by Brooks Riley

It’s not every day that a small, unexpected masterpiece shows up in your mailbox, arriving with the same modest ‘ping’ that announces the other electronic missives. This was no ordinary masterpiece. It was the photograph of a detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco La Fine del Mondo on the entrance wall of La Cappella di San Brizio in Orvieto, the work itself a masterpiece of painterly skill and imagination, dating from ca.1500. It was taken by a good friend who spent several days with the monumental Signorelli frescoes on the interior walls of the cathedral of Orvieto.

The masterpiece I received, one small element of the arched fresco, achieved its rarified aesthetic status from having been isolated by the photographer for the frame, an act of proto-cropping used by anyone who’s ever put his eye to a viewfinder—or for that matter, anyone who’s ever opened his eyes.

We are all born with a cropping tool: It’s called focus. When we wake up in the morning, the eyes flutter open, we leave our cerebral home with its latent, chimerical images and are confronted by a giant canvas with millions of details, fuzzy around the outer edges, stretching out a full 180 degrees. Without a thought, we begin to cut away the dull bits, homing in on the alarm clock, the window, our phones, a doorknob, maybe even our fingernails. This is how we maneuver our way through the day and through life, cropping the big picture to highlight the parts we actually need to see at any given moment. Most of our time and attention are devoted to the details we’ve cropped from our greater field of vision, whether it’s the utensils we use, or the paths we take, or the signs we read.

In photography, cropping occurs before the picture is taken. Read more »

by Joseph D. Martin and Marta Halina

Calls for a Manhattan Project–style crash effort to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology are thick on the ground these days. Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, recently issued such a call on The Hill. The analogy is commonly used to describe DeepMind’s initiative to build artificial general intelligence (AGI). It is similarly used to describe military initiatives to build AGI. At a conference last year, DARPA announced a $2 billion investment in AI over the next five years. Ron Brachman, former director of DARPA’s cognitive systems initiative, said at this conference that a Manhattan Project is likely needed to “create an AI system that has the competence of a three-year old.”

In one sense, the goals of such analogies are clear. AI, the comparison implies, has the potential to be as transformative for our society as nuclear weapons were in the mid-twentieth century. Whoever masters it first will enjoy a massive head start on the next wave of technological development, economic competition, and, yes, the arms race of the twenty-first century. It’s a project that comes with ethical implications that demand focused and well-resourced attention. These consequences are so important that we should not bat an eye at ploughing limitless resources into its development.

But if this analogy is to sustain such a bold claim, it bears closer scrutiny. First, analogies of this sort are not innocuous. Invocations of historical examples, especially examples so iconic as the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program, aim to borrow the authority—and implications of success—that such historical episodes command. It is prudent to examine analogies to see if that authority is merited, or if it has been unjustly swiped. Read more »

Mohau Modisakeng. Inzilo 2013, still from video.

More here, here, and here.

by Emily Ogden

Fans are the people who know the quotes, the dates of publication, the batting averages, the bassist on this album, the team that general manager coached before. I am not a fan. Don’t get me wrong. I’m full of enthusiasms. But I can’t match you statistic for statistic. I haven’t read the major author’s minor novel. I don’t care who the bassist was. You win. I’m an amateur.

Amateur gets opposed to professional sometimes: the amateur isn’t making money from her skill or her knowledge. Other times, amateurism gets opposed to expertise: amateurs screw it up, experts fix it. These are not the meanings I intend. In French, an amateur is a lover; fan, a nineteenth-century US coinage, comes from fanatic. The amateur leaves some space for ignorance, letting the relationship to the beloved thing—the sports team, the artwork—retain the quality of an affair. The fan, in the particular sense I mean, gets lumbered under facts. There is something of the jealous monogamist about fandom, something of the checker for digital traces of the beloved’s secret life. Who hasn’t been there? But wouldn’t it be better if we hadn’t? When I say I am not a fan, I mean I aspire not to follow out that particular impulse. I aspire not to compete, at the cocktail party, for possession of Herman Melville, as measured in knowledge of his vital statistics.

Ownership of the beloved object is tempting but it’s not the shiniest prize that fandom holds out to you. The greatest temptation is a credential, a badge: you know all these things, so you must not be dumb. I’ve flashed that badge plenty, even if it would have been better not to. Read more »

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 26 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.

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?

A nationally-recognized authority on leukemia, Dr. Guido Marcucci has lectured around the world and authored more than 270 scholarly papers on the subject. His ultimate goal is to make leukemia a thing of the past. He has received numerous competitive NCI grants for his clinical and research work focused on the pathogenesis, treatment and prognostic assessment of patients with acute myeloid leukemia. Dr. Marcucci currently serves on the editorial board of three journals, including Blood and the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

by Mary Hrovat

When I watched the 2019 documentary on Apollo 11, it carried me back not to the summer of 1969, when it happened, but to the mid-1980s, when I was an undergrad. I was eight when Apollo 11 launched; of course I was aware of the space program and the moon landings, but I don’t have any memories of everyone gathering around to watch those first steps on another world. My parents weren’t particularly interested, and I don’t remember being caught by the spirit of the times myself.

It wasn’t until shortly before I began an undergraduate program in astrophysics, in the mid-1980s, that I started to take a serious interest in space exploration. I read everything I could find on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs; I was particularly interested in first-hand accounts by the astronauts themselves. Carrying the Fire, by Michael Collins, still stands out in my mind as the very best of these.

I was gripped by the idea of being out in space and seeing Earth from space or the moon from orbit. Sometimes when I was out at night under a dark starry sky, I thought about Collins’s descriptions of his solo passes behind the moon, during which he was out of contact with Earth. I imagined seeing the blackness of space and untwinkling stars out one window of the spacecraft and the impenetrable darkness of the moon in shadow out the other. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Today I ask to what extent it is a positive development that there are no discussions of race and religion in Danny Boyle’s and Richard Curtis’s film Yesterday, whose protagonist Jack Malik is from a South Asian, possibly Muslim, background.

In his essay ‘Airports and Auditions’ for Nikesh Shukla’s The Good Immigrant, the actor Riz Ahmed outlined three stages of cinematic representations of Muslims. Stage One features stereotyped figures (the taxi driver, terrorist, cornershop owner, or oppressed woman). Stage Two involves a portrayal that subverts and challenges those stereotypes. Finally, Stage Three is ‘the Promised Land, where you play a character whose story is not intrinsically linked to his race’. Does Yesterday reach that Promised Land or fall short? I examine the film’s depiction of Jack Malik, whose race and religion are irrelevant to this story about love, fame, the music industry, and the Beatles.

Building on Riz Ahmed’s work, in 2017 two researchers, Sadia Habib and Shaf Choudry, developed the Riz Test for Muslims’ depictions in film and television. Inspired by Ahmed’s speech to the House of Commons about the power and harm of media representations, Habib and Choudry created their own version of the famous Bechdel Test for cinematic portrayals of women. They asked some key questions about the cinematic portrayals of Muslims: 

If the Film/ TV Show stars at least one character who is identifiably Muslim (by ethnicity, language or clothing) – is the character:

• Talking about, the victim of, or the perpetrator of terrorism?
• Presented as irrationally angry?
• Presented as superstitious, culturally backwards or anti-modern?
• Presented as a threat to a Western way of life?
• If the character is male, is he presented as misogynistic? Or if female, is she presented as oppressed by her male counterparts?

If the answer for any of the above is Yes, then the Film/ TV Show fails the test.

This test has already been hugely influential in the world of television, with Channel 4’s new Head of Drama Caroline Hollick (herself of Trinidadian descent, pictured) arguing at 2019’s Bradford Literature Festival that it should be uppermost in the mind of anyone commissioning programmes about Muslims. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Marie Gaglione

1. Into the Woods

 Most college students would readily submit that there are any number of external forces that inhibit their ability to perform or engage meaningfully with their academic endeavors, even when there is a genuine motivation and desire to do so, although such drives are often compromised by more compelling opportunities (see: survivor hour and other fun! college! activities!). There’s life outside of the university to contend with; relationships end, grandparents die, dads go to jail (the last one is particularly case-specific, but statistics on students with parents in prison would be an interesting metric to have). The necessary reaction to all of these things, for those students who have the means to carry on, is to carry on. These events can be managed, more or less, with the passage of time and the support of the community, in whatever sense of the word. There are Things One Can Do to move on from Hard Times.

I am no stranger to these external forces. Since I’ve been an undergrad, I’ve had partners become exes, I’ve lost my grandmas, I’ve been told over text of far too serious things. It’s an eerie dimension of the modern era that one can read of a friend’s suicide or a father’s prison time via instant message. We bounce from one screen to another in our waking hours and we pretend like Alexa isn’t recording our every word. Every day we let Google know our thoughts, our questions, our hopes, our fears; every day we feed into the ultimate hive mind, an unlimited data collective. We’re living in Bradbury’s fever dream with a heightened dose of Orwellian anxiety. And it’s the world today (in conjunction with certain childhood traumas and genetic predispositions) that contributes to what I’ve found far more difficult to overcome than the Hard Times: the internal forces. 

The two ages I oscillate between when considering how long I’ve been depressed are seven and fifteen. At 22, that just means I’ve been depressed for either amount of time. I think about what qualifies as the true beginning – was it the cookie-cutter childhood I missed? Or the chemical dependency that’s kept me prisoner since high school? Was it when I first contemplated the unsustainable and toxic nature of capitalism, and does it get worse the more I study the climate patterns? Whatever the answer may be, the fact remains that a lot of the time I am sad (or worse – sad and panicked). And this isn’t said in an attempt to garner pity or gain sympathy because I’m being vulnerable – it’s the reality of my experience. And it’s relevant here, in a nature essay, because it’s what brought me to the white deer; it’s what made me abandon my car and belongings and head, without intention or explanation, into the woods. Read more »

Our cat, Frederica Krüger, has taken to spying on me while I work in my home office.

by Gabrielle C. Durham

My friend does not use punctuation when he texts, so there is a stream-of-consciousness quality to much of his communications. According to the fine folks at Buzzfeed, you would likely infer that he is a millennial, but that is not true. He conveys his points while eschewing syntactic finality fairly clearly, so when he does use punctuation, he makes a big deal of it, as in “Look. At. The. Punctuation. I’m. Using.”

According to this article, using ending punctuation (specifically a period) in a text can convey insincerity (by way of gratuitous formality) or anger due to code-switching. That sounds a little forced to me, but I’m a Gen Xer, so I do not fit in the classification of folks who are deemed to be responsible for killing half the industries your parents relied on utterly.

Punctuation, which comes from the Latin root punctatio for making a point from the verb pungere, which means to pierce (circa 1539), is the set of standardized symbols in every language, and the marks do vary, that clarify meaning by separating phrases, clauses, and sentences as well as by adding breathing cues. Pablo Picasso described punctuation marks as “the fig leaves that hide the private parts of literature.” The standard punctuation marks in English are period, question mark, exclamation point, comma, colon, and semicolon. Read more »

by Ruchira Paul

Early in H.M. Naqvi’s new novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack (SWAC from here on out) we come across this exchange between Abdullah and a devout young Pathan as the former, in poor health and out of breath, is seen taking a drink of water from a thermos on a sweltering day during the holy month of Ramzan when most able bodied and observant Muslims choose to fast between sunrise and sunset.

“Tum Musalman ho?” asks the younger man offended by Abdullah’s transgression. “Are you a Muslim?”

Enraged by the man’s pious arrogance, Abdullah hollers, “This is Currachee! This is my city! I could be a Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal, Hindoo, Amil, Parsee. I could be Shia, Sunni, Bohra, Barelvi, Sufi….If you want to ask such questions then go back to Kabul. …If you are sensible, then your God is sensible, but if you’re a dolt, your God’s a dolt.”

A dangerous confrontation follows from which the beleaguered Abdullah is rescued by a dark eyed stranger. Abdullah’s defiant bluster notwithstanding, the reader knows that in today’s Pakistan, even a Muslim in a Muslim nation and a lifelong resident of a large and cosmopolitan city like Karachi, a man cannot really expect to have his seeming lack of piety go unchallenged. Many of the adherents of other faiths on the list that Abdullah rattles off no longer live there and the few that do, are marginalized and often live in fear. Not just in Pakistan but in many parts of the world triumphalist majoritarian bullying now pervades the public mood. Read more »

by Thomas R. Wells

The right to own guns is typically justified by the fundamental right to self-defense against bad guys, either our fellow citizens or the state itself if it were to turn tyrannical. Both of these have a superficial appeal but fail in obvious ways. Guns are an effective means of defending oneself against bad guys only so long as they don’t have guns too (because being equally armed doesn’t add up a defense against those who can pick and choose their moment of aggression). Civilians with guns are also ineffective against the armies and ruthless terroristic violence of a truly tyrannical regime.

Here I want to discuss a more subtle and less ridiculous justification for the right to own guns. I think it drives much of the enthusiasm for gun rights but is rarely spelled out. This is the fact that widespread gun ownership forces liberal democratic governments to take the views of those citizens more seriously and work harder to gain their consent. In this way gun ownership operates as a drag on the ambition and scope of what has become a somewhat paternalistic form of government with an irritating tendency to micromanage its citizens’ lives. The hoped for result would be a more libertarian regime that leaves people better alone. Read more »

My friend, poet Nils Peterson, sent me a new poem of his the other day. It moved me to spontaneously add a second verse which I presented to him and he liked. So this is a collaborative venture. The first stanza is Nils’, the last stanza, following the break, is mine. Two writers, one poem. The title belongs to Nils.

The First of July
Report to a Friend

Year half gone. Sometimes
I’ve been Noah hammering
away at my ark, sometimes
his wife who likes the rain.
Last night, I felt the wind
freshen and the few joined
planks of my hull strain
against their braces. I woke
thinking I haven’t called
the animals. This morning
I stand by the hull of my
salvation fiercely caulking,
calling out “Aardvark”

who come in my dream
twigs in mouths, innocent as doves
with proof the seed I’d planted
before the rains would come,
before a hammer would meet my hand,
before I ever imagined a reason for arks,
had become the tree I would fell
and cut and mill to build the story
of my salvation

by Nils Peterson & Jim Culleny
7 / 27, 28 / 2019

by Joseph Shieber

There’s an interesting reaction that I sometimes get from my colleagues in the natural sciences when I describe what I do. When I talk about epistemology – the study of knowledge – I often hear a version of the following response.

“Well, in the sciences we don’t really deal with knowledge at all. At best, we have a high degree of confidence in a claim, but we’d never say that we know it.”

In the faculty dining room, there’s seldom time seriously to discuss philosophy with faculty from other disciplines. Also, if I tried it, I might find myself sitting alone in the very near future. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to respond to my (imaginary) colleague.

To do so, I want to start by considering an argument of Saul Kripke’s. Kripke achieved fame early as a philosophical prodigy. He enjoyed widespread acclaim within the philosophical community first for his work in modal logic and later for his work in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Kripke’s reputation also stemmed from his virtuoso lectures. He was able to lecture without notes on complex topics, the complete paragraphs tumbling out of his mouth, seemingly effortlessly. He was equally known as someone reluctant to put his ideas to paper, so for years many of the arguments attributed to him circulated in samizdat versions taken from notes from his lectures.

In the years in which many of Saul Kripke’s arguments circulated by word of mouth or in third-party notes of lectures, one of the most famous is what we can call the “Paradox of Knowledge’ argument. Read more »

Mrinalini Mukherjee. Devi, 1982.

More here, here, and current show at Met Breuer.