Christian Waugh at The Conversation: Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s rem … | Continue reading
Phillip Wang in Time Magazine: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday unveiled a $124.7 billion budget that he said would close a projected $12 billion deficit over the next two years without drawing from the city’s rainy day reserves, raising property taxes, or making maj … | Continue reading
Heidi Ledford in Nature: A sweeping analysis of sleep duration and signs of ageing in half a million adults has pinpointed a sweet spot — about six to eight hours of sleep each day — that is linked to a lower risk of early death and disease. Getting either more or less sleep than … | Continue reading
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Julian Bell at nonsite: “The museums are full of uprooted pictures,” Pierre Bonnard once said. The artist was anxious for his pictorial seedlings. They might be thrust out into galleries in which they would struggle for survival among alien life forms and in which the climate mig … | Continue reading
Shoulders A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder. No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow. This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere d … | Continue reading
David Malouf (1934 – 2026) at Sydney Review of Books: Each lover of Lawrence’s poems will have his own story of first contact with a new and unique consciousness. Lawrence was the first entirely modern poet I was presented with and, except for what I had picked up from films – th … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa Human intuition is a marvelous thing. With scant evidence, we can make assessments, judgments, and predictions that are often surprisingly close to correct. But our intuition can also lead us astray. Worse, an intuitive idea can be virtually impossible to give … | Continue reading
Seven cyclists passing from Brixen into Vahrn, on a bike path behind a vineyard in South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Jon Greenaway at Current Affairs: There is a distinctive, deeply uncanny horror to the way Jimmy Fallon laughs. Look it up—there are literally hundreds of videos showing him breaking out into laughter at the slightest provocation. It is not a reaction (he sometimes won’t even wai … | Continue reading
Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins at the New York Times: Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obst … | Continue reading
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Emma Wager, Shameek Rakshit, and Cynthia Cox at the website of The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF: This brief examines the drivers of health spending and differences between the U.S. and its peers – other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nation … | Continue reading
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Ewan Callaway in Nature: It’s hard to imagine that a snail could kill a person, but a particularly venomous group of marine molluscs called cone snails can. Their stings contain a cocktail of small proteins called conotoxins, some of which can block ion channels in the nervous sy … | Continue reading
Blue Heron The startled blue heron erupts out of its long-legged inwardness and flies low to the pond over its shadow. My eye flickers between its great sweep of wind and its blurred mirror motion almost white in the pond’s sky-shine. At the end of each wing-beat, the long body d … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers (1) Aristophanes. This is my favorite theory about the origin and nature of romantic love. Humans were once spherical, four-armed, four-legged, two-headed beings that rolled around everywhere confidently. They were cut in half by Zeus for trying to scale Olympus an … | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien Read below or listen here: In this interview, Angie Pepper and Richard Healey discuss their arguments for adopting an abolitionist approach to animal rights, focusing on a recent article in which they argue that the political and social power we wield over animals … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
“Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity,’ according to two people familiar with the initiative.” — The Harvard Crimson Richard Amesbury at McS … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But there is more to life than fair prices. Two people might decide on a fair price to carry out a … | Continue reading
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Robert Kagan at The Atlantic: It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored. The calamitous losses suffered at Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and throu … | Continue reading
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Eliana Dockterman in Time Magazine: Christopher Nolan’s Trojan Horse isn’t a towering colossus looming over the coast of Troy. It’s sinking. Half-submerged, it looks less like a monument than a mistake, an offering to the gods already being claimed by the sea. Inside, filthy sold … | Continue reading
Arora and Moore in The Scientist: The path to bringing a new drug to market is increasingly complex and costly, with development costs now exceeding $2 billion and timelines approaching a decade.1,2 The stakes have never been higher—demanding new models, new technologies, and new … | Continue reading
Bryn Stole at Commonweal: In December 1944, amid the bombs and wartime wreckage of Berlin, acclaimed conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler led the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Brahms and Beethoven in a frigid variety theater—since Royal Air Force bombing raids had already wrec … | Continue reading
June the Horse Sleep is water. I’m an old man surging upriver on the back of my dream horse that I haven’t seen since I was ten. We’re night riders through cities, forests, fields. I saw Stephanie standing on the steps of Pandora’s Box on Sheridan Square in 1957. She’d never spok … | Continue reading
Mae Losasso at n+1: Poetry After Barbarism is a book about the “bar bar bar” of poetic language: not nonsense, exactly, not glossolalia, but the mistranslated, untranslated, and untranslatable. Or as Scappettone puts it, the “dysfluencies and awkwardnesses of grammar and of speec … | Continue reading
by Christopher Hall I did something a little odd this past semester: I had my students write an assignment where I instructed them to use AI as much as they wanted. The assignment was to produce a cover letter and a resume to respond to a job ad I had given them; normally, for an … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson On Water Somewhere I have stowed my astrology reading so I could put my hands upon it when I wanted to see it again. I don’t remember where. So there is something about a water sign [Scorpio] — a certain muddiness and flow of memory. All is at the bottom of the… | Continue reading
Michelle Lougee, Cecily Miller. Magazine Beach Tapestry, 2022. ” In 2022, Cecily Miller and Michelle Lougee teamed up to create a new project for Magazine Beach Park in Cambridge. Taking inspiration from FLOTSAM — Michelle’s 2021 mash-up of tapestry and mosaic made of post-consu … | Continue reading
Alan Michael Parker at the Virginia Quarterly Review: In 2021, after forty adult years of study, practice, and teaching, and nine published volumes, I gave up poetry. In 2022, with no formal training, no understanding of my visual-art skills, and a deep yearning to be vulnerable … | Continue reading
Carlo Rovelli at Noema: The consciousness debate is often formulated in terms used in an influential talk given by a young David Chalmers in Tucson in 1994. Chalmers, a philosopher, distinguished two separate “problems of consciousness.” The first is the very hard problem describ … | Continue reading
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Kiran Kumbhar at Aeon: South Asia, or the Indian subcontinent, or ‘India’ in its pre-nation-state meaning, boasts a remarkable diversity in ethnicities, cultures and languages. For more than two centuries, scholars and amateurs from around the world have attempted to explore it a … | Continue reading
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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet: One of Tina Brown’s most striking innovations during her tenure at the New Yorker across the first half of the nineties was naming Richard Avedon as staff photographer, and he and I were to have several striking collaborations across that perio … | Continue reading
Callie Hitchcock at the LARB: “Stripping didn’t used to be so touchy-feely, but in the past ten years, it’s become a full-contact sport,” writes Lily Burana in her 2001 memoir Strip City: A Stripper’s Farewell Journey Across America. With origins in burlesque, strippers danced on … | Continue reading
Sarah Menkedick in TNR: At her English country manor, the writer Rebecca West had two jersey cows: Primrose and Patience. She delighted in the fresh milk they produced, and in canning vegetables, and in making jam. As Julia Cooke writes in Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Cha … | Continue reading
Andrea Lius in The Scientist: Metallica’s lead vocalist James Hetfield often lauds Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister as one of his biggest inspirations. In 2024, nine years after Kilmister passed away, Hetfield tattooed the ace of spades (the title of one of Motörhead’s most popular tr … | Continue reading
Piers Brendon at Literary Review: As Clementine Churchill famously remarked, her husband was the last surviving believer in the divine right of kings. Yet his position was not that simple, as Ted Powell demonstrates in this scholarly book. Churchill’s own family, beside which the … | Continue reading
by Ken MacVey Justice Clarence Thomas recently gave a speech at the University of Texas on the Declaration of Independence in anticipation of its 250th anniversary this coming July. In giving his take on the Declaration and its ties to the Constitution, Thomas interspersed auto … | Continue reading
by Priya Malhotra Before I launch into any critique of the phone, I should confess that I am not immune to its seductive qualities. I am not writing from a mountain, purified by silence, looking down at the scrolling masses. Like almost everyone else, I spend too much time on my … | Continue reading
Constellations Who will herd the creatures of the constellations across the prairies of the night sky if we disappear like dinosaurs into the mists of archaeology? Who will name them? Who’ll call them Crab and Bear, minor or major? Who’ll domesticate The Lesser Dog, The Little Ho … | Continue reading
Raymond Geuss in Sidecar: Adrian Wooldridge’s recent Centrists of the World Unite!: The Lost Genius of Liberalism does not just echo The Communist Manifesto in its language, it also mirrors its basic structure. Marx and Engels’s exhortation to workers around the world was not a f … | Continue reading
Daniel Bessner in The Ideas Letter: The Donald J. Trump Administration’s war against Iran has renewed talk about the role the United States should play in the world. While in recent American history, public support for US wars has been relatively high in the first days of a confl … | Continue reading
Samanth Subramanian interviews Neelanjan Sircar in Equator: Let’s start with the big result: West Bengal, where the BJP won 206 out of 294 assembly seats. How significant is that margin? By vote share, we’re picking up a 5% difference between the two parties – which is not small, … | Continue reading