by Akim Reinhardt Art is dangerous. It’s time people remembered that and recognized the fullness of it. For if art is to remain important or even relevant in the current moment, then it’s long past time artists stopped flashing dull claws and pretending they had what it takes to … | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder Emma Wilkins’ excellent piece “On Housecraft” in The Philosopher, discusses Helen Hayward’s book, Home Work: Essays on Love & Housekeeping in such a compelling way as to provoke some thoughts without having actually read the book in question. So this is a critique … | Continue reading
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From the introduction by Lisa Allardice in The Guardian: She certainly doesn’t want to be idolised as a saint – that rarely ends well, and besides, she holds grudges. She even chafes against her mantle as feminist icon, “expected to do the Right Thing for women in all circumstanc … | Continue reading
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Meghan Bartels at Scientific American: Cats have been on quite a journey from wild animal to undisputed ruler of millions of couches worldwide. A pair of new studies published on Thursday show that the road to cat domestication was far more complex than scientists first suspected … | Continue reading
Brittany Allen at LitHub: As Michael Billington put it in a remembrance for The Guardian, Stoppard’s unique genius was in taking “seemingly esoteric subjects—from chaos theory to moral philosophy and the mystery of consciousness—and turn[ing] them into witty, inventive and often … | Continue reading
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Gideon Koekoek at Aeon Magazine: What came first, the chicken or the egg? Perhaps a silly conundrum already solved by Darwinian biology. But nature has supplied us with a real version of this puzzle: black holes. Within these cosmic objects, the extreme warping of spacetime bring … | Continue reading
Shehryar Fazli at the Los Angeles Review of Books: Scott Anderson begins his latest book, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution; A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation (2025), with the story of an infamous 1971 party in a desert. The king of Anderson’s title, … | Continue reading
Dana Stevens in Slate: The curiosity that drove the Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell to write her bestselling 2020 novel Hamnet sprang from the scarcity of documentation about the book’s title character, Hamnet Shakespeare. Born in 1585 to William and Anne Shakespeare, the twin br … | Continue reading
Jake Spring in The Washington Post: Earl Gray was astonished by what he found when he cut into the laboratory rats. Some had testicles that were malformed, filled with fluid, missing or in the wrong place. Others had shriveled tubes blocking the flow of sperm, while still more we … | Continue reading
The Great Watchers Think of those great watchers of the sky, the shepherds, the magi, how they looked for a thousand years and saw there was order, who learned not only Light would return, but the moment she’d start her journey. No writing then. The see-ers gave what they knew to … | Continue reading
by Herbert Harris Many years ago, I began a meditation practice, sparked by curiosity and vague, middle-aged worries about stress and blood pressure. To my surprise, it quickly became a regular part of my life. I restlessly explored many forms of meditation and meditation groups, … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong “People tell me that I could do much better,” David McCullough said in an interview included in California Typewriter, a documentary about typewriters “and the people who love them.” “I could go faster and have less to contend with if I were to use a computer—a … | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review: The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her b … | Continue reading
Lina Zeldovich at Undark: A biological phenomenon, microchimerism refers to the presence of a small number of cells from one individual within another genetically distinct individual. It most commonly occurs during pregnancy when fetal cells escape into the mother’s bloodstream o … | Continue reading
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Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Marx, in my opinion, is a woefully underrated thinker on culture. His first book, Ametora — about the history of postwar Japanese men’s fashion — is an absolute classic. His second book, Status and Culture, is a much heavier and more complex tome that wr … | Continue reading
Masud Husain in The Guardian: We all know people with very different levels of motivation. Some will go the extra mile in any endeavour. Others just can’t be bothered to put the effort in. We might think of them as lazy – happiest on the sofa, rather than planning their latest pr … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: From restoring movement and speech in people with paralysis to fighting depression, brain implants have fundamentally changed lives. But inserting implants, however small or nimble, requires risky open-brain surgery. Pain, healing time, and potentia … | Continue reading
Dear Reader, there are no algorithms at 3QD—just six human editors trying to keep a human-curated corner of the internet alive. But recent changes in Google search and other AI-driven shifts have cut our already modest advertising revenue to less than half of what it was just las … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss In the autumn of 1929 the mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings. —John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash 1929 Ah, the mighty. The great, and the powerful. Let us take a moment to remember the mightiest of 1929. Among them surely … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman Some of the best new music is 100 years old. On October 21, 1925, the Anglo-American composer and violist Rebecca Clarke presented a program of her own compositions at London’s Wigmore Hall: Sonata for Viola and Pianoforte Trio for Pianoforte, Violin and Violonce … | Continue reading
“The best evidence we have suggests that early Earth was completely covered by oceans, but to link two amino acids together to make a protein, you have to remove water.” And that would have been impossible if the amino acids were immersed in an ocean. Life needed some land—litera … | Continue reading
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Marigold Warner in Lensculture: When Alastair Philip Wiper first picked up a camera in 2007, he never thought it would lead him to photographing the world’s largest nuclear research facility, a medicinal cannabis farm, and a sausage factory. In fact, he never thought he would end … | Continue reading
Makenna Goodman in The New York Times: Several years ago, I stopped going to therapy. I no longer trusted myself to tell the story of my life in a way that felt forward-moving. I harbored a suspicion that the therapist held some knowledge of me that she would one day reveal — lik … | Continue reading
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The Problem with Gratitude It is the mind’s youngest child, one of the most stubborn of human emotions. Gratitude obeys occasionally and often arrives late, inconspicuous as a heartbeat or insistent as a sob. It can turn a quick walk into twenty minutes of unabashed staring at th … | Continue reading
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by Christopher Horner Here’s an imaginary conversation, based on real ones that I’ve heard or taken part in. The names I use mainly relate to the USA and UK, but the points apply more widely than that. All these mugs voting for Trump, or Reform, Le Pen and so on. They either don’ … | Continue reading
by Kyle Munkittrick You are scrolling the news, half awake sipping your coffee, when you see the announcement. A startup, not quite unknown but not familiar, has a new product unveiling video. Ok, sure, another hype reel. You scroll past. But it shows up again on your socials. Ev … | Continue reading
Kristin Collier at Literary Hub: In a 2013 paper in Social Science & Medicine, researchers studied debt’s impact on general health outcomes—the first study of its kind, they noted. Earlier scholarship traced the impacts of socioeconomic status on health and the impact of debt on … | Continue reading
Mark Louie Ramos in The Conversation: As a statistician involved in research for many years, I know the care that goes into designing a good study capable of coming up with meaningful results. Understanding what the results of a particular study are and are not saying can help yo … | Continue reading
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Naomi Klein at Equator: Fascism is roaring back in the twenty-first century and, in a sickening twist, it is rhetorically claiming that mass censorship, high-tech surveillance and extra-judicial detention are necessary to protect the victims of twentieth-century fascism. Until, o … | Continue reading
Maria Popova at The Marginalian: You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring … | Continue reading
Jonathan Malesic at Commonweal: The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s exhibition “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” on view through January 18, 2026, begins dramatically. As I ascended the stairs to the show, I saw two monumental heads rise on the wall ahead of me. One hea … | Continue reading
“It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see” — Henry David Thoreau I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual. It is surprising how contented one can be with nothing definite – only a sense of existence. Well, anything for variety. I am read … | Continue reading
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Jacob Posner in The Christian Science Monitor: In a YouTube video posted by NASA, kids sit cross-legged in neat rows in a gymnasium at Sunita L. Williams Elementary School in Needham, Massachusetts. You can see them wave their little hands at the camera, which beams the image rou … | Continue reading
Drew Lichtenberg in The New York Times: The new film “Hamnet” features two bright young actors, Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley, playing Shakespeare and his wife, Agnes (née Anne) Hathaway. “Hamnet” arrives already widely lauded — it won the audience award at the Toronto Internati … | Continue reading
by Hari Balasubramanian Something different this time — an article on one of my longstanding research themes. Since 2015, as part of research that has involved many students, I’ve worked with a dataset called the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS). The survey is conducted an … | Continue reading
by Claire Chambers Graham Foster from the International Anthony Burgess Foundation recently invited me to read and talk about R. K. Narayan’s The Vendor of Sweets (1967) for the Foundation’s podcast series. You can listen to our podcast here. The series is based on Burgess’s 1984 … | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Behind the neo-classical façade of the Tate Gallery in Milbank, all grey stone and Corinthian columned, its pediment topped with a grandiose visage of Britannia with her trident and Grecian martial helmet, there is a near-revolutionary work of art first displayed to g … | Continue reading
Ed Simon in Literary Hub: Bibliomania, the only hobby which is also a mental health affliction. The person with piles of titles on their nightstand, in their closet, in the trunk of their car. Books in front of books on their bookshelf. “With thought, patience, and discrimination … | Continue reading
Arianna Huffington in Time Magazine: There was a revealing moment recently when Sam Altman appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast. Carlson pressed Altman on the moral foundations of ChatGPT. He made the case that the technology has a kind of baseline religious or spiritual componen … | Continue reading