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! 🙂

by Eric J. Weiner

An intransigent form of identity politics in combination with neoliberal ideology has left the modern university, if not in ruins, then lacking imagination and cultural capital. It has become a place of sequestered spaces—symbolic and real—where too many students and faculty fear discussing issues deemed to be controversial, inappropriate, or “political.” Across the social sciences/humanities, politics, religion, sex, sexual orientation, climate change, science, gender, economic inequality, poverty, reproductive rights/regulations, homelessness, race, Trump, democracy, capitalism, patriarchy, anti-Semitism, Israel, terrorism, gun violence, sexual violence, and white supremacy are just some of the topics that today make students and even some teachers uncomfortable. At best maybe these topics are addressed by creating some kind of false equivalent in an effort to feign neutrality and keep people comfortable. Discomfort in the classroom from ignorance, tension, power imbalances, conflict, disagreement, or any degree of affective and cognitive dissonance is no longer tolerated. While it used to be considered a fundamental part of the critical learning experience, discomfort of this sort now signals a flaw in pedagogy and/or the curriculum and a betrayal of trust. Learning should always feel good, be nurturing (maternalistic), and, above all, fun. If it’s not then there is hell to pay.

The fear of being emotionally and intellectually uncomfortable and the strategies used to avoid it come from all over the ideological spectrum. Avoidance strategies, from the right and left, take the form of accusations about political bias; political (in)correctness-gone-wild; claims of social/intellectual marginalization; censoring viewpoints (books, speakers, media) that are deemed offensive; silencing people through various forms of protest; creating homogenized “safe spaces”; and policing, through different modes of surveillance, language, thoughts, and behavior. Retreating into intellectual silos on campus and online, students and teachers find comfort and solace in group-think, shared social practices, and aligned ideologies. The cost of these avoidance strategies for the individual and the republic is a form of idiocy, from the Greek “idiotes,” which describes a person who cannot participate in political and intellectual life because of their lack of skills, knowledge, and general ignorance about the responsibilities of civic life. At the same time the left and right are doing their best to defang the critical civic function of the university, most universities are now aligned with neoliberal ideology, focusing on market-based competition, branding, privatization, the de-unionization of faculty/staff, and job training. Within this toxic brew of schooling, tribalism, and ideology, students are seen (and generally want to be seen) first and foremost as children in need of protection, entertainment, and comfort; savvy and influential consumers; agile agents of social media unofficially employed to promote their schools; and docile members of the university “family.” Read more »

Kanti R. Rai, MD, is professor of medicine at The Karches Center for Oncology Research, The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research; director of the Center for Oncology and Cell Biology, Long Island Jewish Medical Center; and professor of medicine and molecular medicine at Hofstra University Northwell School of Medicine. He has been involved in diagnosing and treating Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia for almost 40 years and the staging system that bears his name came out of his early breakthrough research. His research led to the eventual development of idelalisib (Zydelig) as a second-line treatment for patients with CLL and ibrutinib (Imbruvica), used to treat mantle cell lymphoma, CLL, and Waldenström macroglobulinemia. He has been collaborating with other CLL scientists at The Feinstein Institute for years establishing the importance of fludarabine, now a standard-of-care treatment for CLL, and demonstrating the effectiveness of cladribine in treating hairy cell leukemia. Dr.Rai is an active investigator in the Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia Research Consortium, the International Workshop on CLL, and Cancer and Leukemia Group B. He is a member of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, the American Association for Cancer Research and the American Society of Hematology (ASH).

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 Robert Fay

In 1899 at the age of 59 Henry James began work on The Ambassadors, the first of his brilliant, ground-breaking final three novels that included The Wings of the Dove and finally The Golden Bowl. James’ biographer Leon Edel writes, “The Ambassadors was told by James in a complex, indirect style he had never attempted before…rather than accept the old tradition of the novel which told everything, James allowed his readers to know only as much as one learns in life.” And R.P. Blackmur wrote of these final novels, “James made a spiritual trilogy which, with each succeeding volume, approaches nearer and nearer the condition of poetry.”

James is the exemplar of producing unparalleled, distinctive work late in life when the artist must confront, not only the specter of death, but the more intimidating nemesis of one’s previous output, duel foes which can freeze one into a morbid nostalgia. I’m reminded of the Reverend Gail Hightower in William Faulkner’s Light in August, who cannot escape the chimera of his grandfather’s battles in the Civil War, and how this fixation destroys his marriage and his ministry. The past can strangle us indeed.

The challenge of doing true important “late work,” or “late style” as Edward Said called it, should stoke the ambitions (and anxieties) of all serious artists. And while it’s not an impossible mountain to summit, the list of accomplished mountaineers and their treks is intimidating, for it includes: Beethoven’s Late String Quartets; Philip Roth’s great late novels, American Pastoral (published when Roth was 64), I Married a Communist and The Plot Against America; as well as works from Picasso’s Late Period (though there are still critics who disparage these pieces), to name a few. But there is more here than the individual artist bravely exploring his own dimensions, there is the effect on the surrounding culture which (in our present age) is deprived of mature thought, being seduced by the lazy discourse of the adolescent and the crudely juvenile (I’m not speaking of chronological age here). And if you think I’m overstating it, go see what’s trending right now on your favorite social media platform. Read more »

by Rafaël Newman

It was Ramadan on Mother Teresa Street, so the professor and his wife were discreetly abstaining. Their daughter, an aspiring YouTuber, had been granted special dispensation and was gorging herself on chocolate ice cream and Coca Cola, along with me and my colleague, an Israeli poet who had won an award from the Ministry of Culture, Sport and Youth the evening before, both of us treated to refreshments at one of the many outdoor cafés that lined the pedestrian zone in the middle of Prishtinë.

It had taken us a while to reach the café, constantly interrupted in our progress from one end of the mall to the other by passersby greeting the professor – colleagues from the local university and its sister institutions elsewhere in Kosovo; relatives and well-wishers, offering our host “respekt”; and an instrument vendor, who insisted on the professor’s demonstrating his prowess on the qifteli, a long-necked, two-stringed local guitar – so I was delighted when I heard myself greeted, as we took our place at the café, by a Kosovar of my own acquaintance from the French-speaking region of Switzerland, who happened to be in town to visit family.

The Israeli poet and I were in Prishtinë on the last leg of a three-day stay in Kosovo. Our time had been spent not in the capital but in the town of Pejë, in the northwest of the country near the borders with Montenegro and Albania, once a significant stop on the trade route between Dubrovnik and Istanbul. We had been attending a literary festival there, taking part in readings, lectures, and a dizzying round of awards ceremonies. Most of the writers in attendance – largely poets – were “ethnic” Albanians, from the eponymous country to the west, from the significant minority community in Macedonia, to the south, as well as from Kosovo itself, our host. Read more »

by Maniza Naqvi

Grief stages its unfurling
Towards the promise of sorrow,
Strips away to beauty
Peels in layers
Sheds
Skin,
Leaks
Bleeds.
Sheds and sheds.
A friend texts
A song by Daniel Johnston.
An icon. Gone.
Says: Transitioned,
As you would say.
It has taken years, eight
To get here
To rescue stone.
This state.
To transform.
An avocado’s stone
Witness peel
Slip away
Pit turn to flesh
Shed
Dye.
Stone turned flesh,
Weeps,
Bleeds,
Dye.
Heart, pit, stone.
Reborn as stain.
On white sheet.
Tree.
Now washed:
Now bathed,
Now dipped,
Now dunked,
Now immersed,
Now lifted.
Now stained,
Faded rose red,
The hue of that stone
We picked for you
Now glimpses
Glimmers
Gold scapes
Sea blues,
And yes shades,
Crimson and beyond
Brushes and
Strokes
Thoughts
Eternity.
Struggle.