Gal Koplewitz in The Economist: Few people ever observed Emma Kunz, a Swiss alternative healer and artist, at work. One of the only accounts comes from a man called Anton Meier, who first met Kunz when his parents asked her to cure his childhood polio. Kunz was a spiritualist who … | Continue reading
Jayson Greene in Vulture: We left our E-Z Pass in the apartment. Stacy and I realize this only upon arriving at the mouth of the tunnel en route to the Weill Cornell ER. The gate fails to lift as we approach and we almost plow through it. The man at the tollbooth tries to reckon… | Continue reading
Christie Wilcox in Quanta: Our planet formed a little over 4.5 billion years ago, and if the most recent estimates are correct, it wasn’t long before life arose. Not much is known about how that happened because it’s maddeningly difficult to investigate. It’s also proved tough to … | Continue reading
Shankar Vedantam, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, and Jennifer Schmidt at NPR: “This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion,” says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. “There’s more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in … | Continue reading
Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone: Oh, it could get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of p … | Continue reading
Niruj Mohan Ramanujam in The Wire: What has the Event Horizon Telescope actually seen? The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has imaged the silhouette – or shadow – of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. To create this image, astronomers combined data from eight different … | Continue reading
Donna Murch in the Boston Review: Since the late 1990s, yearly rates of overdose deaths from legal “white market” opioids have consistently exceeded those from heroin. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2017, opioid overdoses killed near … | Continue reading
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Robert Rubsam at Commonweal: Almost nothing in this exhibition was created for aesthetic admiration alone. Whether it’s the way a Diné blanket’s lines break into daring geometric forms when placed across a person’s shoulders, or the transformation that a mask undergoes during a r … | Continue reading
Susan Pedersen at the LRB: Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never w … | Continue reading
Peter Adamson at the TLS: Nowadays, not many philosophers are prominent enough to get nicknames. In medieval times the practice was more popular. Every scholastic worth their salt had one: Bonaventure was the “seraphic doctor”, Aquinas the “angelic doctor”, Duns Scotus the “subtl … | Continue reading
Song —A poem composed in 28 A.D. Korea When my dead mother comes to me and asks me to lend her my shoes I take off my shoes. When my dead mother comes to me and asks me to hold her up, for she has no feet I take off my feet. When my dead… | Continue reading
Marcel Theroux in The Guardian: By a strange twist of fate, I read this book while on a visit to the Falkland Islands, where the British victory over Argentina in the 1982 war feels as though it might have happened last week. Outside Port Stanley, on treeless uplands whose names … | Continue reading
Nic Fleming in Nature: The human family tree has grown another branch, after researchers unearthed remains of a previously unknown hominin species from a cave in the Philippines. They have named the new species, which was probably small-bodied, Homo luzonensis. The discovery, rep … | Continue reading
Destin Jenkins in Public Books: Destin Jenkins (DJ): How did you initially approach the story of postwar Detroit? Thomas J. Sugrue (TJS): I began as an economic determinist. That is, I wanted to write about work and housing, but I hypothesized that work, labor, and industry were … | Continue reading
Douglas Preston in The New Yorker: If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seeme … | Continue reading
Dennis Overbye in the New York Times: Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had seen the unseeable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it. “We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before,” said Shep Doeleman, … | Continue reading
Chris Hann at Eurozine: When things fall apart, it is not surprising that people cling to forces they associate with an earlier age of stability. The voters of Kiskunhalas sent a socialist to the Budapest parliament in 1994 and elected the same individual to be their mayor from 2 … | Continue reading
Daniel Albert at n+1: Peak Car offers a compelling story of vast riches and better living. Yet the evidence is thin. The rate at which young people get their licenses has indeed been falling, but the trend began in 1983, when the internet was still a science experiment. Today, th … | Continue reading
Alan Hollinghurst at Literary Review: ‘At last!’ was my first reaction to this book: at last a scholarly treatment of a subject I’ve been noticing, pondering and mentally anthologising for much of my life. It’s partly a gay thing, no doubt, to clock the backside of a marble Jason … | Continue reading
Ceremonias De La Superviviencia at the movies my eye on the Exit sign on the aisles the doorways the space between the seat in front of me and my legs how far could I crawl before I die? wednesday after it happened I went to a work event at a gay bar … | Continue reading
Olga Khazan in The Atlantic: Nurses spend 16 hours on the phone, medications take months to arrive, and patients suffer as they wait. Lynn Lear finished her final round of chemotherapy for breast cancer in December. To help keep the cancer from coming back, Lear’s doctor told her … | Continue reading
Cary Funk in Scientific American: How much do Americans know about science? There’s a new science quiz from Pew Research Center. You can test yourself here. It depends on what you ask, of course. Many Americans understand at least some science concepts on the quiz—most can correc … | Continue reading
Marta Figlerowicz in the Boston Review: Humans always defeat lions in paintings because there are no lion painters. With this lesson, the griot gets up to leave, as Dani Kouyaté’s Keïta! (1995) comes to an end. The film is set in late twentieth-century Burkina Faso. The aphorism … | Continue reading
From the Princeton University Press blog: What led you to write a book about irrationality? I had long supposed that human thought and behavior have been a relatively static thing for the past 200,000 years, that there is a fairly narrow range of species-specific responses to the … | Continue reading
Aubrey Clayton in Nautilus: Since the midterm elections, a feud has been raging on Twitter between Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb, hedge-fund-manager-turned-mathematical-philosopher and author of The Black Swan. It began, late last year, with S … | Continue reading
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Edward Luttwak in the London Review of Books: One can fly to Japan from anywhere, but from Japan one can only fly to the Third World, and it hardly matters whether one lands in Kinshasa, London, New York or Zurich: they are all places where one must be constantly watchful and dis … | Continue reading
Holdfast The dead are for morticians & butchers to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son will leave a grounded wren or bat alone like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch in the driveway he stares. It’s dead, I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule: butterflies are too fragil … | Continue reading
David Marcus at The Nation: In the last weeks of 1954, Eric Hobsbawm and a small group of British historians set out on a goodwill trip to Moscow. It was a strange time to be visiting the Soviet Union, even stranger for a communist eager to see the achievements of actually existi … | Continue reading
Megan Marz at The Baffler: In her first chapter, “The Case for Nothing,” Odell recounts the near-daily visits she began making in 2016 to the Morcom Amphitheatre of Roses (a.k.a. the Rose Garden) in Oakland, California. Seeking post-election consolation, she sat in the public par … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: By turns dreamy, rollicking, and dramatic, Rip van Winkle shows just how well Chadwick absorbed the lessons of his German teachers, in that it marries 19th-century European symphonic technique to a quintessentially American subject. In 1880, th … | Continue reading
Natasha Gilbert in Nature: For centuries, people across the globe have testified to the relaxing and invigorating qualities of tea. The traditional calming effects of the plant Camellia sinensis have elevated the drink, which is produced from its leaves, to a role beyond quenchin … | Continue reading
by John Allen Paulos I’ve always liked stories that depended on mistaken identity, a very old theme in general. Having a degree in mathematical logic, I was also drawn to the subject on a more theoretical level, on which lies Gettier’s Paradox. Since Plato and the ancient Greeks, … | Continue reading
by Abigail Akavia Israel’s minister of justice stars in an ad for the perfume Fascism—if you follow Israeli politics even superficially, you probably have heard about this election campaign video for the New Right party, which sparked controversy in Israeli as well as internation … | Continue reading
Jose Cobo. Part of the mural installation Incarnation, 2012, Madrid. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells Why do you love me? Tell me the reasons. I love you because you are you. If I loved you for reasons then I wouldn’t love you, but the reasons. I would have to leave you if someone better came along. Movies, music and novels portray a particular ideal of romanti … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber If you’re like me, when you read something on 3QD you often have a cup of coffee ready to hand. Perhaps you’re at your desk at work on your computer, with a mug near your mousepad. Or you’re in a coffee shop reading on your cell phone. Or at home reading on… | Continue reading
Reflections on visting Britain in the early Spring, on the beauty of the countryside and the problem of litter. | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford Like most Kafka stories, “A Hunger Artist” inserts you into a bewildering situation, appears to offer you some solace and meaning, and then bewilders you all over again. The Hunger Artist is just that: a man that starves himself for a living. But unlike Gregor S … | Continue reading
Long exposure of evening scene from my balcony after a rare snowfall this late in winter in March of 2016. The white streaks on the street are from the headlights of a car driving by; the blue ones from a speeding police car. | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow The wine world thrives on variation. Wine grapes are notoriously sensitive to differences in climate, weather and soil. If care is taken to plant grapes in the right locations and preserve those differences, each region, each vintage, and indeed each vineyard can … | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf In May 2014, a young man beat his twenty-year-old sister, Farzana, to death by hitting her head with a brick. He did this in broad daylight just outside the High Court building in Lahore, the cultural, artistic and academic capital of Pakistan. He did it as local p … | Continue reading
Peter Godfrey-Smith in Aeon: Australia has had an outsized influence on philosophy, especially in the middle and late-20th century. The field still shows a broad Australian footprint. For many years, Princeton University in New Jersey, perennially one of the highest-ranked philos … | Continue reading
Cynthia Haven in Music & Literature: Cynthia Haven: Violence has been a theme of this conference: Juan Gabriel Vásquez on the Colombian drug wars, three sessions for the Nigerian journalist and author Helon Habila, who spoke about the kidnapped Boko Haram girls and the ongoing te … | Continue reading