Tess McNulty in The Point: Flip through Don DeLillo’s massive corpus, and you may notice that the word “silence” crops up, again and again, at crucial moments. It’s the first word he spoke to the public when, in 1982, he gave his first, reluctant interview. Why, asked the critic … | Continue reading
Kevin Hartnett in Quanta: On May 19, Ashwin Sah posted the best result ever on one of the most important questions in combinatorics. It was a moment that might have called for a celebratory drink, only Sah wasn’t old enough to order one. The proof joined a long list of mathematic … | Continue reading
The San Francisco Symphony performs the world premiere of Throughline, a new SF Symphony commission composed by Nico Muhly with performances by Esa-Pekka Salonen, all eight Collaborative Partners, and the San Francisco Symphony. Watch the full program here. | Continue reading
Simon Torracinta in the Boston Review: In 1893 financial panic triggered a four-year depression in the United States, then the most severe in the nation’s history. Bank runs, shuttered factories, and plummeting wheat prices put millions out of work. In Chicago alone, as many as 1 … | Continue reading
Seamus Perry and Mark Ford discuss the life and work of Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet of psychic divisions and authoritative fretfulness. Mark Ford: I think his best poems all reveal that the pressures of his autobiography in terms of the effect on him of his fairly disastrous e … | Continue reading
Rachel Kushner at Artforum: A certain scene between Marguerite Duras and Susan Sontag, told to me by someone who was friends with both and seated between them while Susan was visiting Paris, goes like this: Duras had just made a new film, and, in keeping with her character, she s … | Continue reading
Roxanne Khamsi in Nature: Just before Thanksgiving in November 2005, paediatrician Ruchi Gupta gathered some parents of children with food allergies in an office building. She aimed to collect data on their knowledge and beliefs about allergies, but the conversation quickly turne … | Continue reading
Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic: On a scale of 0 to 10, I’d say my happiness ranks at about a 6. I’d guess my wife’s is at least a 9. I try not to envy her natural Spanish alegría, but sometimes it’s hard. Still, I’m glad to know I’m a 6, because, as a famous management maxim… | Continue reading
Philip Hensher in The Spectator: Tennyson’s poem ‘Mariana’ has gone everywhere in the world since 1830. A professional scholar in Uruguay, Papua New Guinea or New Haven, Connecticut, reading the lines ‘Weeded and worn the ancient thatch/Upon the lonely moated grange’ might want t … | Continue reading
Damian Carrington in The Guardian: Cultured meat, produced in bioreactors without the slaughter of an animal, has been approved for sale by a regulatory authority for the first time. The development has been hailed as a landmark moment across the meat industry. The “chicken bites … | Continue reading
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang in the Los Angeles Review of Books: I should hate The Innovation Delusion. I’ve made a career as a futurist in Silicon Valley, helping big companies think about the business implications and commercial opportunities of emerging technologies. My father-in-law … | Continue reading
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From New Statesman: Since 2016, liberals have adopted a strategy of delegitimisation, condemning Mr Trump, and his supporters, for degrading political life. A grass-roots campaign of Democrats, Independents and Never-Trump conservatives, which describes itself as the “Resistance” … | Continue reading
Catherine Nixey in MIL: I’d been looking forward to the meal for weeks. I already knew what I was going to eat: the rosemary crostini starter, then the lamb with courgette fries. Or maybe the cod. I planned to arrive early and sit in the window at the cool marble counter and watc … | Continue reading
Maradona in Buenos Aires He was a squat, curly-haired, pug-nosed man, and he walked into the high-end asado restaurant with five beautiful women and his manager, the infamous Coppola, who father said, had led Diego into “drogas.” I often wondered how a man who could handle the pr … | Continue reading
Geoff Shullenberger at The New Atlantis: The old net delusion was naïve but internally consistent. The new net delusion is fragmented and self-contradictory. It vacillates between radical pessimism about the effects of digital platforms and boosterism when new online happenings s … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Lowry at Literary Review: ‘Oh – Vivienne! Was there ever such a torture since life began!’ a dazed Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary in 1930 after a typically miserable visit from T S Eliot and his wife. Vivien had been paranoid and cryptic, rambling about hornets under … | Continue reading
Becca Rothfeld in Bookforum: IT IS CUSTOMARY TO START an essay about Kafka by emphasizing how impossible it is to write about Kafka, then apologizing for making a doomed attempt. This gimmick has a distinguished lineage. “How, after all, does one dare, how can one presume?” Cynth … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Aristotle conceived of the world in terms of teleological “final causes”; Darwin, or so the story goes, erased purpose and meaning from the world, replacing them with a bloodless scientific algorithm. But should we abandon all talk of meanin … | Continue reading
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Adam Tooze in Public Books: In the first half of 2020, as the world economy shut down, hundreds of millions of people across the world lost their jobs. Following India’s lockdown on March 24, 10s of millions of displaced migrant workers thronged bus stops waiting for a ride back … | Continue reading
Once in Twelve Years, I Go to Church I go to the church with the cross in it and I kneel, because it hurts too much to sit, and I pray, wordlessly. I go when it’s quiet, when service is over, ideally when no one is there. But someone is always there. I don’t mean… | Continue reading
Lydia Davis at The Believer: The 1898 children’s classic known in America as Bob, Son of Battle and in England as Owd Bob: The Grey Dog of Kenmuir, by Alfred Ollivant, was long declared—and still is considered, by some—one of the great dog stories of all time, if not the grea … | Continue reading
Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker: In 1964, a twenty-year-old Canadian singer named Joan Anderson began composing her own folk songs. They were good folk songs, sturdily constructed and memorable, but the genre corseted her. She would need to roam the mountains and plains of rock … | 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
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Before the COVID pandemic, travel to academic conferences and colloquia was a large part of the job of being a professor at a research-focused university. The last few months have given us the opportunity to reflect on the hurly burly of ac … | Continue reading
by Ali Minai Given where we find ourselves in this late November of 2020, it is hard to think of a book more relevant or timely than The Hype Machine by Sinan Aral. The author is the David Austin Professor of Management and Professor of Information Technology and Marketing at the … | Continue reading
Dylan Kwait. Surfers by Plum Island, October 2020. Drone photograph. With permission … thanks Dylan! | Continue reading
by Claire Chambers This has been a terrible year with almost no redeeming features. I have written elsewhere about Covid-19’s hardships, both personal and political. Today, with a vaccine on the horizon and Trump defeated, I want to find some other crumbs of comfort that, as with … | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Not long ago there was an article circulating on Facebook about ‘Hating the English’, originally published in a large circulation newspaper. The Irish author says something to the effect that once she thought it was just a few bad ones etc., but now she hates the … | Continue reading
by Thomas Larson According to Donald Trump, in a statement made to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” April 11, 2011, about the fake “birther controversy” of President Barack Obama—the opening salvo in Trump’s campaign of political disinformation—Obama’s “grandmother in Kenya said, ‘Oh, no, … | Continue reading
by Adele A Wilby Recent protests in the US by Trump supporters since the election of Joe Biden, highlight just how political ideologies have the potential to tear seemingly ‘stable’ societies apart. A political divide however cannot always be seen as a clear-cut contradiction bet … | Continue reading
A lamp lighting a storefront in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in November of 2020. And sky. | Continue reading
A review of Cosmology's Century, by P.J.E. Peebles | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Cosmology is a young science. Maybe the youngest. Some people say it started in the 1920’s when these little glowing clouds visible at certain points in the sky were found, by better and better telescopes, to be composed of billions and billions of stars, just like … | Continue reading
Marc Caplan in the Los Angeles Review of Books: ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO, when most American Jews were immigrants from Eastern Europe, nearly every Jew in the United States spoke Yiddish, but no one gave it any respect. Today, by contrast, everyone is full of affection for Yiddish, … | Continue reading
Frédérique de Vignemont in Aeon: Heini Hediger, a noted 20th-century Swiss biologist and zoo director, knew that animals ran away when they felt unsafe. But when he set about designing and building zoos himself, he realised he needed a more precise understanding of how animals be … | Continue reading
Annie Zaidi in Scroll.in: The beating heart of literature is writers’ engagement with sadness and the conflicts of their time. Many of these conflicts are centred on wealth and access to natural resources: land, water, mineral, forest, stone, sand, clean air. Big money, often wit … | Continue reading
Sara Harrison in Undark: THERE’S A WEALTH OF information floating in the air, though we rarely take the time to notice. Olfaction, or the ability to smell, may be the least appreciated of the five senses. A 2011 poll by the marketing firm McCann Worldgroup, for instance, found th … | Continue reading
Rasha Aridi in Smithsonian: The Covid-19 pandemic has made the world feel lonelier than ever as people have been shut away in their homes, aching to gather with their loved ones again. This instinct to evade loneliness is deeply engrained in our brains, and a new study published … | Continue reading
Burnt Norton—excerpt At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor t … | Continue reading
Jennifer Senior in The New York Times: More than 40 years ago, three psychologists published a study with the eccentric, mildly seductive title, “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?” Even if you don’t think you know what it says, there’s a decent chance y … | Continue reading