by Abigail Akavia

On permanent display in the MFA in Boston is a bust by Oskar Kokoschka, “Self-Portrait as a Warrior.” The sculpture is a dramatic head with bulging features: bridge of the nose, cheek bones, and creased brows. The eyeballs are painted azure blue, the parts around them bright orange. The head’s wrinkled features are highlighted by an unnatural yellow and raw red, which make it look like exposed flesh. The mouth is open. It is this last feature in particular that I found striking: the man portrayed lets out a “violent scream,” as Kokoschka himself puts it in his biography. The portrait, ridiculed when it was first shown in 1909 and later condemned by the Nazi regime as “degenerate,” is an image of torment. This artist-warrior figure of anguish, and the question whether (or how) he is giving voice to his suffering, reminded me of the ancient Greek hero Philoctetes.

A famed archer, Philoctetes was one of the warriors that embarked on the initial expedition against Troy. On the way, he was bit on the foot by a snake. The wound festered and became putrid; Philoctetes screamed in pain so badly that the fleet could not carry out the required sacrifices to the gods. Philoctetes’ suffering presence, in short, was so repulsive and disruptive that the Greeks had to get rid of him. They abandoned him on the island Lemnos, where he remained for ten years, periodically visited by bouts of pain. In the version of his story that has come down to us, a tragedy by Sophocles first performed in 409 BCE, Lemnos is uninhabited. The only thing keeping Philoctetes alive on this desolate place is a magical bow he inherited from his friend Heracles (i.e. the legendary Hercules), with which he preys on wild beasts and birds. Ten years after first leaving him there to fend for himself, the Greeks learn by prophecy that Philoctetes and his bow are necessary to take Troy down. Odysseus sets out to Lemnos to bring him back, with the help of the young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. Odysseus, forever conniving, deduces rightly that Philoctetes would sooner die than help the Greeks, and concocts a scheme in which it is Neoptolemus’ job to trick Philoctetes into joining him.

To make a long story short, things do not quite go as planned, especially from the moment Neoptolemus witnesses Philoctetes’ excruciating pain. Sophocles’ play is a plot-twisting, complex exploration of the power of language in its various manifestations—sophistry, lies, pleas, inarticulate cries, and poetic invocations, to name some of the drama’s expressive linguistic media. What becomes of humanity when language is used to defy its proclaimed ends? Can language help restore trust and reintegrate into human community a man that has been so traumatized, physically and emotionally, that he can no longer envision camaraderie—no longer imagine any existence other than his beastly exile? Can this trauma be voiced, and responded to, in language? Read more »

Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a physician-scientist with a persistent scientific and clinical interest in acute myeloid leukemia, hematopoiesis, novel therapeutic drug development and cancer biology. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer. He has published articles in Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine, The New York Times, and Cell. Dr. Mukherjee’s research lab at Herbert Irving Comprehensive Cancer Center studies the biology of blood development malignant and premalignant diseases such as myelodysplasia and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). His goal is to develop new drugs against diseases. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of medicine at Columbia University Medical Center.

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

I could not believe my luck when I woke up this morning. It had rained last night, but this morning the sky was blue the breeze gentle,and the wild grass along the smelly sluggish, open sewer that meanders through the swanky Defense Housing Authority—home to lush golf courses and palatial villas—past the gates of the elite Lahore University of Management Sciences, was audaciously green. The mango tree in the front yard of my mother’s  house—quiet after a fertile summer of exuberant fruiting—balances the crow’s nest full of chattering chicks in its gently swaying branches. All God’s creations bask in the mellow sunshine. No more the snow and ice and cold of Eastern US. For these weeks, it’s going to be this bliss in Lahore. I was glad to be me, and to be alive. I say to myself “Thank God I am on this side of the earth, rather than under it.” What a beautiful world. So much to see and so much to do. I could live like this for a hundred years like William Hazlitt, who claimed to have spent his life “reading books, looking at pictures, going to plays, hearing, thinking, writing on what pleased me best.” I’ll add eating to that list, at the top of it, fried eggs and buttered toast.

In addition to the sunshine and the crows, and trees waving gently in the breeze, there are books to read, newspapers to follow, old trunks to sort through and the joy of restoring broken things. And now, thanks to the miracle of YouTube, music to listen to, movies to watch, many enlightening videos to engage with. This is no time to die! Although it seems unlikely, I have been hooked onto Gayatri Spivak since I heard her speak here in Lahore some years ago. That formidable woman and her harangue about the subalterns, a word I associated with the military, which I was quite intrigued to learn that evening applies to me as well. Not a word of what she says about subalterns makes sense to me but I love to hear her speak. She really is something. She said things that evening, to a crowded hall of Pakistani college students, activists and others, about Derrida and Gramsci —names I  heard for the first time. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

In 1994, Miramax Pictures released a small, independently made film by an unknown director from New Jersey named Kevin Smith. Made for a mere $27,000 (maxing out credit cards and the proceeds from selling his comic collection), the black and white film—replete with deeply offensive language, references to drug dealing and usage, and philosophical debates on Star Wars—grossed over $3 million and netted the young director not only a career, but accolades from the Cannes and Sundance film Festivals and nominations in three categories at the Independent Spirit Awards that year.¹ It’s since been acknowledged as one of the best indie films of the 1990s.

Clerks, it can be argued, functions as a brilliant example of Gen X slacker culture that prized authenticity over slick production techniques and funny but insightful discourse over spectacle. Smith’s career has been built on that authenticity in community and self-expression, even in films that fall outside of his “View Askewniverse.” Generally speaking, Smith makes films that he wishes to see, not what he thinks will sell, and that was very generationally grounded. He infused his love of endlessly examining comic books and sci-fi/fantasy films/shows with the structure of the rom-com and buddy film genres to carve out a career catering not to all mainstream audiences, but to a like-minded audience of fans who love seeing themselves reflected on the screen.

Part of the enduring popularity of Smith’s work represents various shifts within film and TV making that centers on at least some Gen X sensibilities. His work also signaled a shift in Hollywood finally beginning to take speculative fiction seriously, in part to cater to Gen X (and later millennial and Gen Z tastes). The goal was never superstar status as a filmmaker, but a career that allowed Smith to make the kind of work he himself sought out and enjoyed, which mirrors the Gen X relationship to other cultural forms, too—the rise of the current subcultural society that we live in now. Read more »

For the Artists

I know you just want to be a flute
the wind sings through
to make a melody
or an intricate mistake
like the existence of crystals
in nature, drifting as flakes
to cover a field
in a clean white blanket
or inside a rock,
the tiny, glittering caves.

In other words, you just want to be
a structure
with the beauty
already
built into it.

But I’d guess, like me
you’ve walked through a few
gardens in heavy shoes
accused friends & lovers of things they did
& sins they didn’t do
panicked awake at 3am
to sit alone in the kitchen
trying to sip breaths in
past your choked throat.

Still, I hear a song
alive in you
when the joy sets in along
your spine and through
the fields and caves of your body.
Somewhere within
a tree, a willow
rustles as a cool wind
from some other world begins to blow.

by Amanda Beth Peery

by Cathy Chua

Shortly before my first trip to Austria in September, a story did the rounds of  a tourist sued for leaving a review on Tripadvisor complaining of a photographic display of Nazis at a hotel in a little town called Gerlos in the Tyrolean Alps. The case has not yet ended, but for now the Austrian court has granted a temporary injunction against the tourist, in favour of the hotel.

Seeing a Nazi publicly honoured at the hotel had made K and his wife feel indignation and disgust, the post said. “This made us wonder what the hotel owners are trying to tell us with this image. This incident speaks volumes about the current state of affairs in this region of Austria. Sadly, our desire to visit this mountain region has disappeared completely.

For me this raised an issue I often find  myself discussing: is the Far Right in Europe, as it presents itself at the moment, ‘new’? Being a historian, I take the long view and see the continuum. For me,  what is happening isn’t new, it’s connected to the past. Far Right sympathies haven’t stopped, they have from time to time gone into hiding, or disguised themselves, but they have always been there, if not necessarily in plain sight. I hope that is full disclosure of my relevant bias. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joseph Shieber

Imagine a party planner, let’s call him “Mark”. Mark offers his services in party planning to all of the citizens of the town of Happyville.

Now, Mark’s party planning service has an interesting twist.

He begins by throwing a party for a group defined by some close connection — say, a family reunion, or a work party — but then he does something unexpected. He’ll invite some high school friends of the partygoers to the family reunion, or some people with a shared connection to church groups to the work party. What happens then is that people make new connections by getting increased exposure to their friends’ friends — or even to their friends’ friends’ friends.

Almost fifty years ago, the sociologist Mark Granovetter coined the term “weak ties” for these more attenuated connections. There is now a wealth of research tracing the ways that weak ties can affect our lives, from helping us get a job to improving our overall well-being.

Sounds great, right? Mark the party planner is bringing people together, exposing them to new people, and allowing them to harness the strength of their weak ties. What could go wrong? Read more »

Frederica Krüger in October of 2009 in Brixen in the South Tyrol.

by Katie Poore

American writer Rebecca Solnit laments that few writers have had quite as much scrutiny directed toward their laundry habits as Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau, best known for his 1854 memoir Walden. “Only Henry David Thoreau,” she claims in Orion Magazine’s article “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved,” “has been tried in the popular imagination and found wanting for his cleaning arrangements.”

It is ostensibly a non-sequitur of sorts, to seek of such a prominent and canonical literary figure an account of laundry done and not done, of clothing cleaned by Thoreau or, as so many of Solnit’s Facebook friends viciously claim, by “‘his sister every week who came to take his dirty laundry.’” How could shirts washed, and by which hands, become such a point of interest for critics of Thoreau?

The answers are probably manifold, but such social media behavior—by which I mean the vilification of someone based off the mundane details of their quotidian behavior—is a practice typically reserved for the denunciation of those who both enrage and perplex us, who seem to have stepped past boundaries we have established and lead us into uncharted (and often contentious) ideological, rhetorical, or political territory. Read more »

by Michael Liss

The Iceberg has broken off from the ice sheet, and it’s a whopper. It groaned and teetered and shook, hanging on maybe longer than science said it should have, and, then, with a mighty roar, it slid into the ocean. It’s been floating about ever since, banging into things.

Last week, I attended the 17th annual conference of Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society: “Progressivism, Socialism, and Nationalism.” Everyone talked about the Iceberg—where it came from, what it might hit next, what could stop it.

It was a full day, with over two dozen speakers from a variety of backgrounds and outlooks. Two Nobel Prize winners, Joseph Stiglitz and Edmund Phelps, were joined by panelists from across the political spectrum, from the (real) Socialist Bhaskar Sunkara, Founding Editor and Publisher of Jacobin magazine, to Douglas Holtz-Eakin, President of the American Action Forum, and Ryan Streeter of the American Enterprise Institute. Add a variety of luminaries, including Richard Sennett of the London School of Economics and the ubiquitous (and engagingly scary) Jonathan Haidt, and there were a lot of perspectives.

I don’t have the space to cover everything (I will post links to the sessions when available from the Center), but the issues raised were important and worth examining. Read more »

by John Schwenkler

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

I am the sort of person who can be very good at finding my way around a place, while having almost no ability to translate that capacity into a realistic map of the place that I am able to find my way around.

This place could be a building, a neighborhood, a city, or a more distant set of locations that are connected by major roads. In each case what allows me to get around is the knowledge of what I can do at various landmarks that will take me from one location to another: for example, turn left at the Exxon station to get to the supermarket; walk past the bathrooms and then up the stairs to the right to reach the department office; take the interstate south to exit 53A, then follow the highway over the bridge and take the first left to get to the beach.

My mastery of these landmark-based strategies means that sometimes I am able to give good directions concerning how to get from here to there in places that I know my way around, though doing this requires me to simulate in my imagination what the next relevant landmark will be after taking a given step—and this sort of remembering is something else that I am not always good at doing. Still, when I do manage to remember, or am reminded of, a given landmark along my memorized route, then what I remember is something I already knew: for example, that the road out of the neighborhood goes past an Exxon station, at which one needs to turn left to get to the supermarket.

With maps, things are different. Even if I am extremely adept at getting around a place, often I will have had no idea that the place I am able to get around has the layout that a map displays it as having: no idea, that is, that the locations I know how to get between are located with respect to one another in the ways that the map displays. In knowing how to find my way around, all I knew was what to do, upon seeing a certain landmark, in order to continue on the way to a given place. And I knew all of this very well without knowing much of anything about the spatial structure of the place I was able to navigate, or the spatial relationships between the landmarks I could find my way between.

Based on conversations with other people about these matters, my sense is that I may be a sort of person who is peculiarly bad at aligning my knowledge of how to get around a place with a representation of that place in the form of a map—though there is some experimental evidence suggesting that landmark-based navigation is the default human strategy for getting around an environment. My present interest, however, is not in these questions, but in a wider phenomenon that this is only a single example of, and which I believe provides a common impetus for philosophical inquiry. Read more »

Agnes Denes. Model for Teardrop—Monument to Being Earthbound. The Shed, New York, October 2019 – March 2020.

“The artist’s original Teardrop depicted a monumental teardrop-shaped sculpture “levitat[ing] above the center of the base afloat on an elastic cushion of magnetic flux.” Impossible then and now, a scale version magically floats on a table top in the middle of the gallery.

At the far end of the gallery is the only splash of color in the exhibition design by New Affiliates; a glowing blue-purple wall hints at something special out of sight.”

(Congratulations New Affiliates!)

More here, here, and here.

by Robert Fay

In The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, China has made contact with a technologically-advanced alien civilization called Trisolaris. The aliens plan to invade earth and are cultivating a cadre of earthling collaborators, most of whom are Chinese nationals. The Trisolarians accomplished this, not by using sex or blackmail to recruit agents a la the FSB or CIA, but by creating a seductive computer game designed to both introduce the nuances of Trisolarian civilization, as well as to weed out unworthy recruits. As recruits progress in the game, they proceed through evolutionary epochs of Trisolarian history, which curiously enough, includes historical personages from earth. In one early stage of Trisolarian development, the great Chinese Emperor Qin Shin Huang supervises the successful creation of a massive human computer, involving the recording of endless semaphore signals conducted by tens of thousands of Trisolarian soldiers raising up and down flags.

The emperor is filled with pride: “Each individual’s behavior is so simple, yet together, they can produce such a complex, great whole!” he says. “Europeans criticize me for my tyrannical rule, claiming that I suppress creativity. But in reality, a large number of men yoked by severe discipline can also produce great wisdom when bound together as one.”

It’s not impossible to imagine Chinese President Xi Jinping saying this in a moment of candor. If China continues to skillfully counterbalance all of its many contradictions, why wouldn’t Xi stand before the U.N. General Assembly and proclaim the singular superiority of his one-party, authoritarian model of capitalism? For the Chinese today are no longer content with praise, they believe the world should begin studying and imitating China. Read more »

Dr. David Steensma specializes in care and research for myelodysplastic syndromes and leukemia. He and colleagues were the first to identify and understand the clinical implications of the clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP). He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Clinical Oncology responsible for the “Art of Oncology” section and has more than 150 publications in peer-reviewed journals. Dr. Steensma currently serves as an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, consulting physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital, and a faculty member in the Adult Leukemia Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.

Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book 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 Eric J. Weiner

The terror of the unforeseen is what the science of history hides, turning a disaster into an epic. —Philip Roth, The Plot Against America

The only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is. —R. G. Collingwood

When he was seventeen years-old, my late father-in-law, Mario Gartenkraut, escaped from Poland two days ahead of the Third Reich’s invasion of his town. His family did not believe him when he warned them of the terror that he saw coming. They sent him off to Bolivia in South America, but stayed behind. By the end of the war, all of his sisters and his parents had been exterminated by the Nazis in the death camps. A few of his brothers survived. Mario foresaw the terror of fascism and it saved his life. Most of his family did not and they were murdered. The memory of the kind of fascism that he survived is both a tool for resistance and, ironically, can blind us to things we must resist and overcome. As a tool for resistance, the mantra that we should “never forget” is a powerful way to keep the memories of those we lost alive as well as remember the conditions as they have been represented in official history that led to the systematic murder of millions. But the phrase also plants the seeds of our undoing. The representations of fascism that construct these memories become indelible and as such make it difficult to imagine what fascism might look like in our current times.

Peering at the horizon of our withering democracy for jack-booted soldiers, transport trains, and smoke rising from the ashes of crematoriums makes memory a liability. If we are looking out for one kind of threat based upon the science of historical memory, then we are sure to miss threats to our freedom from other forms of fascism that may be hiding in plain sight. As was true for Mario’s sisters and parents, what we don’t see, won’t see, can’t see, or refuse to see might be the most terrifying thing of all.

The Terror of the Unforeseen, Henry Giroux’s latest salvo against what he calls neoliberal fascism is, first and foremost, a history book. It is, of course, also a cogent critical analysis of current events, particularly as they unfold in the story of Donald Trump’s presidency. But at its core is a deep respect for History’s pedagogical power to teach us as Collingwood writes “what man has done and thus what man is.” Like Collingwood, Giroux sees in History shadows cast beyond the present that reveal in hazy and sometimes horrifying outline what humans might become by taking a complex account of what they have done. Hiding in these late afternoon shadows is the terror of unforeseen advances toward negative freedom, dehumanizing technologies, and state-sanctioned violence against those who have been classified as disposable. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

For Fred Weinstein

“What is hidden is for us Westerners more ‘true’ than what is visible,” Roland Barthes proposed, in Camera Lucida, his phenomenology of the photograph, almost forty years ago. In the decades since, the internet, nanotechnology, and viral marketing have challenged his privileging of the unseen over the seen by developing a culture of total exposure, heralding the death of interiority and celebrating the cult of instant celebrity. The icon of this movement, the selfie, is now produced and displayed, in endless daily iterations, in a ritual staging of eyewitness testimony to the festival of self-fashioning.

This same period has also seen a parallel, related but in some senses opposed development: the use of photographic documents – occasionally, indeed, self-portraits, though fragmentary or denatured, and/or amateur photographs of their subject taken by the authors themselves – to illuminate non-fictional works, primarily literary memoirs, (pseudo-)biographies, or historical reconstructions; beginning in 2001 with W.G. Sebald’s epochal Austerlitz and continuing in books overtly or implicitly inspired by the Anglo-German’s peripatetic, omnivorous, documentary style. Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul (2003), Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost (2006), Teju Cole’s Every Day Is For The Thief (2007), Aleksandar Hemon’s The Lazarus Project (2008), Gary Shteyngart’s Little Failure (2013), and Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey (2019) all deploy photographic material obliquely, frequently quite bereft of deictic apparatus and often only remotely or tangentially associated with the adjacent narrative, as if to shadow the work’s textual body, to propose a secondary or paratextual level, or to serve as a form of punctuation (implicitly echoing Barthes’s polysemous term “punctum”, the ineffably affecting element in a photograph) in the rebus that is the written account of a life. These various, recent non-fictional works at once coopt a visual medium for the literary project and mount a subtle protest against the ongoing debasement of the (human, autoerotic) image in selfie culture by restoring to that image some of its Barthesian mystery, even as they borrow from the new idiom its demystification of the art of photography by placing it in the hands of non-professionals. Read more »