What He Thought …………. —an excerpt . . . we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till, sensible it was our last big chance to be poetic, make our mark, one of us asked ………………………………….. “What’s poetry? Is it the fruits and vegetables and marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or the statue the … | Continue reading
Henry Louis Gates, Jr at The New Yorker (from 1995): The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson’s acquittal, horrified whites had a fleet … | Continue reading
What can we do about the coming economic uncertainty due to AI? We’re talking about risk here, and how to deal with it. This is something Mark Blyth has been thinking about for some time. Happily, he does his thinking with a good deal of wit and a nice dash of charm to boot. Char … | Continue reading
NOTE: For the past six years, Joseph Shieber was a much-valued contributor here at 3QD. He wrote 73 essays for us which can be seen here. We are all saddened by his loss and wish to express our sympathy to his wife, Lesa, and his children, Samuel and Noa. This obituary is taken f … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar As the saying goes, if you believe only fascists guard borders, then you will ensure that only fascists will guard borders. The same principle applies to scientists working on nuclear weapons. If you believe that only Strangelovian warmongers work on nuclear … | Continue reading
by David Greer I used to visit our airport on Vancouver Island not to catch a flight but to hear the skylarks. I stood in the parking lot and looked up. The stares from passengers arriving and departing seemed a small price to pay for the reward of listening to the endless birdso … | Continue reading
Replacing the Gates If I’d broken the laws of light— if I’d been caught by a black hole and sent to prism, would you visit me with spectral frequency and split waves with me? Would you help cleave white into colors and set them free to carom off of everything in sight replacing t … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers The fella says, we must never forget that we are human. And as humans we must dream. And when we dream, we dream of money. —David Mamet/The Spanish Prisoner (1998) Long after Jesus held up a coin with Caesar’s picture on it and wisely counseled giving back to Caesa … | Continue reading
by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan A new study has revealed a troubling development in the state of Maryland: while murder rates fluctuated between 2005 and 2017—first trending downward, then increasing for a few years—the homicides recorded during that period have grown stea … | Continue reading
by Christopher Horner Immediacy itself is essentially mediated —Hegel Look at that desk in front of you right here, now. Isn’t it just there, a bare existence, a simple immediate thing right in front of you? The senses register its presence. This, at least, is a bare fact that yo … | Continue reading
by Claire Chambers The Chilean-American author Isabel Allende published her twenty-first Spanish-language novel Violeta in 2022, with an English translation by Frances Riddle appearing the same year. This historical novel is affecting and witty, as Allende paints a vivid picture … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson I This is how it felt. Yankee Stadium Gone – Impossible. It’s like going to your old hometown and finding your house – No! the neighborhood tarmacked over. Yes, we live in the world of Heraclitus, “Everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and not … | Continue reading
Alpine salamander in the woods near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow Is there such a thing as tasting expertise that, if mastered, would help us enjoy a dish or a meal? It isn’t obvious such expertise has been identified. The most prominent model of tasting expertise is derived from the practice of wine tasting and has been extend … | Continue reading
by Jerry Cayford It’s a book about how our political system fell into this downward spiral—a doom loop of toxic politics. It’s a story that requires thinking big—about the nature of political conflict, about broad changes in American society over many decades, and, most of all, a … | Continue reading
Amelia Nierenberg in The New York Times: Walnuts can improve cognitive function. Blueberries can boost memory. Fish oil supplements can lower your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. You may have noticed these buzzy “brain food” claims scattered across online health articles and social … | Continue reading
Ann Gibbons in Science: Zeresenay Alemseged doesn’t remember the 1974 discovery of the famous fossil Lucy at Hadar in Ethiopia, because he was 5 years old, living 600 kilometers away in Axum. Later he saw Lucy’s name on cafes and taxis, but he knew little about her until he becam … | Continue reading
George Makari at Literary Hub: George Makari: I heard you say in an interview that as you’re starting to think about writing a book, you write a note to yourself, saying, “Write a book that no one else could write.” Geoff Dyer: Yeah, it’s a little piece of self-encouragement. Bec … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in Quanta: Granted, the social lives of viruses aren’t quite like those of other species. Viruses don’t post selfies to social media, volunteer at food banks or commit identity theft like humans do. They don’t fight with allies to dominate a troop like baboons; they d … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: Saar Wilf is an ex-Israeli entrepreneur. Since 2016, he’s been developing a new form of reasoning, meant to transcend normal human bias. His method – called Rootclaim – uses Bayesian reasoning, a branch of math that explains the right way to w … | Continue reading
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld at Corporate Board Member: The negative buzz over board challenges experienced by Harvard, Tesla and Boeing shows remarkably parallel problems over the same period. Harvard’s stumble is particularly educational for boards facing a governance crisis. At a recent … | Continue reading
Peter Higgs (1929 – 2024) Theoretical Physicist Posted on Sunday, Apr 14, 2024 7:38AMSaturday, April 13, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Thomas Gumbleton (1930 – 2024) Bishop and Social Activist Posted on Sunday, Apr 14, 2024 7:33AMSaturday, April 13, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Elevator Music A tune with no more substance than the air, performed on underwater instruments, is proper for this short lift from the earth. It hovers as we draw into ourselves and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights that count us to our various destinies. We’re all in this … | Continue reading
Sarah Aziza in The Baffler: THERE IS NO PROPER ENTRANCE to an essay that undertakes things which should never be uttered, which have already been said. There is no way to reconcile the knowledge that the hours I spend writing will also mark the death of numerous Palestinians, and … | Continue reading
Paolo Gerbaudo in Phenomenal World: In the late 1970s, Western markets were flooded with Japanese cars from then-unfamiliar brands like Toyota, Mazda, Datsun, and Honda. The combination of a high quality product, efficient fuel consumption, and a low price tag made these brands v … | Continue reading
Adam Shatz interviews Pankaj Mishra in the LRB Podcast: Pankaj Mishra joins Adam Shatz to discuss his recent LRB Winter Lecture, in which he explores Israel’s instrumentalisation of the Holocaust. He expands on his readings of Jean Améry and Primo Levi, the crisis as understood b … | Continue reading
Miri Davidson in Sidecar: The far right wants to decolonize. In France, far-right intellectuals routinely cast Europe as indigenous victim of an ‘immigrant colonization’ orchestrated by globalist elites. Renaud Camus, theorist of the Great Replacement, has praised the anticolonia … | Continue reading
Joe Moshenska at The Guardian: In December 2021, the philosopher Yitzhak Melamed posted on social media a letter that he had received from the rabbi of the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam. Melamed had written requesting permission to film there for a documentary on the philosop … | Continue reading
The Philosophy of Spinoza & Leibniz – Bryan Magee & Anthony Quinton Posted on Saturday, Apr 13, 2024 9:30AMSaturday, April 13, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Dwight Garner at the NYT: Come with me, down the rabbit hole that is the life and work of the Brooklyn-born poet Delmore Schwartz (1913-66). There are two primary portals into Delmore World. Neither involves his own verse. Reading about Schwartz is more invigorating than reading … | Continue reading
queer ancestor(s) at most, you are a whisper that my mother covertly deals over the kitchen table, eyes shifting looking out for all vengeful ghosts both dead and alive she thumbs through photographs nonchalantly her index finger stopping briefly to shine a light, so fast, I almo … | Continue reading
Jerry Groopman in The New Yorker: Several years ago, I fell at the gym and ripped two tendons in my wrist. The pain was excruciating, and within minutes my hand had swollen grotesquely and become hot to the touch. I was reminded of a patient I’d seen early in medical school, whos … | Continue reading
Lindsey Doermann in Anthropocene: In 2008, the biotech industry had fallen on tough times: capital was drying up and businesses were struggling to survive. That’s when Ryan Bethencourt saw an opportunity. A biologist with an entrepreneurial streak, he and a couple of friends star … | Continue reading
Nathaniel Rosenthalis in The Common Reader: My first impression, upon opening Hollis’s The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem was admittedly delicious. A usual kind of epigraph greets us: “There is always another one walking beside you,” from Eliot’s poem, but then we turn the pag … | Continue reading
John Horgan at his own website: Claude Shannon can’t sit still. We’re in the living room of his home north of Boston, an edifice called Entropy House, and I’m trying to get him to recall how he came up with information theory. Shannon, who is a boyish 73, with a shy grin and snow … | Continue reading
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Rashid Khalidi in The Guardian: For people everywhere, myself included, the awful images that have come out of Gaza and Israel since 7 October 2023 have been inescapable. This war hangs over us like a motionless black cloud that gets darker and more ominous with the passage of en … | Continue reading
Learning to Live Without a Self with Jay Garfield Posted on Friday, Apr 12, 2024 10:50AM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Lauren K. Watel at Salmagundi: I force myself to watch videos of swarms. Swarms in flight, the frantic electricity of their communal passage, as if the air were awash in buzzing embers. And swarms at rest, noisy seething clumps clinging to branches and eaves and fire hydrants and … | Continue reading
Michael Hofmann at the LRB: We are a small part of a shrinking thing, tail to a dwindling dog, or that thing that, in Yeats, is fastened to the dying animal. The heart; the soul. The dying animal is the English department, perhaps the humanities as a whole. When I started at the … | Continue reading
Field Guide Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake, up to my neck in that most precious element of all, I found the pale gray curled-upwards pigeon feather floating on the tension of the water at the very instant when a dragonfly’ like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin hovered o … | Continue reading
Sunstein and Thaler in The New Yorker: In 1968, Tversky and Kahneman were both rising stars in the psychology department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They had little else in common. Tversky was born in Israel and had been a military hero. He had a bit of a quiet swagger … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Inside the brains of people with psychosis, two key systems are malfunctioning: a “filter” that directs attention toward important external events and internal thoughts, and a “predictor” composed of pathways that anticipate rewards. Dysfunction of these systems ma … | Continue reading
Uri Berliner at The Free Press: You know the stereotype of the NPR listener: an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag–carrying coastal elite. It doesn’t precisely describe me, but it’s not far off. I’m Sarah Lawrence–educated, was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother, I drive … | Continue reading
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