I was about to board this Frecciargento fast train from Bozen to Verona last week when I noticed how nicely the shape of the train matched the shape of the mountain in the background.

by Tamuira Reid

The apartment in West Harlem, five buildings down on the left. The apartment just past the pawn shop, across from the Rite-Aid, parallel to the barber’s where all the pretty boys hangout waiting to get a Friday night shave. The apartment past the deli were you get cheese and pickle sandwiches and the all-night liquor store and the ATM machine no one is dumb enough to use.

The apartment at the top of the stairs with the impossibly high ceilings and the blue bathroom door, the door you labor behind for twelve hours before going to the hospital, your body threatening to push another body out. The apartment where you bring him home, his pink baby body covered in muslin and sweat. The apartment with the wide cracked stoop where you rest with his father just long enough to catch your breath, to say holy shit, he’s beautiful.

The apartment you now stand in front of, seven years later, holding onto a box of birthday-wrapped legos and your son’s hand. The apartment at Broadway and 138^th. The apartment on the way to the party. The apartment half-way down a steep hill, the hill you lug your grocery bags down, and the hill you climb with your luggage. The apartment with a broken oven but perfect sunlight and enough closets to hide things in. The apartment in an old brownstone next to other old brownstones, framed by planter boxes filled with tulips and beer cans and night club fliers. The apartment owned by an angry old man and his needy young wife, a man who is stretched so thin he could give two fucks when you tell him the heat is out. The apartment where you sleep in a pile for warmth, arms and legs wrapped around one another, the baby squished between across the two of you. Read more »

by Shawn Crawford

Preachers at our Baptist church had to ask for an Amen. We weren’t just going to spontaneously let one loose. God can’t drive a parked car, my youth minister would say. Meaning you had to exert your own will as well in the pursuit of a righteous life. When it came to the Holy Spirit, we rarely even tried the ignition.

After the death of Christ, the apostles found themselves a pretty sorry lot. Scared and convinced they were the next candidates for execution, most went into hiding. What transformed them was not merely the appearance of the resurrected Jesus, but the gift of the Holy Spirit, and this gift came to them through the sound of a rushing wind and tongues of fire that descended from heaven and “came to rest on each of them” (Acts 2.3). The depiction of this event generally involves little candle flames hovering over the Apostles. As if that wasn’t cool enough, the first thing that happened for the Apostles was the ability to speak in languages they had never known. Which came in handy, because it just so happened Jews all over the world had gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost, a derivation of a Greek word that means “fifty” and denoted the fiftieth day after Passover and the beginning of the next Jewish holiday Shavuot. Peter gave the first sermon on the need for repentance and baptism, the Christian church began, and the word Pentecost became associated with the Holy Spirit and speaking in tongues, which would eventually spawn a focus on such practices in Pentecostal churches. Read more »

by Michael Liss

I don’t know a lot about guns.

I live in New York, which has comparatively restrictive gun laws, I don’t own any, I don’t hunt (and didn’t grow up hunting), and I wasn’t in the service. I don’t have the emotional bonds that others who grew up around them might. The entire sum of my personal experience was several years of summer-camp riflery practice: .22 caliber single-action rifles that might have been previously used in the Boer War. We marched them over to a “range” consisting of a shack with mattresses on the floor, a lot of tree-stumps, and a contraption with pulleys and clotheslines to move the targets, and competed for NRA sharpshooter patches.

That is just about my last firsthand memory of guns, so, to reiterate, I just don’t know very much about them. I also can’t tell you about makes, models, types; whether a particular firearm is an “assault weapon”; or which one (or six) John Wick would pick. As I can’t speak knowledgeably about guns themselves, I’m going to stay in my lane as a lawyer who writes about history and politics, and talk about guns and gun control in that context. In doing so, I expect to irritate virtually everyone who reads this.

First, the Second Amendment exists. It doesn’t matter whether you or I agree with it—it’s there. We can argue about what the Framers intent was when they wrote it, or the intent of the voters of the States that ratified it, but you can’t wish it away. This is not an endorsement of unlimited guns in every hand and every place, and it is certainly not a moral judgment. It is just a reflection of reality. When government acts restrictively on guns, it takes something from gun owners, and the entire legal analysis from that point forward hinges on whether it is taking too much. Read more »

Neo Matloga. Unknown Title. 2018.

More here and here.

Currently showing at Zeitz Museum, Cape Town.

by Rafaël Newman

I am employed two or three weekends a month as a minder or “Betreuer” at a treatment centre and halfway house for recovering drug addicts in Zurich. My duties include spending the night at the facility as the lone member of supervisory staff, eating meals with the clients, supervising their activities and accompanying their outings, taking urine samples and administering breathalyzer tests, distributing a variety of antidepressants and other prescription meds, and joining them for sessions of meditation and self-led group therapy.

Our clients typically come from the Swiss middle and working class, are predominantly white and “European”, and have in common with other addicts of my acquaintance a marked tendency to egocentrism and either a concomitant failure of empathy or, in reaction to the affective over-sensitivity that has come to be associated with addiction (particularly in the case of celebrity overdose victims such as Philip Seymour Hoffman), a self-protective closing of the border between self and other, whether by chemical, behavioral, or neurotic means.

Among my unspoken responsibilities as a minder, therefore, and in line with the principles of the self-help program that serve the center as an unofficial “philosophy”, is the performance of a living example: of empathy in action; of open-mindedness regarding others and their sensibilities or “struggles”; of humility and the will to serve, rather than simply to use, exploit, and consume. And as a consequence, the recovering addicts in my charge are, implicitly, to learn how to belong to a group rather than to go it alone, as they have been wont to do in active addiction. Read more »

Michael Caligiuri, a renowned physician-scientist is the President of City of Hope National Medical Center, and Deana and Steve Campbell Physician-in-Chief Distinguished Chair. He directed The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center for 14 years prior as well as being the chief executive officer of The James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute for 10 years. Caligiuri’s research focuses on the development and activation of human natural killer cells and their modulation for the treatment of leukemia, myeloma, and glioblastoma. He is a fellow and the immediate past president of the American Association for Cancer Research and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine.

Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questions listed below. She videotaped the interviews and over the next months we will be posting them here one at a time each Monday. Please keep in mind that Azra and the rest of us at 3QD neither endorse nor oppose any of the answers given by the researchers as part of this project. Their views are their own. One can browse all previous interviews here.

1. We were treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML) with 7+3 (7 days of the drug cytosine arabinoside and 3 days of daunomycin) in 1977. We are still doing the same in 2019. What is the best way forward to change it by 2028?

2. There are 3.5 million papers on cancer, 135,000 in 2017 alone. There is a staggering disconnect between great scientific insights and translation to improved therapy. What are we doing wrong?

3. The fact that children respond to the same treatment better than adults seems to suggest that the cancer biology is different and also that the host is different. Since most cancers increase with age, even having good therapy may not matter as the host is decrepit. Solution?

4. You have great knowledge and experience in the field. If you were given limitless resources to plan a cure for cancer, what will you do?

5. Offering patients with advanced stage non-curable cancer, palliative but toxic treatments is a service or disservice in the current therapeutic landscape?

by Eric J. Weiner

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare. —Audre Lorde

As I write this introduction, I struggle against becoming overwhelmed by too many things: The mass shootings that occur on a regular basis; the daily gun-related murder and maiming that occur throughout the country everyday; the normalization of white supremacy/nationalism; the poverty you can see in the eyes of children in shelters and on the street; a twittering billionaire president who mugs for the cameras of “the enemy of the people” as children are concentrated in “camps” at the southern border; the increase in crimes against immigrants, African Americans, Jews, Muslims, women, and gay people; the gouging prices of life saving drugs like insulin; and the smugness of those in congress who summer far from the death and chaos, muttering to the press about mental illness, second amendment rights, the “free” market, cultural deficits, and anything else that might distract from the callousness and cynicism that drives what poses for public policy these days. And I could go on.

But I know that if I am overwhelmed then I will not have the energy to resist, talk back, confront, fight, struggle, reflect, transform, teach, and renew.  In this essay, I will discuss what it means to develop what I am calling a praxis of pleasure as both a strategy and tactic of resistance. As a tactic, a la Michel de Certeau, it is a practice of reclaiming a modicum of power within an established geography of inequitable power relationships. As a strategy, it is a guide toward living well so that we may rise to fight another day. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Bill Murray

Thirty years ago this week two million people joined hands forming a human chain across 676 kilometers of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Known as the Baltic Way, the visually arresting stunt was a cinematic cri de coeur for freedom.

In time freedom was theirs. The Russian military fled, sometimes trashing their barracks and looting along the way the way. As a measure of the state in which the Soviet Union left the Baltics, still now, thirty years on it takes around seven hours to travel by train between Tallinn and Riga, the capitals of two European countries separated by scarcely 200 miles. Imagine.

The Estonian and Latvian railways have finally co-ordinated their timetables, but you still have to walk across the platform to change trains at the border. By contrast, the drive takes perhaps four and a half hours, and, as both are now Schengen countries, your vehicle breezes through the abandoned border post without slowing down.

Much of that drive, after the tidy Estonian border town of Parnu, takes you south along the coast of the Gulf of Riga. Estonia and Latvia are lovely during this early bit of Baltic autumn, grasses with full summer growth waving in fields skirting Baltic shores. Read more »

by Sarah Firisen

I’ve just come back from a lovely vacation in Ireland. We did a lot of driving and usually had the radio on, often to RTE, the state run station (the equivalent to the BBC in the UK). At least once an hour an advertisement would come on reminding people that they need to get a TV license, which costs 160 Euros, $177 a year. I grew up in the UK, where a license is 154.50 sterling,  $187 a year, and remember the ads when I was a child that warned of the TV detector van coming around and catching people who hadn’t paid their license. Of course, that was in the days of very obvious exterior antennas on houses. When TV licenses were first issued in the UK after the second world war, they funded the single BBC channel. Even when I was a child, there were only 3 channels, then when I was a teen 4, and two of those were the BBC. In the UK today, a license is needed for any device that is  “installed or used” for “receiving a television programme at the same time (or virtually the same time) as it is received by members of the public”. In Ireland, as the many ads I heard made clear, the license is for a physical TV, regardless of what it’s used for, including gaming or streaming YouTube videos. In the UK, you don’t need a license if you watch anything else on your TV, including using catch-up devices and players for BBC shows, except if you use the BBC iPlayer services, but you do need a license if you watch live TV or use the BBC iPlayer on any device.  

Listening to these repeated ads in Ireland, it struck me how regressive this license charge is. Reading up on the differences in the UK, their rules seem fairer at least. On my return, I read that Ireland is actually changing its licensing rules in the future and that “The Government is to scrap the current licence fee and replace it with a charge that will hit virtually every Irish home, regardless of whether a television set is present…It will mean that anyone with a laptop, a tablet or a smartphone at home will be liable to pay.” 

I’m not really debating the virtue or utility of such licenses. There’s clearly a valid debate about the need for state owned TV and radio stations in this day and age, but that’s not my point to debate here either. Rather, my thoughts are about government’s ability to keep pace with technological changes. Read more »

Self-portrait in reflection on the entrance doors of the showroom of famous chandelier-maker, Faustig, in Brixen, South Tyrol, in October of 2014.

by John Schwenkler

The community of philosophers is mourning the loss of Barry Stroud, one of the great philosophers of the past half-century, who died on Friday, August 9 of brain cancer. Stroud earned his B.A. from the University of Toronto and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. From 1961 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where I knew him during my time as a graduate student there.

Stroud’s important paper of 1968, “Transcendental Arguments,” followed Immanuel Kant in distinguishing two sorts of question that a philosopher can raise about the concepts human beings use in thinking about ourselves and our world. The first, which Kant associates with John Locke, is the question of fact that concerns which concepts we do have and how we came to possess them. To explore our concepts in this way is to engage in what Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, called a “physiology of human understanding.” It is to give a causal account of how our minds came to be the way they are—an important project, but not one that is distinctively philosophical, since empirical disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology also take it up.

Kant’s other way of reflecting on human concepts, which is the one he undertakes in the first Critique, raises instead a question of right. This question asks, given that we have the concepts we do and have come to possess them in whatever way we did, whether we really are justified in possessing those concepts and using them to think about things. It is a question of whether our ways of thinking allow us to have an objective grasp of reality rather than a merely subjective conception of how things are. Read more »

by Bill Benzon

While cruising the web on the evening of July 22, 2019, I learned that Dick Macksey had died earlier in the day. He was a legend at Johns Hopkins University, had been for years – a prodigious polymath who speaks who knows how many languages, a tireless teacher, a genial host, and an indefatigable conversationalist who owns more books than the Library of Alexandria, though only a few of them are quite that old. Everyone had spoken of the legend for decades, and Everyone is now retelling it.

The thing about legends is that they are based in fact, but the amplification serves to create distance from facts behind the legend.

I had worked with Macksey for seven years between 1966, the spring of my freshman year at Johns Hopkins, and the fall 1973, when I went to SUNY Buffalo to get a doctorate in English literature. I have had occasional contact with him since then, both in person and over the phone. I knew the legend of course. But I also glimpsed the man. Read more »

Einstein & Etta James

(reading below)

I’m fourteen when Einstein is
in Princeton

he’s old & heading out of breath
as I am fresh and new at breathing
in some

but there the landscapes of the space
between our ears divides

Al used levers of mind to lift
mass in time while mine
took to bass of R & B
which thumped in heads
and loins in adolescent
instants

Einstein’s gone, but his poster’s on our wall
—if you were stepping down our stairs you’d
glimpse him

in overcoat and hat strolling through our stairwell
wry smile, moustache, life-sized, black and white,
shedding light on light (you couldn’t
miss him)

same moment: mid-fifties
bluesy Etta James, was desirably
winsome

she was strong and sexy
beautiful and sure

so I weighed the heft of
his and hers and took them both
to mind and heart and lately find,
in terms of back-and-forths between the two,
there certainly has
been some

I admired them both and
then some
.

by Jim Culleny
12/15/18
https://clyp.it/0vecuqux

by Michael Klenk

I live and work in two different cities; on the commute, I continuously ask my phone for advice: When’s the next train? Must I take the bus, or can I afford to walk and still make the day’s first meeting? I let my phone direct me to places to eat and things to see, and I’ll admit that for almost any question, my first impulse is to ask the internet for advice.

My deference to machines puts me in good company. Professionals concerned with mightily important questions are doing it, too, when they listen to machines to determine who is likely to have cancer, pay back their loan, or return to prison. That’s all good insofar as we need to settle clearly defined, factual questions that have computable answers.

Imagine now a wondrous new app. One that tells you whether it is permissible to lie to a friend about their looks, to take the plane in times of global warming, or whether you ought to donate to humanitarian causes and be a vegetarian. An artificial moral advisor to guide you through the moral maze of daily life. With the push of a button, you will competently settle your ethical questions; if many listen to the app, we might well be on our way to a better society.

Concrete efforts to create such artificial moral advisors are already underway. Some scholars herald artificial moral advisors as vast improvements over morally frail humans, as presenting the best opportunity for avoiding the extinction of human life from our own hands. They demand that we should take listen to machines for ethical advice. But should we? Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

Nearly four years ago here at 3QD we talked about how Euler became interested in a trifling little puzzle in 1736. He asked if it was possible to take a walk through the city of Königsberg, Prussia and cross each of its seven bridges once and only once. It seems like a silly thing to spend your time on and is obviously of no use to anyone. My former senator would have an aneurysm at the idea of funding such research. Fortunately for us, Frederick the Great was more of a visionary.

Being no slouch, not only did Euler solve the problem (spoiler: it’s not possible), he invented two major fields of modern mathematics in the process. Four years ago we followed one of those rabbit holes and were led to the field now called topology. It is the study of geometry when you don’t care about angles, distance, and the like. Topology is a rich and exciting area of modern research with all sorts of applications. It leads to subway maps, the use of homology to study the structure of huge data sets, motion planning for robots, and gives us that one easy trick for solving labyrinths like a Theseus.

The second rabbit hole is the one we follow today. It leads to another area of modern mathematics now called graph theory.

In mathematics, a graph is nothing more than a collection of nodes and connections between them (sometimes called vertices and edges, respectively). Graphs can be drawn where each node is a dot and each connection is a line connecting the corresponding dots. Read more »