by Bill Murray

The first part of this century West Africa was no place to be. Liberia was led by Charles Taylor, now serving a fifty year sentence for “aiding and abetting as well as planning some of the most heinous and brutal crimes in recorded human history.” In Sierra Leone’s civil war, entire families were gunned down in the street. Children and adults had their limbs hacked off with machetes. 

A few years later in 2010, Laurent Gbagbo, the incumbent president of Côte d’Ivoire, refused to cede power following elections. Subsequent clashes led to 3000 deaths. (Gbagbo was acquitted of war crimes in January of this year).

In the late 1990s though, you might casually catch a flight to Abidjan on now defunct Air Afrique for a bit of innocent, if unlikely, tourism.

It was still the era of guidebooks. Here is the then-current Lonely Planet Guide to West Africa:

“On the northwest edge of town near the beginning of the road to Dabou is the Parc du Banco. Several hundred meters beyond the dirt road entrance to the park you’ll see … Africa’s largest outdoor laundrette – some 750 fanicos (washermen), mostly Burkinabé and none Ivorian, jammed together … in the middle of a small stream frantically rubbing clothes on huge stones held in place by old car tyres.” Read more »

What is peculiar about this photo is that what you see behind the metal frame of the door is not a supermarket. It is a giant photo of the supermarket affixed to the wall which is a couple of meters behind this door. The actual supermarket shown in the photo on the wall is off to one side. I don’t know why. Photo of photo taken last week in Vahrn, South Tyrol.

by Bill Benzon

September 4, 2019: Adam Satariano, “The World’s First Ambassador to the Tech Industry”, The New York Times, September 3, 2019.

In 2017, Denmark became the first nation to formally create a diplomatic post to represent its interests before companies such as Facebook and Google. After Denmark determined that tech behemoths now have as much power as many governments — if not more — Mr. Klynge was sent to Silicon Valley.

“What has the biggest impact on daily society? A country in southern Europe, or in Southeast Asia, or Latin America, or would it be the big technology platforms?” Mr. Klynge said in an interview last month at a cafe in central Copenhagen during an annual meeting of Denmark’s diplomatic corps. “Our values, our institutions, democracy, human rights, in my view, are being challenged right now because of the emergence of new technologies.”

He added, “These companies have moved from being companies with commercial interests to actually becoming de facto foreign policy actors.”

Here we go, I thought, I’ve seen this kind of thing before.

September 12, 2019: Miriam Pawel, You Call It the Gig Economy. California Calls It ‘Feudalism’. The New York Times, September 12, 2019.

Labor leaders cheered in the balcony and lawmakers embraced on the floor of the California Senate on Tuesday as it passed a landmark measure that defines employees, a move that could increase wages and benefits for hundreds of thousands of struggling workers. […]

The “new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy” is “feudalism all over again,” said the Assembly speaker, Anthony Rendon, a Los Angeles Democrat.

Bam! Another one.

What kind of thing is that? – you ask. Virtual Feudalism, that’s what.

* * * * *

Abbe Mowshowitz is a mathematician and computer scientist interested in the impact of computing technology on society. I’d met Abbe when I was on the faculty at The Renssalaer Polytechnic Institute in the previous century. He was interested in how the deployment of computer technology was creating virtual organizations that would lead to a virtual feudalism. He would eventually publish a book on the subject [1]. Before that, however, he commishioned me to to ghost an article on the subject. Alas, that article never got published. Here it is. The ideas are Abbe’s. The prose and stories are mine. Read more »

Robert Freeman. Abundant Life, 2019.

Oil on canvas.

More here and here.

Thanks to Laura Weinstein for connecting us!

by Chris Horner

In my years in education I have regularly come across what I call the lightbulb fallacy: the view that people have degrees of brightness and that it is the job of education to measure the wattage of learners in order to find the best social sockets to plug them into. It is a noxious idea. The notion that intelligence is a measurable ‘something’ that is possessed by people in varying degrees is one of the ways in which we end up with an education system that fails the majority of those it is supposed to be helping. It damages not just those in schools and colleges but people in general, and it is based on a fallacy about what it is to learn and understand.

One can see a number of reasons why adopting a notion like this would seem useful for an education system like ours: if people have amounts of intelligence that can be identified and measured, then people can be classified and fitted into the place in education, and later in the economy, that will suit their degree of ‘brightness’. But the problem is that people aren’t like lightbulbs with differing degrees of wattage, and this essentialising approach, that imputes a fundamental, intrinsic trait to an individual, leaves most people experiencing education as a demotivating process in which they learn to experience themselves as failures. Examinations put the seal on this by placing students in an ascending hierarchy of brightness. The effect of this on many, if not most, learners is unhelpful, to put it mildly. As an educator I have had to deal with numerous situations in which students have in effect used this as an alibi for giving up, since if those other students are brighter than oneself, why bother? Of course, not every learner reacts to lower marks in that way – but most get the message, in the end, that they cannot get far up the ladder of educational achievement, and that success is the preserve of a small number of the very bright. Read more »

Wadih Arap is the Director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey at University Hospital and Chief, Division of Hematology/Oncology in the Department of Medicine at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. He has served on the National Cancer Institute’s Board of Scientific Counselors, several review boards for the National Institutes of Health and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Prostate and Breast Cancer Research Program. His research is based on the premise that differential protein expression in disease tissues enables the development of novel, targeted drugs to treat human disease. By integrating genomic analyses and analytical high-throughput technology, functional protein-protein interactions can be manipulated to develop clinical strategies for effective disease management.

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 Anitra Pavlico

Most of the modern revival of Stoicism has centered on the works of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius–all from the “Late Stoa,” or the third phase in the history of Stoicism. No complete works survive from either the early or middle period. 

Chrysippus (c. 279-206 B.C.E.) was one of the most influential early Stoics. He studied with Cleanthes, who studied directly with Zeno, who founded the school in 262 B.C.E. You won’t see his quotes on any inspirational desktop art, but Chrysippus was perhaps the one most responsible for keeping Stoicism alive in its early years. A later Stoic saying was, “If Chrysippus had not existed, neither would the Stoa.” 

Chrysippus was prolific, having reportedly written over 705 books. No single book remains, and today we only have around 475 fragments. He was the second great logician, after Aristotle. Diogenes Laertius reported in his Lives of the Philosophers that most people believed that if the gods were to pursue dialectic, they would adopt Chrysippus’ system alone. The seemingly airtight logic of many Stoic approaches to life, as they have filtered down to us, stems directly from Chrysippus. The Stoic philosophy featured three branches: logic, physics, and ethics. The scope of logic also included the analysis of argument forms, rhetoric, grammar, propositions, perception, and thought. [1] Josiah Gould points out that Chrysippus felt that logic should be studied before the other two branches of the philosophy. [2] While Gould notes that it is lamentable that we do not have a single full logic treatise when they have such “tantalizing” titles as On Negative Propositions, An Introduction to the Study of Ambiguity, On Imperatives, and Reply to Those Who Think that a Proposition Can be Both False and True, he maintains that we can reconstruct some of his views based on the fragments we possess. Read more »

by Elizabeth S. Bernstein

In 1973 Betty Friedan traveled to France to have a conversation about the state of feminism with Simone de Beauvoir, whom she regarded as a cultural hero. Friedan’s own opinions had evolved considerably in the decade since the publication of The Feminine Mystique. She would elaborate those changes sometime later in a new book, The Second Stage, in which she argued for women’s work in the home to be viewed as “real work” and included in the gross national product. Now, in her meeting with Beauvoir, Friedan asked her opinion on ways to recognize the value of that work, such as crediting it for social security purposes, or distributing vouchers which parents could either use to buy childcare or collect on themselves as full-time caregivers. Perhaps Friedan wondered if Beauvoir’s thinking too might have changed since she stated in The Second Sex that the work of a woman at home “is not directly useful to society, it does not open out on the future, it produces nothing.” If so, she got her answer: Beauvoir, holding out for a total remake of society, believed that even in the meantime “No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children …. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one.”

Rhetoric is one thing, and given the many ideological variations within the women’s movement, any attempt to attribute to it some particular position on women’s work in the home would almost certainly invite fierce disagreement. But it is much harder to dispute what has actually happened in the last half-century. In certain respects the women’s movement has had enormous success. Women’s levels of education, employment, and income have all surged. In that sense the situations of men and women are far more alike than they once were. Through their inroads into realms previously closed to them, women have obtained a share of the status which was once conferred far more heavily on men.

I would be hard-pressed to say, though, that there has been any improvement in the status of “women’s work.” (I mean by that the traditional work of women, whether performed by women or by men.) The essential functions without which no society can exist – the care of children, the preparation of food, the keeping of a house, the care of the elderly and infirm – continue to be devalued. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Niall Chithelen

Drive the laneless roads of Lanzhou, sit the high-speed train, and then you are in the center of Tongwei county, a city among ancient villages, covered in construction works, ground floors of sliding glass storefronts, signs of green, blue, red, or black, with yellow or white lettering. And yet nothing shines here; this is not a colorful place.

A man who seems to be helping to organize your travel in the area met you at the train station and he reappears at lunch. You are not sure who he is, but he knows people here. He answers the phone with a gust of air.

A local museum sits behind a heavy locked door on the third floor of a building which is otherwise unremarkable and quite short on windows. Some artifacts in the museum are thousands of years old, some are hundreds. Also on display are two posters from the 1930s, written haphazardly by young members of the Red Army, messages to the “ordinary people” in the area. The tour guides are expert and excited. When you leave, they close the door again and lock it. The last group of visitors was days ago.

The landing outside the museum is lit only by a sign of dry red light. A young child wanders around the museum, stands on the landing, wary of the visitors. His attention is focused on a phone screen, and, watching him walk in front of the sign unfazed, you wonder if his memories too will bear the darkness of this building, hued red around their edges. Read more »

Reflection in a hotel window in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in September of 2017. The slight confusion this photo creates about what is inside and what outside the window reminded me of some lines from the beginning of the poem “Pale Fire” by Vladimir Nabokov (in the eponymous novel which it begins, the poem is supposed to have been written by the fictional character John Shade) in which he so beautifully describes a similar scene of window reflections:

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff–and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

by Tim Sommers

John Rawls, the author of “A Theory of Justice” and “Political Liberalism”, was the most important political philosopher of the twentieth-century – and the most influential. His theory of justice, “justice as fairness”, and, much later, his theory of political legitimacy via the free use of “public reason”, transformed philosophy and provided the most systematic, comprehensive normative political theory since Utilitarianism more than a century earlier. He was (and is) widely read by lawyers, economists, and public policy makers.  He was on Vaclav Havel’s bookshelf during the Velvet Revolution. His theory of civil disobedience, not Thoreau’s or Gandhi’s, “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy” describes as “the most widely accepted”. He was the foremost liberal egalitarian – arguing that while we all have certain rights, freedoms, and liberties that the state cannot violate, in a just society the least well-off members should be as well-off as possible – even while, outside of the academy, liberal politics splintered into right neoliberalism and left identity-politics. He trained two generations of moral philosophers who went on to dominate the field. To this day, in any survey of the most important, or most cited philosophers of the twentieth-century, he is consistently in the top five – and is always the most highly-ranked moral philosopher.

I was lucky enough to be a student in the last class Rawls taught as a full professor in 1991 and to be in touch on-and-off for a few years after. Many, many people knew him much better than I did. And nothing I say about his views relies solely on any private conversations I had with him. But, like so many people his life touched, I was deeply affected not only his intellect, but his dignity, his warmth, his generosity, and his humility. So, full disclosure, I don’t pretend to be objective on the subject of Rawls. Read more »

by Adele A Wilby

In a political era where many of the ‘isms’ in radical politics: Marxism, socialism, communism, anarchism, Trotskyism have either been discredited or have lost their appeal and force in western democracies, I found it refreshing to visit the life of one individual deeply involved in shaping those radical movements in the twentieth century: the anarchist, Emma Goldman, in her autobiography Living My Life.

The politics of ‘Red Emma’ as she came to be known, brought much controversy to Goldman over the course of her life: she was loved by many and equally hated and vilified for a politics that, in essence, aimed at, what she considered, would promote the well-being of humanity. ‘Anarchism,’ she   wrote in her essay ‘Anarchism: What it Really Stands For’, ‘…stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government…for a social order based on free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth…anarchism is the philosophy of the sovereignty of the individual’. Great ideals! However, conceptualising ‘anarchism’ in such terms suggests a tension between collective interest and well-being, and the individual, a tension not fully resolved in her writing. But as Goldman was to realise over the course of five decades of political activism, the zeal behind her political ideals often resulted in the corruption of those good intentions and were the source of disappointment and nefarious practices, as exemplified in a kindred ideology, ‘socialism’, during Russia in the early twentieth century.

Nevertheless, despite the idealism within the political philosophy of anarchism, Goldman and other thinkers like her, such as her mentor Peter Kropotkin, and her life-long colleague and friend, Alexander Berkman, left a political legacy that is worthy of critical attention. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

There is widespread concern about increasing or high economic inequality in many countries, both rich and poor. At a global level, according to the World Inequality Report 2018, the richest 1% in the world reaped 27% of the growth in world income between 1980 and 2016, while bottom 50% of the population got only 12%. Over roughly the same period, however, absolute poverty by standard measures has generally been on the decline in most countries. By the widely-used World Bank estimates, in 2015 only about 10 per cent of the world population lived below its common, admittedly rather austere, poverty line of $1.90 per capita per day (at 2011 purchasing power parity), compared to 36 per cent in 1990. This decline is by and large valid even if one uses broader measures of poverty that take into account some non-income indicators (like deprivations in health and education) for the countries for which such data are available.

If absolute poverty is declining, while measures of relative inequality (of income or wealth) show a significant rise (or remain very high), this implies that the conditions of the poor may be improving, but those for the rich may be improving much more. But if people are less poor than before, should we be concerned about high or rising inequality, about how much better-off the rich are, and, if so, why? This is an important question on which more clarity is needed, as quite often when people tell you why they dislike inequality many of the examples they cite are really about their aversion to the stark poverty around them. Read more »

Wilmer Wilson IV. From My Paper Bag Colored Heart, 2012.

Performance still.

More here, here, and here.