Charisse Burden-Stelly in Boston Review: In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States, anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching and race riots. At this auspicious mom … | Continue reading
The New Left Review has introduced a blog, Sidecar. Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar: President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other … | Continue reading
Stefan Collini in The Guardian: New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of “celebration” smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an anniversa … | Continue reading
Sarah Hughes in The Guardian: Most people approaching their 90th birthday would be forgiven for deciding that, whatever their work, enough was enough and it was time to relax. Most people, however, are not Edna O’Brien. Ireland’s greatest living writer has over the past week deli … | Continue reading
Vijay Prashad in Counterpunch: Ten years ago, a hawker in Tunisia set himself on fire, which spurred on people along the entire Mediterranean Sea—from Morocco to Spain—to rise up in revolt. They took to their squares indignant at the terrible conditions in which they had to make … | Continue reading
I was never one of those matter- of-fact mothers who tell their children this is thus or what to do. Though I knew how to hold my babies as soon as they were handed to me, I could feel how tremendous a life was. This animal, cradled on my heart, mine for the naming, how… | Continue reading
H.M. Naqvi in Literary Hub: I was in Australia on the tail-end of my eastern book tour, the Last Book Tour perhaps, one that had taken me to Indonesia and Bangladesh earlier, when the plague, after circling for months, dove in for the kill. I left perhaps a week before Australia … | Continue reading
Matt Ridley in The Spectator: Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machin … | Continue reading
Micah L. Sifry in The American Prospect: I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and jud … | Continue reading
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin at Dublin Review of Books: A poem from Paula Meehan’s second collection, Pillow Talk (1994), is called “Autobiography”. Well, in some ways a Selected Poems is like an autobiography; it expresses a sense that the life lived to date, and the work done, have s … | Continue reading
Joseph E. Davis and Paul Scherz at The New Atlantis: At other times and in other places, traditional ways of life, social classification, and metaphysical order gave shape and coherence to the course of life, providing a picture of aging well. Each period of life had its activiti … | Continue reading
Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker: Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in … | Continue reading
Don Arturo Says: When I was young there was no difference between the way I danced and the way tomatoes converted themselves into sauce I did the waltz or a guaguancó which everyone your rhythm which every one your song The whole town was caressed to sleep with my two-tone shoes … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Gene drive organisms (GDOs), developed with select traits that are genetically engineered to spread through a population, have the power to dramatically alter the way society develops solutions to a range of daunting health and environmental challenges, from contro … | Continue reading
Adolph Reed Jr. in The New Republic: This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication of Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s landmark study of Chicago. Black Metropolis appeared as World War II neared its end, with U.S. political leaders fiercely … | Continue reading
Richard Dawkins in The Spectator: For, whether we like it or not, it is a true fact that we are cousins of kangaroos, that we share an ancestor with starfish, and that we and the starfish and kangaroo share a more remote ancestor with jellyfish. The DNA code is a digital code, di … | Continue reading
Dave Lindorff in CounterPunch: As the US confronts both a political crisis of presidential succession and a worsening pandemic, it might be instructive, though perhaps not comforting, to learn that we’ve been here before. In the period between the 1773 Boston Tea Party up through … | Continue reading
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Bill McKibben in The New Yorker: We are necessarily occupied here each week with strategies for getting ourselves out of the climate crisis—it is the world’s true Klaxon-sounding emergency. But it is worth occasionally remembering that global warming is just one measure of the hu … | Continue reading
Letter to America pardon the lag in writing you we were left with few letters in your home we were cast as rugs sometimes on walls though we were almost always on floors we served you as a table a lamp a mirror a toy if anything we made you laugh in your kitchen we… | Continue reading
Carl Rollyson at The Hedgehog Review: This idea of Faulkner as fixated on the past has a long pedigree, perhaps beginning with “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,” a much-read 1939 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre. “In Faulkner’s work,” Sartre contends, “there is n … | Continue reading
David Kakauer in Nautilus: In 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, a young journalist in Tokyo, covered the battle between master Honinbo Shusai and apprentice Minoru Kitani for ultimate authority in the board game Go. It was one of the lengthiest matches in the history of competitive gaming … | Continue reading
Philip Ball at Marginalia Review: The term “soft matter” was coined in 1970, and has become common currency in science only in the past two or three decades. Yet the substances to which it refers – such as honey, glue, flesh, soap, leather, starch, bitumen, milk, pastes and gels … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: Should Cambridge University academics and students “tolerate” or “respect” the views of others with which they might disagree? Should we tolerate Millwall fans booing players taking the knee? Should gender-critical feminists who argue for the importan … | Continue reading
Liam Heneghan in Aeon: It is our sad lot that we love perishable things: our friends, our parents, our mentors, our partners, our pets. Those of us who incline to nature draw this consolation: most lovely natural things – the forests, the lakes, the oceans, the reefs – endure at … | Continue reading
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Anjan Basu in The Wire: A couple of days before he was scheduled to discuss, on the platform of the Tata Literary Festival 2020, his recent book Internationalism or Extinction, a group of India’s social and political activists wrote an open letter to Noam Chomsky in which they su … | Continue reading
Dennis Zhou at Art in America: In the early 1980s, the painter, sculptor, and all-around technological savant Tishan Hsu landed a night job as a “word processor” at a Wall Street law firm. Encountering early computers before they entered widespread use, Hsu spent his shifts engro … | Continue reading
Sam O’Brien at Atlas Obscura: In the winter of 1984, Timothy Tangherlini worked on a dairy farm on the Danish island of Funen. One day, while brushing cattle in the barn, he spotted a tiny man in a hat sitting on the back of one of the cows. When Tangherlini tried to speak to the … | Continue reading
Revisions Before the poet was a poet nothing was reworked: not the smudge of ink on twelve sets of clothes not the fearsome top berth on the train not a room full of boxes and dull windows not the cat that left its kittens and afterbirth in a pair of jeans not doubt. Before the… | Continue reading
Jeff Sharlet in Bookforum: I REMEMBER BETTER THAN MOST where I was when I knew Donald Trump would win. Not just that he would win but that “the office” would not subdue him, that he was coming because he was the crest of a wave, a force made unstoppable by its mostly unseen mass. … | Continue reading
Blake Belden in Phys.Org: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, but many immunotherapies have had limited success in treating aggressive forms of the disease. “A deeper understanding of the immunobiology of breast cancer is critical to the success in harness … | Continue reading
Will you please consider becoming a supporter of 3QD by clicking here now? We wouldn’t ask for your support if we did not need it to keep the site running. In this difficult time, we continue to scour the web daily to bring you the best analysis and information we can find. And, … | Continue reading
Amit Chaudhuri in n + 1: The title of this talk seems to suggest that I know the answer to the “why,” and that I’m about to share it with you. I began writing my first novel in 1986, in what I elected to be my gap year: so, if I’ve been trying my hand at… | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in particular the ability to learn new sounds and use them for communication. Many other species … | Continue reading
David French in The French Press: This is a grievous and dangerous time for American Christianity. The frenzy and the fury of the post-election period has laid bare the sheer idolatry and fanaticism of Christian Trumpism. A significant segment of the Christian public has fallen f … | Continue reading
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Racists Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa! The butcher we used to patronize in the ….. Rue Cadet market, beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the ….. import of which I missed but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop …..… | Continue reading
Ted Scheinman in Smithsonian: In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he’d spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence. As the … | Continue reading
Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic: The doomsday machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but co … | Continue reading
Karthik Purushothaman at The Baffler: For much of his career, Metres has focused on American wars in the Arab world. In Shrapnel Maps, his new collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, he shifts his terrain to Palestine-Israel. Drawing on disparate sources, including 1948 mem … | Continue reading
Dustin Illingworth at The Point: William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955), was initially famous for its inaccessibility. More talked about than read, the book perplexed critics with its seemingly endless allusions and erudite tangents. Despite this initial reception, … | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells Prime Minister Boris Johnson has exactly one strategy in his EU trade negotiations: threatening to drive Britain into a no-deal wall unless he gets what he wants. In other words, Johnson has been approaching this extraordinarily important matter of national int … | Continue reading