James Poniewozik in The New York Times: Imagine being stuck in a room with Roman Roy — Kieran Culkin’s witty, self-hating “Succession” character — without having gotten any understanding of his psyche to contextualize his machine-gun quips. That’s “Mountainhead,” times four. No o … | Continue reading
………………………………….Names Lost in the Count ……………………………………………………… The world speaks in digits now. “37 killed, 20 injured” Death now serves as ornament for the news headlines. “50 killed, 80 injured” Human flesh, scratched to cold numbers. “23 killed, 45 injured” Corpses now subjected t … | Continue reading
by Scott Samuelson The sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room. —Blaise Pascal In its “Recovered Books Series,” Boiler House Press has just republished Christopher Burney’s Solitary Confinement, originally released in 1951, a profo … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat After my power went out during a recent round of severe storms, I turned on my battery-operated Realistic Weatheradio. I bought this cubical radio at Radio Shack many years ago, and it sits on a bookshelf in the living room, largely ignored until extreme weather ha … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Seeing is Believing. Vahrner See, Südtirol, October 2013. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Charles Mathewes in The Hedgehog Review: The first time I met Alasdair MacIntyre I was twenty-one, and he threatened to kill one of my classmates. Then he told us all that our attention to his work was “profoundly misbegotten.” It was the spring semester of 1991, my senior year a … | Continue reading
Leah Downey and Mark Blyth at Taylor and Francis Online: How should states secure funding to support the green transformation, where the state is an actor that is both public and dependent upon private interests? This pressing issue in international political economy (IPE) has so … | Continue reading
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Tim Connolly at Aeon: In the modern West, individualism takes on many forms. Perhaps the most readily apparent is in a political philosophy that puts the freedom and the rights of individuals as its highest values. The social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke treats … | Continue reading
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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet: My recent fortnight in Berlin was replete with its usual share of artwalk splendors—the permanent display of room after room of paintings by the incomparable Adolph Menzel at the Alte Nationalgalerie (though actually not so incomparable as all … | Continue reading
Banu Mushtaq in Paris Review: There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation. All the children are at home. When they’re not in front of the TV, they’re either climbing the guava tree in the front yard or perched on the compound wall. What if one of them falls … | Continue reading
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Zoe Guttenplan at Literary Review: In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work. ‘I should much prefer that the b … | Continue reading
Dear Reader, Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and profes … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr It’s a ritual now. Every Sunday morning I go into my garage and use marker pens and sticky tape to make a new sign. Then from noon to one I stand on a street corner near the Safeway, shoulder to shoulder with two or three hundred other would-be troublemakers, wavi … | Continue reading
…..Why Being? What happens, happens before & after, every time, without fail, always— yet, is singular, is a one-note affair in a symphony of nows each moment of which then becomes before & after, simultaneously. If this seems confusing, blame time, or life, or God which, in part … | Continue reading
Matthew Karp in Sidecar: The US political world can today be divided not only between left and right, but along another axis: Trump maximalists and Trump minimalists. Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transfo … | Continue reading
Quinn Slobodian in The Ideas Letter: Polyps confounded political theorists in the 18th century. The creatures that collectively make up coral reefs acted in ways that defied both expectations of divine design and the established hierarchy of the animal kingdom. How could these lo … | Continue reading
You Shall Not See Me Only union with you gives joy. The rest is tearing down one building to put up another. ……………… But don’t break with forms! Boats cannot move without water. We are misquoted texts made right when you say, us. We are sheep in a tightening wolf-circle: You come … | Continue reading
Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian: In this droll and timely analysis of extreme wealth, New Yorker staff writer Osnos notes that superyacht demand is outstripping supply. In some countries you have to wait for bread, water or inoculations; in others for giant sea-going vessels. In … | Continue reading
Katie Englehart in The New York Times: In 2023, one out of 20 Canadians who died received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in the world, when measured in total figures. In one province, Quebec, there were more MAID … | Continue reading
by Gary Borjesson And these two [the rational and spirited] will be set over the desiring part—which is surely most of the soul in each and by nature the most insatiable for money—and they’ll watch over it for fear of its…not minding its own business, but attempting to enslave an … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal I first started reading Jon Fosse’s Septology in a bookstore. I read the first page and found myself unable to stop, like a person running on a treadmill at high speed. Finally I jumped off and caught my breath. Fosse’s book, which is a collection of seven novels pu … | Continue reading
Peter Hessler at Literary Hub: In the spring of 1991, when I was a junior at Princeton, I took John McPhee’s seminar on nonfiction writing. Back then, I was an English major who hoped to become a novelist, and I focused primarily on writing short stories. I had no real interest i … | Continue reading
Victoria Malloy in Atmos: The concept of bringing back the scent of extinct flowers started with Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company founded by five MIT scientists, with an ethos rooted in the lessons of Jurassic Park: that life finds a way. “A lot of the story of bio … | Continue reading
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Benjamin Balthaser in the Boston Review: Several recent books chronicling specifically American Jewish dissent from Zionism, past and present, demonstrate how this relatively recent Zionist “consensus” was manufactured. Geoffrey Levin and Marjorie N. Feld tell stories of once-mai … | Continue reading
Chris Cohen at The Nation: Unlike the other usual contenders for the title of greatest living American composer, who rose up out of lofts and art galleries (Glass, Reich) or Hollywood recording studios (John Williams), Adams is a denizen of the concert hall and the opera house—th … | Continue reading
Graham Tomlin in Literary Review: What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same language but were also near contemporaries. When R … | Continue reading
Peter Diamandis in Singularity Hub: In 2025, in accordance with Moore’s Law, we’ll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. Here are eight areas where we’ll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade: 5. Disruption of Heal … | Continue reading
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Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker: Pain might flicker, flash, prickle, drill, lancinate, pinch, cramp, tug, scald, sear, or itch. It might be blinding, or gruelling, or annoying, and it might, additionally, radiate, squeeze, or tear with an intensity that is mild, distressing, or e … | Continue reading
Resemblances On top of those low mountains the surprising snow lingers. Here in the valley beside the small stream, a snow of almond blossoms. A congruence, then, between high and low, or is it only the eye playing its old game of this is like that? How much we’ve learned from th … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman The brilliant and recently departed Jules Feiffer drew a cartoon many years ago called Munro. It was later made into an Academy Award-winning animated short. You can watch it here. Munro was only four years old, but somehow he got drafted into the army. He went t … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene Many people who have thought carefully about AI are anxious about certain uses of it, and for good reason. Many are concerned that people (young people in particular) are increasingly offloading their critical thinking development and responsibilities to … | Continue reading
by Eric Schenck My sister and I have always been close. But for the last few years, something has bonded us like nothing before: trashy television. We love nothing more than to watch reality TV shows and rejoice that we are not these people. 90 Day Fiancé (hereafter affectionatel … | Continue reading
Marcus du Sautoy at Big Think: In the first movement of his piece, Messiaen wanted to create the strange sense of time ending. He achieved this in the most stunning manner. Time depends on things repeating, so he needed to produce a structure where you never truly hear the moment … | Continue reading
Michael Le Page in New Scientist: The goal of understanding how inert molecules gave rise to life is one step closer, according to researchers who have created a system of RNA molecules that can partly replicate itself. They say it should one day be possible to achieve complete s … | Continue reading
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Richard Aldous at Persuasion: Public gaffes piled up. Biden referred to Vice President Harris as “Vice President Trump” and described himself as the first black vice president. At a NATO summit President Zelensky of Ukraine was called “President Putin.” Behind the scenes at photo … | Continue reading
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This Minute, This Life However hard I try to forget what I’ve learned to not know what I know to not see, not believe sudden doors open anyway to moments of clarity to lost treasure found and fingers of light pointing this leaf, this word, this minute, this life. by Johanna Jorda … | Continue reading
Clifford Thompson at Commonweal: Why abstract art? The question is not rhetorical, especially as a point of entry into the visionary work of Jack Whitten, whose career spanned six decades before he died in 2018. One possible answer: the need to say what cannot be said according t … | Continue reading
Rowan Wilson at Aeon Magazine: In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest … | Continue reading
Alex Kirshner in Slate: Through a stroke of good fortune, Elon Musk’s otherwise disastrous purchase of Twitter has turned into one of the great business acquisitions of all time. Buying control of a president was a start. What if the deal bought him something even more valuable? … | Continue reading
Lina Zeldovich in Nature: Autism spectrum disorder, or autism, is a neurodevelopmental disorder. People with the disorder may have deficits in social communication and interaction and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. Autism is really a con … | Continue reading
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad You are scrolling through photos from your childhood and come across one where you are playing on a beach with your grandfather. You do not remember ever visiting a beach but chalk it up to the unreliability of childhood memories. Over the next few mon … | Continue reading