the 250 kilometers to the crater and so it does.

No package tour jets preceded us when we flew into Kilimanjaro International Airport aboard a small plane from Nairobi, so the airport bank wasn’t open. Consequently, we have no Tanzanian Shillings.

Oxen pull plows across the fields. Buses are occasional and private cars are rarer than cows. At the time of this visit (several years ago), the road is primarily for foot traffic, human and animal. No matter how far from a village, people are everywhere walking on the roads, always. They only move to the verge, reluctantly, when a Land Rover thunders by.

The few vehicles you do pass are either chock full of ride-sharing local folks, or they’re hauling two or three white Europeans on safari, or maybe they’re jeeps that read something like, “Africa Wildlife Research Project, funded by Belgian government.”

What do you know, way out here Godfrey knows where to buy a few beers. Two hot Tuskers from Kenya, two hot Safari beers from Tanzania, a roadside bodega, no power, no refrigeration, just a handful of dusty beers on a shelf for four for five dollars at an anonymous shack, friendly enough, opaque to a stranger. Godfrey’s got this round. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently, how we regulate our minds. It can be simply things, like listening to some music, taking a walk, taking a few deep breaths, a time-out, maybe we take in a movie, or have some coffee, wine or liquor? perhaps smoke some weed – it’s legal now in America, at least in some states. Maybe one meditates, perhaps every now and then, perhaps daily; perhaps you go on a retreat for a week, a month, two or three. One can see a shrink, get a prescription or two. Read a good novel? Take an evening class at the local community college. For that matter, isn’t education about training the mind?

It’s what we do, one of the things. Regulating the mind. The list could grow and grow.

But I’ve got something more specific in mind. I’m interested in those various moments either when: one’s mind impresses itself on you as a stranger, as something perhaps a little perhaps a lot foreign, or you take a leap to see whether or not your mind will catch you. Welcome to your mind. And welcome to the world.

Herewith I offer a collection of experiences. I’m embarrassed to say that they’re my own. I don’t regard them as particularly special. They’re just the experiences I know about. They span my life from about age four to perhaps thirty.

We all have such liminal experiences, each in our own way.

Fiddle-De-Dee

That’s the earliest more or less distinct memory I’ve got, Burl Ives singing that song. I’m told I played the record over and over, on one occasion driving my visiting Uncle Harry to distraction. As I note in the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil, “It is my mind’s tether to history, my umbilical to the world.“

Since that particular experience happened at the house on Cherry Lane, I would have to have been four years old or so at the time. Though, come to think of it, there is an exceedingly vague impression of the house in Ellsworth, where we’d lived before moving to Cherry Lane in Johnstown, Pa. Read more »

Fane Alm, South Tyrol, in October of 2013.

by Sarah Firisen

When I moved into a new, larger apartment with my boyfriend a couple of months ago, I decided to buy a Roomba, robot vacuum cleaner. I named her Joanne. I love Joanne, my boyfriend is less of a fan. He finds her hour and a half or so a day moving around the apartment to be intrusive. He doesn’t appreciate me going around beforehand and picking his things off the floor so that she doesn’t get caught in them. When I was at work one day and she got stuck, it was a toss up whether he was going to rescue her or not – he did, but grudgingly. He says to me, “Why does she have to vacuum every day? You don’t vacuum every day”. My response, “Let’s set the bar a little higher than my housekeeping”. And it’s true, Joanne does takes a long time to do what I can do pretty quickly. And she can’t, and doesn’t get to every spot. On the other hand, she can get to spots under cabinets, or beds, that I can’t, or at least don’t get to. Does she clean as well in one session as a professional cleaner would? No. Does she clean better over the course of a week than I do, definitely. Read more »

by Scott Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

I.

The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk. That’s a philosophical chestnut attributed to the German idealist, G.W.F. Hegel. It’s a poetic way of saying that wisdom is achieved only in hindsight. The Owl of Minerva, the representation of the goddess of wisdom, begins its activity only at the end of the day, only once the deeds in need of wisdom’s guidance are done. Our plan here is to present what we see as a central feature of why the Owl of Minerva must fly only at dusk and then turn that critical thought to some, by our lights, unjustifiably optimistic calls for public philosophy.

Let’s start with a pretty intuitive distinction between different kinds of things. There are, on the one hand, things that behave how they do independently of how we talk about them or how we classify them. So, Helium behaves that way it does regardless of who we talk about it or classify it. The same goes for plenty of other things – planets, microbes, physical substances, and so on. They take no heed of what we think about them and just do their own thing. On the other hand, there are things that behave differently when we classify or talk about them differently. For example, people are that way. If you talk about a group or an individual and they hear about it, they will often start behaving differently in light of what you said. Ian Hacking calls these two different kinds of things indifferent and interactive kinds, respectively. Interactive kinds are such that “the classification and the individual classified interact.”

But interaction isn’t a one-way street. When it comes to interactive kinds, how they behave can change how we think about them, too. There’s an informational loop, then, between our concepts of interactive kinds and individuals of those kinds. That looping phenomenon between concepts and kinds occasions interesting diachronic phenomena. In essence, our concepts of interactive kinds, so long as individuals of those kinds are responsive to the content of those concepts, will change the behavior of those individuals. The kind, because it is interactive with the concept, will, from the perspective of the conceptualizer, be a moving target. Our concepts, with interactive kinds, then, will always be incomplete, because as we develop them and make them explicit, we end up changing the way the interactive kind behaves. Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Each year my department hosts an all-day event for high school students interested in math. Nowadays we have approximately 400 students and 20-30 teachers join us from all across Oklahoma and north Texas. Some drive 2+ hours each way to come!

The students’ goal? Probably getting out of class is high on the list :-).

Our goal is for the students to have fun and see interesting math they are likely to have never seen before. More generally we hope the students see math as a lively, engaging, and creative subject with lots of interesting open questions which are areas of active research. It’s meant to be an antidote to the dusty, rigid, cut-and-dry subject they usually see in an educational system focused on standardized tests and the like.

The highlight of the day, at least for me, is a talk by a visiting mathematician chosen for their reputation as an excellent speaker. It gives me an all-to-rare chance to hear a non-technical introduction to some cool math. This year we had the pleasure of hosting Diana Davis. Dr. Davis earned her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2013 and is now faculty at Swarthmore College. She gave a fantastic talk about playing billiards on a pentagonal billiard table.

Since we are mathematicians who are untroubled by the real world, we will always assume there is no friction nor spin to our billiard balls. This means the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection and a ball can bounce around the table forever. We’ll also assume the table has no pockets and the ball never hits a corner. This is because our interest will be in understanding the trajectories a ball could take as it bounces around the table and pockets and corners would cause complications. A fundamental first question is if there is always a periodic trajectory: that is, a path that eventually repeats itself and, hence, repeats over and over forever. Read more »

Tavares Strachan. Untitled. 2014-15.

Neon sculpture.

More here, here, and here.

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

From whatever quarter the scientist comes to the study of human behavior – psychology, sociology, education – he finds that the unwise behavior of the mother has had much to do with the wrong starting of the personality trend. —Ernest R. Groves and Gladys Hoagland Groves (1928)¹

Childrearing practices in the United States underwent a radical alteration during a period from the last decade of the nineteenth century through the first few decades of the twentieth. In 1929, psychologists William Blatz and Helen Bott looked back on the changes they credited to Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, whose childcare manual was first published in 1894 and continued to come out in new editions every few years:

The publication of Dr. Holt’s Care and Feeding of Children marked an epoch. . . . Previous to this mothers had brought their children up by rule of thumb, the child’s demands being the gauge of the mother’s behavior. Thus, if the baby cried he was fed, if he was fretful he was rocked or dandled, if he had colic he was walked the floor with, this being accepted as all in the day’s work in bringing up a baby. All this Dr. Holt and his followers significantly changed. Instead of the baby’s demands, the rule laid down by the specialist prescribed the rule for the mother to follow.²

The subtitle of Holt’s book was A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses. In it, in question and answer form, he taught mothers to apply in their own homes the lessons which he had learned as the first attending physician at the New York Babies’ Hospital. Those lessons included that all babies were to be fed the same quantities at the same intervals and put to sleep at precisely the same time every day. Infants who were hungry when it was not feeding time would have to wait; those who were sleeping when it was feeding time would be awakened. Practically from birth infants were to be held over chamber pots twice a day, with a piece of soap introduced into their rectums to induce a bowel movement. By this method Holt claimed that the baby could be trained to regular action of the bowels by three or four months of age. Read more »

by Anitra Pavlico

I recently read Jill Lepore’s This America–which she describes as a “long essay,” calling on historians to begin again to tell stories about America to counter the rise of nationalism in the country, to bring about “a new Americanism, as tough-minded and openhearted as the nation at its best.” She writes that patriotism is not the same as nationalism: “Patriotism is animated by love, nationalism by hatred.” Lepore quotes Stanford historian Carl N. Degler, who at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in 1986 accused his colleagues of abandoning the study of the nation. Degler warned that if historians failed to “provide a nationally defined history, others less critical and less informed will take over the job for us.” As Michael Lind points out in his review of This America, Lepore has made clear in other venues that she has problems with the “very lefty history that can’t find a source of inspiration in the nation’s past and therefore can’t really plot a path forward to power.” The left has renounced patriotism to such an extent as to leave a vacuum that the right has filled.

In recent decades, many individuals who were previously underrepresented in the history academy began to write about the experiences of their ancestors, both in this country and in their countries of origin. The study of American history took a turn toward globalism, cosmopolitanism, and individualism. In the late 20th century, many historians felt that by studying the American nation they would prop up nationalism, which many believed was on the wane. As we now know, nationalism has not died, as evidenced by the rise of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Rodrigo Duterte, Jair Bolsonaro, and many others. Far from it.

Lepore has arguably directed This America not only at her fellow historians but at all Americans, urging us to begin to see ourselves again as part of a nation with a history that is worthy of being remembered as positive and illustrious–overall. She does not gloss over the negative by any means. Lepore paints the current battle of ideas in America as nationalism versus liberalism. Liberalism, “a very good idea: that all people are equal and endowed from birth with inalienable rights and entitled to equal treatment”–was not a feature of the United States at the beginning of its nationhood. How are historians to square this fact with Lepore’s call for a renewed focus on telling a story of American liberalism to counter the rise of nationalism in the form it has taken in the last century? That is their quandary and ours to wrestle with.  Read more »

Dr. Joseph Jurcic specializes in the research of acute myeloid leukemia, radioimmunotherapy with alpha and beta particle-emitting radioisotopes, monoclonal antibody therapy for leukemia, and the molecular monitoring of minimal residual disease. His work focuses on the treatment of acute and chronic leukemias, myeloproliferative neoplasms, and myelodysplastic syndrome. He received the 2001 Louis and Allston Boyer Young Investigator Award for Distinguished Achievement in Biomedical Research from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. Dr. Jurcic is currently Professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and Director of the Hematologic Malignancies Section of the Division of Hematology/Oncology with over 80 articles and book chapters 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 Lisa Herzog, Stephan Jonas, Philipp Kellmeyer, Karola Kreitmair, Michael Klenk, Eva Kuhn, and Kai Spiekermann

Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Google, often referred to as Big Tech, know more about you than your closest friends and family. They know who you are talking to and what you are talking about, what you are buying or are thinking of buying, how much money you have, and what your fears and desires are. What a few years ago may have sounded like a dystopic vision, is today a reality of our online life (our ‘onlife’). In this setting, even Facebook’s plans of introducing their own currency, Libra, does not seem out of the ordinary.

While users of digital technology operate on an implicit assumption of trust this trust is misguided. The trouble is not merely that a given company records user behaviour within its own digital ecosystem but that companies integrate virtually all of our online activities from a plethora of sources, thereby making us transparent and vulnerable to observation, manipulation, and exploitation.

Tracking personal data streams has become the dominant business model of the web. What this means is that when a service is ‘free’ on the web, your data is the payment that sustains the business model. In this internet of humans, in which personal data have become the most valuable commodity, we have no meaningful control over who has access to such information and no power to amend, correct, or withdraw it. In light of recent push-back against online privacy violations, e.g. Facebook losing users and facing a $5bn fine after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, as well as a growing public animosity towards big tech (so-called tech-lash), companies have learned that user privacy concerns could hurt their revenue streams and thus should not be ignored. Unsurprisingly, most proposals by tech representatives intended to address these issues involve a thorough revision of privacy laws and some form of making money by selling privacy privileges, such as subscription models that permit the use of apps without providing data or enduring ads.

One could argue that people concerned with their privacy should just stop using online services altogether. But given the pervasiveness of interconnected digital technology, this is unrealistic. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Brooks Riley

A long time ago, on a mountainside in Liechtenstein, I tuned my transistor radio to the Deutschlandfunk, one of neighboring Germany’s state radio stations whose broadcast range leaked into that tiny country. This is what I heard:

Hier ist der Deutschlandfunk, heute aus der Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee.

It wasn’t the fact that the station was transmitting country music, a treat for the Virginia girl far from home. It was the announcer’s voice that enthralled me and the language it spoke. There was an elegance, a muted, dependable deep resonance, a flow of words with a rhythmic logic that made me long to be able to speak that way. It sounded noble, above the fray, measured and meaningful. I could imagine that voice reciting Shakespeare or Schiller or Rilke.

This was not the ‘Achtung!’ German most Americans know from movies about the Nazis, or newsreels of Hitler speeches, or parodies of authoritarian figures in uniform. And despite the subject at hand—a country music broadcast—the voice-over did not try to mimic the jovial downhome twang of the good-ole-boy announcer from my deep South. It could just as well have been narrating a classical music concert from an ‘opry’ closer to home.

I added German to my bucket list that day. Read more »

by Adele  A Wilby

Biographies frequently provide us with insights into individual characters in a way that autobiographies might not: the third person narrator offers the prospect of greater ‘objectivity’ when evaluating and narrating information and events and circumstances.  And so it is with Paul Avrich and Karen Avrich’s Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman,and Katie Kirkpatrick’s Becoming Beauvoir: A Life.These two books provide a wealth of knowledge on the political and philosophical thinking that engaged the brilliant minds of two significant women of the twentieth century: Emma Goldman and Simone Beauvoir.

The life trajectories of the two women could not have been more different: Goldman was a Jewish Russian émigré to the United States; she learned her politics through experience and in that process clarified her political thinking on anarchism, and her life was lived humbly. Beauvoir on the other hand, was from a bourgeois Catholic family and benefited from a formal education and she lived life relatively comfortably. However, despite their divergent lifestyles and politics, similarities can be drawn between their thinking on women, love and freedom.

There is literature available on these issues, but Goldman and Beauvoir were prepared to live the principles they espoused in the early twentieth century. For both women, freedom was central to their thinking and shaped the way they lived their lives. Consequently, their personal relationships were unconventional:  they had many lovers and loves, including, in the case of Beauvoir, female lovers. Nevertheless, they were able to sustain a relationship with one man in particular throughout their lifetimes:  Alexander Berkman in the case of Emma Goldman, and Jean Paul Sartre in the case of Simone de Beauvoir. Commenting on her first encounter with Berkman, Goldman says, ‘a deep love for him welled up in my heart… a feeling of certainty that our lives were linked for all time’. Beauvoir also identified something special in her meeting of Sartre: she was prepared to enter into a ‘pact’ with Sartre that was premised on a love for each other. The ‘pact’ would separate their relationship from ‘lesser’ lovers: their love would be what Sartre termed an ‘essential love’, and they were then free to pursue their open relationship unburdened of the constraints of monogamy and marriage.

However, as we learn from Avrich and Avrich and Kirkpatrick the sexual relationship between these enduring couples eventually came to an end. Read more »

Pedestrian underpass for crossing the main road through the town of Freienfeld in the South Tyrol. Photo taken in November, 2019.

by Tim Sommers

Suppose you had some undeniable proof of the Everettian or Many-Worlds Interpretation (MWI) of quantum mechanics. You would know, then, that there are very many, uncountably many, parallel worlds and that in very many of these there are many, many nearly identical versions of you – as well as many less-closely related “you’s” in still other worlds. Would this change the way you think about yourself and your life? How? Would you take the decisions that you make more or less seriously?

Consider Larry Niven’s 1971 take on that question. In a fitting contrast to the infinite multiplication of actions implied by the existence of a quantum multiverse, his story, “All the Myriad Ways”, consists entirely of a solitary police detective sitting alone and trying to puzzle out why a rash of unexplained suicides has accompanied the discovery of multiple, parallel universes. He begins to think that people see the existence of a world corresponding to every possible choice they might make as undermining the idea that they have any choice at all. In the end, he puts his own gun to his head – and all of the possible outcomes of that occur at once. I think there is more than one way of understanding this story. It’s not necessarily that people are inspired to take a fatalistic attitude by the knowledge of other worlds, it’s that just by recognizing that suicide is one of the possible outcomes, it becomes one of the things that will happen in some world or another.

But there may be a basic misunderstanding about quantum parallel universes lurking there. The splitting of universes has nothing to do with you and your decisions. Subatomic quantum events cause the universe to split, not you. You can, however, cause the universe to split whenever you make a decision by tying that decision to a quantum event. There’s an app for that. (Warning! This app only works if the MWI of Quantum Mechanics is correct.) Anyway, in the end, it’s not clear that it matters what causes the universe to split since it is splitting so often and so fast that it should create plenty enough parallel universes to cover all the decisions you could possibly make.

How should you feel about this? Read more »