by Jeroen Bouterse

Have you ever been in this situation where you had to get a group of 3 men and their sisters across a river, but the boat only held two and you had to take precautions to ensure the women got across without being assaulted?

This problem is one of 53 puzzles in the oldest extant puzzle book in the Western (Latin) tradition: the Propositiones ad acuendos iuventes or problems to sharpen the young. Its authorship is uncertain but it is often and plausibly attributed to Alcuin, who possibly sent them to the Frankish ruler Charlemagne in 800 AD.[1] I hope you will allow me a brief introduction of these puzzles, before I go on to do what I hope will by then be redundant, namely spelling out why I think you should be thrilled by their existence.

Slugs and Pigeons

Alcuin’s puzzles are diverse, but puzzles of the same type often show up more than once. For example, some have us figure out a number based on a multiple of it, provided in a somewhat convoluted manner: a man seeing a certain number of horses and wishing that he possessed that number, and then that number again, and then a quarter more than that, for then he would possess a hundred horses (puzzle 4). There are questions that effectively ask how often a given area fits into another given area, how items can be distributed in discrete quantities given certain conditions, or how long it will take for one animal to overtake another or to cover a given distance. The first puzzle, for instance, has a leech invite a slug over for lunch, only to have us realize that it will take the poor creature centuries to get to its destination. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joshua Wilbur 

This month I’m submitting a guest post written by an acquaintance of mine.

His name, strange as it may sound, is One-Week Man.  He suffers from an unusual quirk: he can only remember the most recent week of his past, and he can only imagine one week into his future. He is forever stuck in this ever-shifting window of time.

One-Week Man is a bizarre, parochial soul, and I’m skeptical of his capacity to hold a well-informed opinion on anything of consequence. Nevertheless, he insisted on sharing his thoughts, which I present below, unedited.

It’s true.  I can only recall one week of the past and think ahead one week into the future. (Maybe “Two-Week Man” would be a more fitting name, but I didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.)

Some explanation might be helpful. I’m writing this on a Sunday, September 1st. Exactly one week ago, I spent the day on the beach. What happened in my life prior to that sunny afternoon, I couldn’t tell you: it’s all a haze. Looking forward to next Sunday, I’m planning to do some work around the house, a one-bedroom cottage that I don’t remember moving into. Beyond that, I literally cannot imagine what the future holds. August 25th and September 8th represent the limits of my mental universe. 

As it turns out, I’m very busy this week. My calendar—who would I be without it?—is filled with work meetings, doctors’ appointments, even an out-of-state conference from Wednesday to Friday. I work in the life insurance industry; I always have as far as I can tell.

For the most part, I’m content with things, despite my temporal malady. The doctors can’t explain my condition, which they consider untreatable and “psychosomatic” (whatever that means, I’ve forgotten), so there’s nothing I can do but live one week at a time. Most people, apparently, are terrible at thinking about the future. For me, it’s an absolute black hole. It’s difficult because I really do care about the fate of, well, everything: myself, my country, my planet. But I can’t see beyond the week, cursed as I am with a short-sighted brain and countless things-to-do. This is my dilemma. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

Last weekend, a bat got into my house somehow. I first heard it in the small hours of Friday night as it scratched around somewhere near the furnace flue. I didn’t know if it was an animal settling into a new home in my attic, or if perhaps it was going out periodically to get food and bringing it back to feed babies in an established nest. All became clear very late the next night, when the bat managed to get out of the enclosure around the flue and then exit the closet where the furnace is. After some drama that I need not recount here, it flew out the front door, and I stopped gibbering on my front walk and went back inside.

The thing is, I don’t dislike bats. I enjoy seeing them in the evening sky. I worry about white-nose syndrome. I want there to be bats in the world, and now that I’ve had time to calm down, I’m glad the bat in my house got safely away. I can see that the experience was more stressful and life-threatening for the bat than for me. But I don’t really want bats anywhere near my house.

I was upset in large part simply because wild animals don’t belong in the house, period. But after a conversation with a friend about the bat situation at my house, I began to think about the fact that my love for and appreciation of nature is selective. I know that humans are having an appalling effect on the lives of other animals, and there’s no possible justification for our destructiveness. Yet, although I’m grateful for the presence of a fair amount of the urban wildlife around me, I wish some of it weren’t there. On some level, I’m not sure I’d mind if it were gone. Read more »

Day 28: India’s Siege on the Vale of Kashmir

by Ayaz Rasool Nazki

Trapped
in a tomb
you yearn
for a voice:

a family kin
a friend
a stranger

even an enemy would do
a nightingale sings (of joy?)
a crow caws caws caws

Your santoor
in the corner
its strings
concertina

Dumb
for notes
you sing

only of blood
to sculpt
wounds

* * *

Ayaz Rasool Nazki, Kashmiri poet, painter, novelist lives in Srinagar. His recent poetry collection is ‘Songs of Light’ (Writers Workshop 2018). Translated from the original Kashmiri by Rafiq Kathwari / @brownpundit #StandWithKashmir

Morning view from my bedroom window in Brixen, South Tyrol, in May of 2016.

by Gabrielle C. Durham

If you grew up in the Western Hemisphere, chances are good that you heard or read several fairytales by the Brothers Grimm as a child. Examples include “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Less well known, and for good reason, are stories of retribution, such as “St. Joseph in the Forest” or “King Thrushbeard,” or gratuitous violence, such as “The Louse and the Flea.”

These German purveyors of macabre moralism were not just busy horrifying children and their parents for countless generations; one of the brothers, Jacob Grimm (1785–1863), was also a linguist, or philologist, as the profession was known in the 19^th century. Grimm’s concern was how the branches of the Indo-European languages tree led to the altered Germanic languages. (The original nine Indo-European language families are Indo-European, Armenian, Hellenic, Albanian, Italic/Romance, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, and Germanic, which includes English.)

Specifically, Grimm wanted to explain how consonants changed from Indo-European roots, recognized throughout those languages from Farsi to French, into Germanic languages. We’re going to get a little linguistic here, so bear with me. Read more »

by Marie Gaglione

I don’t know where exactly the blame lies for the United States’ relationship with work. Early disciples of capitalism, probably, or the first few factory owners of the industrial revolution. I could (and readily would) fill this essay pointing fingers at monopolists and wall-streeters and Reagan-era plutomaniacs, but it wouldn’t stop inquiring minds from demanding twenty-year plans from children. Every kid gets asked, and everyone asks it, but we don’t talk about what we’re really communicating. What do you want to be when you grow up? The language of it carries its own implication. Adults with even the very best intentions are telling the youth of this country that what you do is who you are. Your work will define you; it’s what you will be. 

When I was very little, I wanted to be an astronaut, a firefighter, or a hairdresser. They were the most glamorous jobs I could fathom with what I imagined to be comparable levels of danger involved (here I spare the reader a lengthy digression on the psychology of fearing blowdryers).  It wasn’t about the work of the position; I don’t remember ever contemplating the daily lives of these people. It was an idea of the kind of person I wanted to be. Bold and powerful and exciting. But because what we do and who we are get braided together from such a young age, I floundered around with my answers as I grew up. And it’s weird because you get to college and they reinforce what you’ve heard forever: choose wisely, this will define you. Your major will determine what you do and who you become for the rest of your life. It’s no wonder so many undergrads are in a state of perpetual panic. Read more »

by Abigail Akavia

This month marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of Hanoch Levin. Levin was Israel’s most important and prolific playwright. In addition to 56 plays, most of which he directed himself, he wrote poems, sketches, and prose, and is often compared to such giants of modernism and absurd theater as Chekhov, Artaud, Brecht, and Beckett. Levin died of cancer at the age of 55, after gaining a unique status as a theatrical superstar. His plays were extremely popular, and some of the most significant works of Israeli high-culture ever produced.

Levin was catapulted into fame (or notoriety) as a satirist in the late 1960s. His scathing political pieces lampooned Israel’s chauvinistic patriotism at a time when the young state was overwhelmingly euphoric from its triumph against three Arab nations in the Six Day War. After these controversial satires, he wrote mostly comedies. Featuring pathetic but endearing characters with hilarious, often made-up, names—Jonah Popoch, David Leidenthal, Pepchetz Schitz, to mention just a few whose names are not too hard to translate or transliterate—his comedies represented a specific kind of Israeli Jew of east-European descent. At the same time, these comic figures stand for a broader Israeliness (not ethnic-specific, that is), which Levin exposed in its provinciality, illusions of grandeur, and a bigoted us-against-them mentality. Read more »

Imagine This

thing shaped like a dish
saucer moonspan wide in nightsky
laden with milk for a cat
a gesture of someone kind
who is always more than this and
ever less than that

sun up
moon scats

have you noticed that
in a miraculous way fully backed by science
the eyes of truth will always stare you down
in the dark regardless of how you may
hate a fact

Jim Culleny
4/1/15

Janet Cardiff. Forty Part Motet, 2001.

“While listening to a concert you are normally seated in front of the choir, in traditional audience position. With this piece I want the audience to be able to experience a piece of music from the viewpoint of the singers. Every performer hears a unique mix of the piece of music. Enabling the audience to move throughout the space allows them to be intimately connected with the voices. It also reveals the piece of music as a changing construct. As well, I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.”

More here, here, and currently at the Clark Museum.

Joseph R. Bertino, MD, is University Professor of medicine and pharmacology, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and has previously served as director of the Yale Cancer Center and chair of the Molecular Pharmacology and Therapeutics Program at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. He is the author and co-author of more than 400 scientific publications and the founding editor of the Journal of Clinical Oncology. His research is focused on curative treatments for leukemia and lymphoma and has helped shape optimal methotrexate administration schedules. Currently, his laboratory is studying gene therapy and stem cell research. He has received the Rosenthal Award from the American Association of Clinical Research, the Karnofsky Award from the American Society for Clinical Oncology, and the American Cancer Society Medal of Honor for his accomplishments in the field of research.

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 Joseph Shieber

One of the masterful conceits of Socrates’s discussion of tyranny in Plato’s Republic is a surprising claim that Socrates makes at the outset of the dialogues, and one that serves as a guiding thread throughout. You would expect that if someone is going to criticize tyranny, they would do so because of the harms done to the victims of tyranny. But Socrates claims that he can show that tyranny actually harms the tyrant himself. In fact, Socrates even claims that the harms to the tyrant are greater than those done to his victims.

I thought of this brilliant rhetorical strategy as I read Daniel Markovits’s recent essay in the Atlantic Monthly, “Meritocracy’s Miserable Winners”.

Markovits deploys the Socratic maneuver from The Republic in service of a critique of meritocracy. The one side of the critique, that meritocracy harms those that it excludes from its gifts, is the one that you might expect. But the other side of the critique, that meritocracy harms its beneficiaries, those who reap enormous wealth and status from meritocratic institutions, is the one that might surprise you.

I want to get to the more original aspect of Markovits’s critique of meritocracy – his claim that it harms its beneficiaries – in a moment. But I first want to consider his critique of meritocracy on the basis of its harms to those excluded from its rewards. Read more »

What To Say To Rain

I would like to beat down
into the world too
& make everything growing glisten.

…

What to Say to Sky After a Storm

It’s too late
when the silver sun blinks awake
we already learned how to live
in our soft bodies in the wind
& dream through the shadows of rain.

…

What to Say to Night

Thanks for the moon. You knew
to leave a light on in the long hallway
and I believe the shadow of the Earth
that gouges it out is an accident.

…

What to Say to Write

There is nothing to say
except
the whole sky blossoms sometimes
into billows & light
& the wooden bowl of peaches on the oak table
speaks to how something
keeps on giving–we should say
if we deserve this.

by Katie Poore

As a child, author and poet Annie Dillard would traipse through her neighborhood, searching for ideal places to stash pennies where others might find them. In her novel Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a meditation on the natural world surrounding her home in a rural Virginia valley, she tells us she would nestle them “at the roots of a sycamore,” or perhaps “in a hole left by a chipped-off piece of sidewalk.” She would draw arrows pointing toward the penny in chalk, sometimes writing tantalizing promises down the block: “SURPRISE AHEAD” or “MONEY THIS WAY.”

She wanted to give innocent passersby “a free gift from the universe,” she says. In her six-year-old mind, these pennies were just that: potent and grand indicators of a larger existential goodness, near-divine symbols of worldly benevolence.

Reading about this childish endeavor is endearing, and even admirable. It’s hard to imagine many children go about their days attempting to introduce such undeserved and good-natured whimsy into the lives of complete strangers.

But I know I never would have picked up Dillard’s penny. If I had followed her arrows at all, I’m certain I’d have seen the penny and rolled my eyes, leaving my gift from the universe behind. Let some other crestfallen explorer settle for such a scant cosmic prize.

But this is precisely Dillard’s point: How many gifts do we elect to bypass simply because they are too small? The chapter in which she recounts this tale is called “Seeing,” which begs the question: How blind are we? How resistant to wonder have we made ourselves, and how unaccommodating of the universe’s gifts? As Dillard phrases it: “Who gets excited by a mere penny?” Read more »