by Gabrielle C. Durham

Do you remember when the Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw suggested significant changes to English spelling so that it would make more sense? Probably not, because it was more than 70 years ago. According to him and, likely, some predecessors, English spelling was so goofy that ghoti could be manipulated to sound like fish. (Gh as in “enough,” o as in “women,” ti as in “action.”) He had an admittedly excellent point about the, um, esoteric spelling rules of English.

Often alphabets reform during times of great social and political upheaval as an issue of nationalism. For instance, many of the languages and alphabets in Europe underwent serious changes to uphold and distinguish themselves from other similar languages in the second half of the 19th century, amidst all sorts of revolutions.

For example, one Serbian hero is Vuk Karadžić, who updated the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet in 1818, which was officially adopted in 1868 in Serbia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina. He removed many letters from the old alphabet and added a few new letters to better match how people actually spoke. If you have ever heard of Saints Cyril and Methodius, you may be familiar with the two brothers creating the alphabet that led to modern Cyrillic in or around 900 (Cyrillic being named for St. Cyril). The alphabet they created was actually Glagolitic, which in its original form has been found in parts of modern Croatia. The alphabet that the brothers created was intended to for transcribing the liturgical language Old Church Slavonic. Its strongest predecessor was ancient Greek, with elements of Old Bulgarian and Old Macedonian. Read more »

Crescent moon with vapor trails at twilight in Brixen, South Tyrol, in December, 2016.

by Marie Gaglione

Things are changing. Always, everywhere, immensely and minutely, the history of mankind unfolds as we rotate around a grand burning star (also, everything everywhere else changes; the history of mankind may be of the least consequence on a cosmic scale, but I digress). I digress too early; I include parentheticals too soon; I stall with flowery descriptions of the sun. Because – ugh – I’m going to talk about “how divided we are as a nation.” It’s such a tired phrase; I don’t want to write about it. It’s stale because it’s static, and anyway, the declaration is often accompanied by divisive rhetoric. Wherever one may fall on the political spectrum (and here I’m being gracious; how often do we now identify with a “side”), they likely have established opinions of those who lie elsewhere. It does seem increasingly difficult to imagine a sweeping reconciliation when we continue to pour our definitions in concrete and defend our positions by reason of consistency. Inflexibility begets inability to listen, and thus to understand, which is why we find our differences so baffling and allow our prejudices to influence our opinions. So, finally, here it is: my own personal take on how we can get people to stop saying how divided we are. Bear with me, because I’m going to try and sell contradictions as potential energy for unity. Read more »

by Thomas O’Dwyer

One of the few pleasures left in modern travel is to visit an unfamiliar place and to attempt to feel its historical and cultural pulse – if it still has one. The British author Lawrence Durrell endlessly sought the “spirit of place” in his travels. He developed the rare talent of being able to transmit that spirit to his readers – the long-dead voices of Alexandria, or the mythical deities riding the breezes of the Greek islands and Cyprus.

Two weeks ago I went to Lisbon for the first time. By accident rather than design, Portugal had been the only European country I had never visited. If I had to produce a few keywords to summarise my knowledge of the country, I might have come up short. There was Vasco de Gama, a Carnation revolution against a dictator named Salazar, the writer José Saramago, port, cork trees, Fatima, and fado music. I might even have mentioned Brazil. Sorry Portugal, that was about it.

I was appalled by my ignorance of the ancient, imperial, and cultural history of a European nation. Some of my travelling companions were American, reminding me of another dreary fact of modern travel. Wherever you go, you can’t escape America. Perhaps in the 50s BCE, some lone travellers felt the same when they visited remote Celtic Britain. They found they still couldn’t avoid Roman garrisons and bathhouses. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

Firstly, of course we should rescue the art first. Secondly, of course we should not.

This is a thought experiment. Presumably the Louvre already has extensive fire suppression systems and separate evacuation plans for its visitors (including the less abled) and for its most valuable art works. The point of this scenario is not to recreate the boring details of such plans, but to stimulate thinking about the fundamentals of value and hopefully break through some cliches.

Life has value. Indeed life is the ultimate source of value because it is only from the perspective of life – of a subject of experience of the world – that the act of valuing is possible. To self-consciously alive creatures like ourselves, art is one of the things we can find valuable. But continued being is even more valuable because of all the other valuable things besides art that we may want to be and to do. The ending of a life is a bad thing to the extent that it cuts such being off from ourselves and others. There is an unfairness to having a shorter life than most others, and there is a particular tragedy in having a life cut off abruptly – in mid-sentence as it were – without the time to say goodbye to our projects and our loved ones.

So human life has value and moreover it is greater than art. But this scenario is not in the first instance about the comparative value of life and art in some absolute sense. Rather it asks us to make a more specific choice between saving a few (perhaps as many as several thousand) humans who happen to be visiting the Louvre, or saving some world-famous artworks like the Mona Lisa. Read more »

“What the earliest scriptural-literary texts . . . do is attempt
to find a language to come to terms with . . . the contingency
of being.” —Amit Chaudhuri, from Storytelling & Forgetfullness

A Skeptic’s Critique of Storytelling

what is a story anyway but a trip through landscapes
inhabited by characters bent by other characters
shoehorned into imaginations, pulled
as a potter does a pot drawing up water & clay,
the stuff of earth, forcing it into free-standing somethings
into which are pitched or placed our most concrete
dreams of the day to display our freshest bouquets
in rooms we inhabit among stars?
………………………………………………  what are they but songs
skewed by future disharmonies no matter how
religiously we hang their notes on staffs
to assemble sounds harmonious and appropriate
to the day they were first sung?
…………………………………………….what but
parcels of recollections & hope, Jenga game blocks
assembled to be disassembled as need sees fit
to salve a wound or wrench moments
into the most convenient configurations
of top dogs of certain times —histories written by
winners and losers but whose top billing in texts
depends upon coincidence, or something even more mysterious
which bends the arc of future tales in the peculiar direction of
Who Knows What?

Jim Culleny
9/22/19

by Joseph Shieber

I want to begin with a parable.

There once was an itinerant salesman by the name of Osip, who made his living selling rags and trinkets in the little villages that lay in the triangle between Smolensk, Minsk and Kiev. He spent his weeks and months traveling between the major cities, finding what he could in one location and selling it on in the next.

One of Osip’s rivals was a man named Mendel, who also plied the same routes selling rags. It was a constant struggle between the two of them to see who could find the better wares, or sell them for a better price.

Now, once, as Osip was traveling on the route from Minsk to Orsha, he happened upon a group of brigands outside of the town of Barysaw. Luckily for Osip, he had spent all of his money in Barysaw, buying new wares, and the brigands were interested in coin, not merchandise, so they let him pass.

When Osip reached Orsha, he encountered Mendel, preparing to make the reverse journey from Orsha to Minsk, and laden with coin to purchase wares along the way, before selling them on.

Now, there are two main routes from Orsha to Minsk. The more direct of the two was the one that Osip had just traveled, passing by the brigands outside of the town of Barysaw. The other is a good bit longer, as one must first head south to Mogilev, before then heading west to Minsk.

As Osip encountered Mendel, then, he faced a quandry. Should he do the right thing, and warn Mendel about the brigands that he would encounter if he took the more direct route? Despite his rivalry with Mendel, Osip was determined to do the right thing.

But now Osip faced a second challenge, of a more practical nature. If he simply warned Mendel, and told him about the brigands, there was little doubt that Mendel would assume that Osip was lying to try to trick him into taking the longer route that went through Mogilev. Osip, however, had an idea.

“Nu, Osip,” said Mendel. “Just arriving from Barysaw? Were the pickings good?”

“No, Mendel,” Osip replied. “I traveled through Mogilev, and as you see I bought up the best stock. I was lucky, too. Just as I departed I saw a gang of brigands setting up to ambush travelers on the road from Mogilev to Orsha. On your travels you should be sure to choose a different route.”

“Ah, Osip,” Mendel cried. “Do you take me for a fool? The route through Barysaw is the faster route from Minsk to Orsha. You must have seen the brigands along that route, or else you heard that the stock in Mogilev is indeed good, and want to get there first yourself by sending me elsewhere. Either way, your plan won’t work. I will take the route to Mogilev.”

And with that, Mendel proceeded to take the route toward Mogilev, on his way to Minsk. As Mendel passed him, Osip smiled to himself, happy that his deceit had saved his rival from a terrible fate.

I wrote the parable myself, but I don’t have any illusions about its originality. In fact, I have the strong feeling that I read a story almost exactly like it, but I was unable to recall where.

The basic message, of course, is that it is possible for someone intentionally to utter a falsehood with the further intention of getting his hearer to believe something true. And though that message has a faint air of paradox, it really shouldn’t be all that surprising. Read more »

Artists: Lachaolasie (Latch) Akesuk, Parr Josephee (formerly Etidloie), Aoudi Qinnayuaq, Cie Taqiasuk, Julieta Arias, Moises Frank

Piliriqatigiingniq Mural Project, June 29 – July 21, 2015.

Toronto, ON, Canada.

More here and here.

by Ruchira Paul

Coming full circle from a medieval myth to present day reality – through a path strewn with storms, fires, snakes, spiders, dolphins, falling masonry, refugee ships, ghosts and goddesses

Following in the footsteps of the brilliant and exhaustive account of the British opium wars in his hefty Ibis Trilogy, Amitav Ghosh’s latest book Gun Island at just over 300 pages, is a relatively slim volume in which he returns to the Sundarbans to pick up from where his 2004 novel The Hungry Tide left off, with a dire warning about the ravaged ecological plight of the region. Only this time, Ghosh’s novel takes us out of the Sundarbans to Venice via Brooklyn, Kolkata and Los Angeles.

Added to nature’s fury are now new problems caused by the displacement of people and animals due to loss of habitat and livelihood, increase in crime and proliferation of unregulated industries that poison the environment. The result is more hardship on land and an unprecedented devastation of the region’s aquatic life. Some of the characters that figured in the previous book reappear in Gun Island. They are older, discouraged and fed up with the escalating degradation of the economy and the environment of this beleaguered part of the world. The prospect of fighting for a good life in the Sundarbans appears bleak. Read more »

Dr. Seema A. Khan is Professor of Surgery in the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, and the Bluhm Family Professor of Cancer Research. She is the Co-leader of the Women’s Cancer Research Program at the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center. Her research focuses on applying biomarker knowledge to improve breast cancer risk stratification and develop preventive interventions for high risk women. Current studies include an examination of the effects of progesterone antagonists in women with breast cancer, and a study of breast cancer risk biomarkers in benign breast biopsy samples. In addition, Dr. Khan’s group is working on the development of transdermal delivery of drugs to the breast. She chairs a Phase III trial for the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group which will investigate the role of local therapy for the primary tumor in women presenting with Stage IV breast cancer. Recently completed research includes a case/control study of hormone levels in nipple aspirate fluid.

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 Hari Balasubramanian

A degree in engineering from India, grad school at an American university, and a job at an American corporation: call it the Indian-engineer version of the American dream. Like hundreds of thousands of Indian immigrants, Ved, the 36-year old protagonist of A California Story, appears to have fulfilled this dream. He lives in San Francisco and works for a famous Silicon Valley company, Omnicon. Arora’s novel immerses us in Ved’s life at a time when the disillusionments of corporate life are gnawing at him and he longs for love and sexual fulfilment.

The opening chapter – the funniest in the novel and also one of the better takedowns of corporate motivational lingo and imagery I’ve read – describes a marketing sales conference organized by Ved’s company. The CEO opens proceedings with this: “Every morning I wake up and think, what can I do for my customers today?” As the presentations begin, “jargon fills the air: synergy, paradigm, bleeding edge, leverage, disruption, value-proposition, mission-critical, solution ecosystem.” Later on, Ved reflects on the art on display at the Omnicon office: art that was “once anti-establishment but has long been defanged and made chic: a Diego Rivera mural; a wall sized woodcarving of Che Guevara’s shaggy face – presumably to inspire ‘the rebels’ in their ranks, rebels, who, like him, work in identical beige cubicles in a large carpeted hall to raise Omnicon’s profits.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Emrys Westacott

Academic dishonesty is a widespread problem in colleges in many countries, and it is getting worse. One particular form of cheating has become especially common in the age of the internet: students buying custom-written essays–a.k.a. “contract cheating.” A recent study estimated that over 15% of college students had paid someone else to do their work for them;[1]and given that this figure is based on self-reported dishonesty, the true figure is quite likely to be higher.

Back in the day, plagiarism would typically consist of a student copying out some passages from an obscure source, or perhaps from a fellow student’s essay. This approach involved a certain amount of work. Pre cut-and-paste, you had to actually copy out chunks of text. Pre the norm of typed essays, you’d even do this longhand. There was a serious danger that you might learn something in the process. But the method had two obvious advantages. It was free. And there was little chance of getting caught.

The internet left traditional plagiarism in the dust, along with hardcopy journals and encyclopedia salesmen. Cutting and pasting passages found online was child’s play. Unfortunately, anything easily found by a plagiarist could be just as easily found by a professor. Worse, plagiarism-detecting software like Turnitin could expose even cunningly stitched together passages drawn from multiple sources.

But when one door closes, another one opens. Demand for custom-written college essays surged. These are essays that are usually written by decently educated, experienced writers, many with advanced degrees, often living in countries where writing other people’s essays is the most lucrative work they can get. Read more »

by Cathy Chua

A while ago findingtimetowrite wrote a post about underrated writers as she saw them.

She started off with Patricia Highsmith and I must agree, she is vastly underrated. I don’t know that it’s gender related so much as because she writes ‘crime’ which has for so long been judged as ‘genre’. Designation as denigration. Perhaps it was also her sexuality which saw her at fault in some way which affected her at a critical level. Not to mention that her books made and still make highly successful movies. I could see that being a critical negative too.

Start with the Ripley series by all means, but don’t stop there. She doesn’t just get into the minds of her characters, she will get into yours, so there will be occasion when you need to be prepared for a disturbing experience. As you read, you will find – for me in this regard Edith’s Diary stands out – that you may begin to doubt the ordinary common standards by which you have so far functioned in the world.

These are a few others on my list. Read more »

It is an old tradition in the Tyrol for people to grow flowers on their balconies in summer. These are purple hanging petunias alternating with standing salmon and white geraniums (and a batch of red ones in the middle). You can also see pink and red hanging geraniums on the two small balconies in the background on the right here. Photo taken in mid-August, 2019.

by Mindy Clegg

In recent years, social and political conflicts over fandom emerged into general public consciousness. Both Captain Marvel and the upcoming film Joker illustrate the point. Both films stirred contentious debates around gender this past year.¹ But many who are either new to fandom or count themselves as casual fans might miss that these debates are not new. Speculative fiction has been generating discussion around contentious issues for decades. Sci-fi and fantasy genres excel at allowing the reader or viewer to engage creatively with politically charged ideas. A look at some of the earlier postwar franchises can be instructive in understanding the connection between political discourse and fandom communities, in this case Star Trek and Star Wars. Although fandom dates to much earlier in the century (the 1930s at least), the popularity of both franchises brought in new people and shifted the dynamic from a smaller, literary-based community to wider mass media fandoms.² These franchises proved fertile ground for socio-political discussions. They also provide an excellent lens into the time periods in which they aired (today included). As such, I argue in this months’ essay that the two franchises represented diverging generational views and political paths to a better society. Both shaped how we relate to mass mediated speculative fiction and can help us better understand the political discourses of a given historical period.

The men who created these two franchises revealed their own political views through their work. Gene Roddenberry was a vet of the Second World War and a member of the LAPD before becoming a script writer for TV. He began writing for TV in the late 1950s and early 1960s, using his experience with the LAPD and his interest in westerns to create a career in the writers room. He soon pitched a new project based on his interest in both science-fiction and the Civil Rights movement. He called Star Trek a “Wagon Train to the stars.” Read more »

by Palle Yourgrau

Where does this strange notion of non-punishable crimes come from?  … Isn’t it high time it were proclaimed that every discernible crime is a punishable one …? —Simone Weil, The Need for Roots

When the finger points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger. —Confucius

What Happened at Verbier

At the 10^th anniversary of the Verbier Festival and Academy in 1994, in Switzerland, there was an extraordinary performance of Bach’s Concerto for Four Claviers (based on a Vivaldi Concerto for Four Violins), an electrifying piece of Baroque rock n’ roll performed by an insanely gifted group of musicians that included the Russian Evgeny Kissin, who rocked the house, eclipsing even the legendary Martha Argerich.[1] Luckily for us, the performance was captured on film, now available on dvd.  Unluckily, the cinematographer or director[2] was, as usual, a criminal.  What passes for a representation of four pianists playing Bach is in fact, for much of the time, a gallery of four faces of four pianists playing Bach, though fortunately for us, the faces are noble ones, especially the Beethovenian countenance of Argerich-in-winter counterpointed by the seraphic visage of the ever-child-like-Kissin.  Still, every now and then, thanks to a merciful God, actual piano playing emerges on screen as a kind of afterthought, including even passages that musically deserve to be center stage.

Now, what happened in Verbier in 1994 is by no means an anomaly.  It is as common as sand on a beach.  It is, sadly, the norm when cinematographers and directors set out to capture a cultural event or an historic or otherwise important performance in music or ballet, or other artistic venues like figure skating.  There is, to cite another example, a dvd containing performances by four pianists, including Joanna MacGregor and Angela Hewitt, of Bach’s complete Well-Tempered Clavier, where the cinematographer/director puts to shame the crimes committed at Verbier. Read more »

by John Schwenkler

This year marks the 25^th anniversary of the publication of Mind and World, a groundbreaking book by the South African-born philosopher John McDowell, who has taught since 1986 at the University of Pittsburgh. The book is based on a series of lectures that McDowell had delivered at the University of Oxford in 1991. The importance of McDowell’s arguments was recognized immediately when the lectures appeared in print, and for many philosophers of my generation an encounter with Mind and World—in my case, within the context of a decade of philosophical work responding to those arguments—was a defining moment in our intellectual development.

There is no easy way in to a book that treats fundamental philosophical questions in the manner of Mind and World, but a reasonable place to start is with a passage from Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason that frames its overall dialectic. I have set in boldface a crucial sentence that I’ll focus on below:

Our nature is so constituted that our intuition can never be other than sensible; that is, it contains only the mode in which we are affected by objects. The faculty, on the other hand, which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding.

To neither of these powers may a preference be given over the other. Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

It is, therefore, just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts.

What Kant calls ‘intuition’ can fairly be glossed as ‘perception’ or ‘sensory experience’: he means that by which our minds are related to particular objects in the world thanks to the way they affect our sensory organs. This contrasts with what he calls the ‘understanding’, through which we think about things using general concepts. The concept horse, for example, is not a concept of any horse in particular. According to Kant, we can apply this concept to a particular horse, say the famed Secretariat, only because we stand in a sensory relation to that horse, or have heard of Secretariat from someone who (has heard of him from someone who has …) encountered Secretariat directly. And this direct encounter is what Kant calls intuition: it’s a way for this particular animal, Secretariat, to become present to our minds, i.e. be ‘given to us’, so that our thinking can be about him in particular. Read more »

Maria Thereza Alves. Seeds of Change: New York – A Botany of Colonization; 2019.

More here, here, and here.

Thanks Bringing this interesting project to my attention, Bunny Harvey! 🙂