A closeup of the very sharp horizontal snow line on the mountain Riol in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, with winter creeping down from above while autumn lingers below. Photo taken in the golden light of the early morning sun in November of 2019.

by Mindy Clegg

Welcome to the future, which is now the past. As James Gleick argued (in his thoughtful and entertaining book, Time Travel: A History) the concept of the future is now fodder for historical understanding. As Gleick notes in his book, popular culture provides a key insight into how ideas about the future shaped the past, present, and the actual future.¹

Pop culture during the twentieth century has long imagined the near and far future. Such imaginings became a running gag for talk show host Conan O’Brien. Back in the late 1990s, he started a new segment on his show, called “In the Year 2000.” It started first with him and his co-host Andy Richter (and later guests he was interviewing) donning collars and lighting up their faces with flashlights, while the band played futuristic sounding music in the background. Then, a round of predictions based on current events, ridiculous and silly predictions, all set to happen in the far off future of the year 2000. This bit continued well into the new millennium. Only during O’Brien’s all too-short stint hosting the famed Tonight Show did the format change to predict events in the year 3000 (with Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner providing a regular voice over—although once it was Lt. Sulu instead, George Takei).

The joke revolved around the idea that the future was already here, but the year “2000” still sounds pretty futuristic. Plus, it plays on how we viewed the future across the breadth of the twentieth century, as culminating in a utopia of technological progress, inevitably leading to social progress. Think Disney’s Epcot Center or Gene Roddenberry’s hopeful, post-scarcity, racially unified vision of the future in Star Trek. But O’Brien also pointed to a new phenomenon, when dates from popular culture in what was once the future recede into the past. I argue in this essay that the future we imagined in the past both shaped the present and contradicts it. This becomes clearest when we examine how some science fiction films or TV shows imagined a future date in our recent past. I’ll take three examples, the first being the classic anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion (set in 2015). The second is Ridley Scott’s classic adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Blade Runner (set in 2019). Last will be two events in the Star Trek universe: one set in our recent past (the Eugenics Wars) and one in the near future (the Bell riots). Read more »

by Michael Liss

Economics. The dismal science. All those numbers and graphs, formulas and derivations, tombstone-sized copies of Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus’s Macroeconomics (now apparently in its 19th edition), and memories of the detritus that came with them: half-filled coffee cups and overfilled ashtrays, mechanical pencils and HP-45s.

As you might imagine, with that as background, I approached Willful: How We Choose What We Do with a bit of primal trepidation, something deep inside my limbic system. To add to my anxiety, I had just seen a review of the latest Piketty missive under the ominous headline “Thomas Piketty’s new War and Peace-sized book…” and wondered what kind of dense read I was getting myself into.

I was wrong. Once Mr. Robb’s book was in my hands, I realized that I was looking at an entirely different animal, one that didn’t scream at or lecture you, but, in calm, measured tones laid out a fairly remarkable thesis—that existing, accepted theories of why we do things (such as the redoubtable “Rational Choice”) don’t tell the whole story.  We aren’t all calculating machines all the time, either consciously or subconsciously doing the math to maximize the return from each transaction. Rather, as humans, we can be motivated by individual, personal factors that have meaning and value to us beyond just what a rational choice analysis might direct. These factors go into the process of what Mr. Robb calls “For-Itself Choice.”  Read more »

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao
If you name it, it’s something else

What can’t be named is eternal
Naming splits the eternal to smithereens
…………………………… —Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC

Lao Tzu’s Lament

at first I think, I’ve got it!
then I think, Ah no, that’s not it
I think, it’s more like a flaming arrow
shot into the marrow
of the bony part of everything

………. but some summer nights
………. it’s hanging overhead so bright

then right there I lose it
I let geometry and time confuse it
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing

………. but some summer nights
………. it’s croaking from a pond so right

then again I lose it
let theology and time confuse it
then it’s silent and won’t sing a thing

……………….. I’m thinking I’ve been here before
……………….. feet two inches off the floor
……………….. I’m thinking, is this something true?

sometimes I think, I’ve lost it!
though I never could exhaust it
because it’s lower than low is
and wider than wide is
deeper than deep is
higher than high is

………. but some fresh spring days
………. it’s cuttin’ through the fog and the haze

……………….. I’m thinking I’ve been here before
……………….. feet two inches off the floor
……………….. I’m thinking, is this something true?

by Jim Culleny, 6/15/15
Copyright: Jim Culleny, 6/23/15

by Eric J. Weiner

The word “schlep” comes from the Yiddish “schlepn,” which means to drag or haul. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a schlepper, although it couldn’t hurt. Amidst the deepening economic and political inequities informing everyday life, schlepping is one of the great social equalizers. To see a person in the subway or on the street, schlepless as it were, can be a bit disorienting. Who is this person who can travel so unencumbered? He (and it’s almost always a “he”) must be wealthy and powerful beyond imagination: A king or prince? A tech-guru? A hip-hop mogul? A cannabis hedge fund manager? Maybe he’s a mysterious, self-identified “founder” flush with new money and the freedom from schlepping it buys. Maybe he has “people” to schlep for him. They must be “professional” schleppers undoubtedly paid below a living-wage to schlep things they could never afford to schlep themselves.

Yet at the same time, I look upon this extravagantly empty-handed man-king with a degree of benevolent pity. Nothing to schlep must make traveling through the world an empty, meaningless experience. Absent the things he doesn’t carry how would he know not only where he is but who he is? It is true that we may be more than the sum total of what we schlep, but take away the stuff we schlep and it becomes difficult to know where the measure of who and where we are even begins.

Providing the theoretical and methodological foundation for such an analysis of the things we schlep, Stuart Hall’s (1997) seminal analysis of the Sony Walkman articulates the things people schlep to a general theory of culture itself. For Hall, the things we schlep represent a kind of language and as a consequence the study of cultural artifacts hold enormous promise in helping us understand complex systems of representation, meaning and power. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Hydroglyphs with black fish, Ubud, Bali, 2019.

Digital photograph.

by John Schwenkler

This is the second in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding.

My first post in this series explained how philosophy can aim to help us become articulate about things we already understand at a practical or intuitive level, much as drawing a map makes explicit the knowledge we have in being able to find our way around a certain place.

At the end of the post I considered several objections to this project, including that it is too conservative and uncritical to count as a philosophical endeavor. According to this objection, the project I envisioned is inadequate because of the way takes our ordinary ways of thinking for granted and isn’t concerned to replace our philosophical beliefs with better ones. At the end of this post I will explain again why I think this objection misfires, but first I want to discuss a different approach to philosophy that has an opposite orientation in these respects, and consequently takes a quite different stance on the value of “common sense.”

The opening lines to the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes’ classic philosophical text, the Meditations on First Philosophy, capture beautifully the attractiveness of this alternative philosophical project. Descartes titled his first meditation, “Of the things which may be brought within the sphere of the doubtful,” and it begins as follows:

It is now some years since I detected how many were the false beliefs that I had from my earliest youth admitted as true, and how doubtful was everything I had since constructed on this basis; and from that time I was convinced that I must once for all seriously undertake to rid myself of all the opinions which I had formerly accepted, and commence to build anew from the foundation, if I wanted to establish any firm and permanent structure in the sciences.

Many people know of the famous thought experiment that Descartes develops in the subsequent pages, in which he imagines that all his thoughts and perceptions are the product of “an evil genius … [who] has employed his whole energies in deceiving me.” For Descartes, the purpose of this thought experiment was to rein in the habits of credulity that had led him in his youth to admit false things as true ones. He was instead to adopt a skeptical attitude, believing only those things whose truth he could see for himself in a “clear and distinct” way. Read more »

Dr Robert Gallo, a biomedical researcher, is renowned for his role in the discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the infectious agent responsible for AIDS and in the development of HIV blood tests. He co-founded Profectus BioSciences, Inc., a biotechnology company. Profectus develops and commercializes technologies to reduce the morbidity and mortality caused by human viral diseases. He is also a co-founder and scientific director of Global Virus Network. He is the director and co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. In November 2011, Dr Gallo was named the first Homer & Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine.

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 Rafaël Newman

In the spring of 1991 I crossed the German-Polish border at Görlitz and travelled through Zgorzelec, the city’s one-time other half across the river Neisse, into Poland.

The Gulf War had just ended, and the streets of Berlin, where I was spending the year at the Freie Universität, were still littered with cardboard coffins, relics of protest against the US-led intervention in Iraq. A recent visit to the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, to see the Berliner Ensemble perform Brecht’s Die Maßnahme, had been disrupted by activists clambering on stage with a banner that read, “THIS IS WAR: NO MORE EVERYDAY LIFE”, a neatly ironic iteration of the playwright’s own tactic of estrangement as a defense against complacency and the hypocritical respite provided by bourgeois entertainment. Moreover, whispered confabs at the Staatsbibliothek with fellow students at my American grad school also currently abroad were being met with glares of more than usually acid disapproval from locals. So it seemed like a good time to get out of town for a while.

A recently acquired Berlin friend had planned a car trip to Poland to visit family – or rather, the Polish friends who had assisted his German relatives when they were made to leave their “ancestral” home on the Baltic following the Second World War, when that part of Germany was “restored” to Poland, for a new residence on the Rhine – and I invited myself along for part of the ride: from Berlin, by way of Görlitz/Zgorzelec, to Breslau, now Wrocław, where I would part company with my friend before he headed north to Gdynia, his family’s former home. Read more »

by R. Passov

The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBofC) provides a short history of boxing. It’s an ancient sport. The Romans fought each other wearing cestus, sometimes to the death. Before them so the Greeks. In the fourth century AD, tired of the violence, the Romans outlaw the sport.

According to the BBBofC, fourteen hundred years pass before boxing re-appears in London as an organized sport for bettors. In 1719, a James Figg is recognized as the First Heavyweight Champion. His protégé, John Broughton introduces rules. A century later, John Graham fighting for the 8^th Marquis of Queensberry, codifies the rules as the Queensberry Rules, which still govern the sport:

A boxer shall wear gloves. Wrestling is not allowed. The match is no longer a fight to the finish. Rounds shall last for three minutes. A boxer must rise before a 10 second count and the match shall be fought in a standardized ring – more or less.

Queensberry Rules also include – No shoes or boots with springs and a man hanging off the ropes with his toes off the ground shall be considered down. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Americans stood as implacable enemies of National Socialism. As an American myself, on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, I want to tell you about my dear friend the Nazi soldier.

“I don’t like Polish people,” he says, and raises an eyebrow suggesting “How could anybody, really?” 

Among other things, it’s common knowledge their language is incomprehensible. 

At 90, he has earned his opinions. 

He’s gray and a little severe, turned out today in a light spring jacket, tan sweater and shirt with matching scarf. He takes small steps, pitched forward just a little. He’s tall, thin, bright and upright, and he walks us up and down the streets of Wittenberg all day long.

We suggested a visit and he’s determined we make the day of it. We’ve come all this way, haven’t we?

His father was born in Poland, but mind you, Poland’s borders waved like a battle flag. When his father was born Posen was German. Today it is Poznan, in Poland.

His father fought the Great War riding great horses for the Kaiser, a dragooneer fighting hand to hand with lances. Imagine. His father owed oaths to three sovereigns in his lifetime: Kaiser Wilhelm, the Weimar government and the Third Reich. Imagine that, too.

Erich was born in 1929.  Read more »

by Bill Benzon

AI – artificial intelligence – is all the rage these days. Most of the raging, I suspect, is a branding strategy. It is hype. Some of it isn’t, and that’s important. Alas, distinguishing between the hype and the true goods is not easy, even for experts – some of whom have their own dreams, aspirations, and illusions. Here’s my 2 cents on what we do and do not know.

And it’s only that: 2¢. Not a nickel or a dime more, much less a 50 cent piece.

What are computers, animal, vegetable, or mineral?

One of the problems we have in understanding the computer in its various forms is deciding what kind of thing it is, and therefore what sorts of tasks are suitable to it. The computer is ontologically ambiguous. Can it think, or only calculate? Is it a brain or only a machine?

The steam locomotive, the so-called iron horse, posed a similar problem in the nineteenth century. It is obviously a mechanism and it is inherently inanimate. Yet it is capable of autonomous motion, something heretofore only within the capacity of animals and humans. So, is it animate or not? Consider this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s “Sound” chapter in Walden (1854):

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion … with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in gold and silver wreaths … as if this traveling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils, (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it.

What was Thoreau doing when he wrote of an “iron horse” and a “fiery dragon”? He certainly recognized them as figures. He knew that the thing about which he was talking was some glorified mechanical contraption. He knew it was neither horse nor dragon, nor was it living. Read more »

The river Eisack flows into Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol from the north on a clear night, November 10, 2019.

by Akim Reinhardt

Stuck is a new weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. A table of contents can be found here.

Prologue: Full of Sound and Fury

Last year we drove across the country. We had one cassette tape to listen to on the entire trip. I don’t remember what it was. —Steven Wright

You sing it in the shower and in the car. You slap your thighs and lip sync at work. Eventually you try to ignore it, but on and on it goes. You often don’t remember when it began. Worst of all, you have no idea how to make it stop. Good, bad, or otherwise, the song has a hold on you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Then, poof! It’s gone.

You don’t know what you did. Probably nothing. Nor can you pinpoint a specific moment when the song slipped away, unnoticed. While it was here, there was no escaping it. But when you weren’t looking, it magically flittered away, like pixie dust losing its shimmer in the breeze; the spell has been broken and you are finally free.

I’m no different from other people, except when I am.

Left to its own devices, my mind will usually fill the blank spots with music. Walking down the street, cooking dinner, lazing around the house: most activities are accompanied by a random soundtrack in my head. Even while doing something that requires substantial concentration, such as writing this book for example, I usually hear music.

Simply put, music clings to me. All kinds, really. Any genre. Rock, blues, pop, folk, jazz, hip hop, classical, avante-garde, whatever. Things I like, things I don’t. A song I heard on the radio. The theme to a TV program. Something playing in the supermarket, or blaring out the window of someone else’s car, or honestly from lord knows where. From far and wide, it finds me and holds on tight. Pieces of songs, scraps of this and that, melodies and chords, beats and rhythms parade through my brain, one after the next, a vast array of sound, ever changing.

Until a something gets stuck. Some folks call it an “earworm.” Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

As a development economist I am celebrating, along with my co-professionals, the award of the Nobel Prize this year to three of our best development economists, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Michael  Kremer. Even though the brilliance of these three economists has illuminated a whole range of subjects in our discipline, invariably, the write-ups in the media have referred to their great service to the cause of tackling global poverty, with their experimental approach, particularly the use of Randomized Control Trial (RCT).

Of course, the Prize as such is not for great policy achievements in poverty reduction (if it were, the Chinese policy-makers enabling the lifting of nearly half a billion people above the poverty line in their country would have got prior attention), but for methodological breakthroughs, which the pioneering effort in extensive application of RCT in field experiments in several poor countries clearly is.

I should also proudly point out that these three economists did some of their major work while they were active members of a MacArthur Foundation-funded international research group on Inequality that I co-directed for more than 10 years starting in the mid-1990’s. Duflo was the youngest member of our group; incidentally, the French speakers (including, apart from Duflo, Thomas Piketty, Philippe Aghion, Roland Benabou, and Jean-Marie Baland) and the Bengalis (apart from myself, Abhijit Banerjee and Dilip Mookherjee) were together nearly half in strength in this group of about 18 members from different countries and social science disciplines.

The media write-ups on the Nobel Prize (including in leading magazines like The Economist), however, give a somewhat misleading impression about the evolution of thinking in development economics, as if after decades of pontification on structural transformation and prudential macro-economic policy and associated cross-country statistical exercises to understand the mainsprings of growth and development, the practitioners of RCT  finally came along focusing our attention to the micro level, and providing us with a magic key, the so-called ‘gold standard’ in assessing poverty alleviation policies, telling us what ‘works’ at the ground level of policy intervention and what does not. Read more »

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

Feminists are often accused of downgrading motherhood. The accusation is ridiculous: motherhood hit rock bottom long before the new feminist wave broke. —Germaine Greer (1984) ¹

What sort of picture does the phrase “stay-at-home mother” call to mind? Searching images and stock photos online, you may find a reasonably diverse looking group of contemporary women with young children. There are, after all, millions of mothers at home in the United States today – over a third of those with children under the age of six – and they are a demographically diverse lot.

But there is also a particular variant of the photos on offer which tends to be favored by editors looking for illustrations of at-home mothering. It is the image of that iconic housewife of the 1950s, in her apron and heels. The woman who, these many decades later, is still our foil. The woman whose fate we were saved from by second-wave feminism.

This woman, the story goes, had been influenced by men to devote herself to her children to an excessive degree. The very essence of the “feminine mystique” Betty Friedan decried was that it urged postwar wives to find their fulfillment in “sexual passivity, acceptance of male domination, and nurturing motherhood.” ² Read more »