D. Clay Ackerly in Vox: “Wait. I can catch Covid twice?” my 50-year-old patient asked in disbelief. It was the beginning of July, and he had just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, for a second time — three months after a previous infection. While the … | Continue reading
Sally O’Reilly at Cabinet Magazine: Sonic branding is big business. Should you be interested, you could commission the composition of a long-form anthem, a sonic logo, or the sounds your product emits during user operation. Computer and video game companies lavish much time, effo … | Continue reading
Juan Cole in Informed Comment: Peter Beinart, a professor of journalism at the City University of New York, has caused a stir in the past week with articles and interviews in which he says he has given up on the project of a Jewish state in Israel. He still likes the idea of a Je … | Continue reading
Philip Parker at Literary Review: Like many a subsequent empire, Rome had a highly ambivalent relationship with the outsiders it needed to fuel its commerce, stock its slave markets and man its armies. In this particular case, those outsiders were not colonised peoples but the Ge … | Continue reading
Hummingbird One day in a lifetime I saw one with wings a pipesmoke blur shaped like half a kiss and its raspberry-stone heart winked fast in a thumbnail of a breast. In that blink it was around a briar and out of sight, but I caught a flash of its brain where flowers swing udders … | Continue reading
Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker: Italy at the beginning of the fourteenth century was a conglomeration of prosperous city-states that had broken free of the feudal system. Some of them, such as Venice, formed merchant republics, which became seedbeds for capitalism. Venice and … | Continue reading
Francis Collins in NIH Director’s Blog: Early detection usually offers the best chance to beat cancer. Unfortunately, many tumors aren’t caught until they’ve grown relatively large and spread to other parts of the body. That’s why researchers have worked so tirelessly to develop … | 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 Skepticism is the view that knowledge is unattainable. It comes in varying strengths. In the strongest version, it is a thesis about all knowledge, the global denial that anyone has ever known anything. More commonly, though, skepticism is … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa One of my favorite areas of mathematics is Ramsey theory. In fact, my first 3QD essay was about F. P. Ramsey and his marvelous result which launched the field. It is one of those rare parts of mathematics where the results are often easy to understand, hard to … | Continue reading
“It doesn’t matter if other factors besides the plaintiff’s sex contributed to the decision,” the Court affirmed, and, for the first time, ruled that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individ … | Continue reading
Joseph Rovegno via justiceforgeorgenyc Instagram. Black Lives Matter Protests, June 2020. (with permission from the artist). More here and here (JR is raising funds for BLM and ACLU … do check out the links). | Continue reading
by David Kordahl Physics writing, let’s face it, is usually pretty boring. In a recent essay for Tablet, Adam Kirsh diagnosed one reason for this. When physicists write non-technical literature, they often begin with the assumption that the world as revealed by physics is the rea … | Continue reading
by Godfrey Onime “Dr. Onime, your patient in room 607 is throwing a fit,” read the nurse’s message on my iPhone. “He wants to leave. What should I do?” I was half-way through lunch. I placed a call to the nurse and asked her to try and convince the patient to stay until I got… | Continue reading
by Paul Orlando I have a friend who is a self-described “cop magnet.” He’s been arrested six or seven times, just standing there. I understand why. He looks like trouble. A propensity for wearing all black clothing. A shaved head and a full beard. Multiple tattoos; never smiles. … | Continue reading
by Chris Horner There are some notions, ideas and arguments, that no matter how often they are exposed as fallacious, are rebutted and refuted, seem to recur again and again. Moral relativism is one of them.[1] Put simply, this is the view that one’s moral judgments are delimited … | Continue reading
In the wake of the tragic killing of George Floyd and resurgence of the Black Lives Movement, Unilever dropped the word ‘fair’ from its skin-lightening cream, ‘Fair & Lovely’. But if the idea was to support the fight against racism, why not just drop the skin-lightening cream? | Continue reading
by Anitra Pavlico Lately I’ve been craving the music of French composer Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). As reality continues to be fraught, in the midst of a pandemic, social unrest, culture wars, and on and on, Ravel’s music offers an enticing escape. Described by his close friend, c … | Continue reading
Cat in the Domplatz in Brixen, South Tyrol, in June of 2015. | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Being Korean is a behavioral science all its own. There are formalities at all levels of society and potential affronts lurking in every social engagement. Ageism is set in stone, and in honorifics that define older or younger persons, friends, siblings and relati … | Continue reading
by Katie Poore Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt is a string pulled so tightly it is on the verge, always, of snapping. It is like this from the first sentence, when our protagonist Lydia Quixano Alvarez’s 8-year-old son, Luca, finds himself in a rain of bullets while he uses the ba … | Continue reading
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi The language of light is compelling. The suggestions of light at daybreak are vastly different from twilight or starlight, the light of a firefly is not the same as that of embers or cat eyes, and light through a sapphire ring or a stained glass window is n … | Continue reading
by Timothy Don The current economic crisis is crushing artists, museums, and galleries everywhere. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, an exorbitant rental market made maintaining a practice difficult before this crisis hit. It’s even harder now. With 3QD’s permission, I … | Continue reading
Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books: After I wrote about novels characterized by their focus on belonging—the concern with being in or out of a certain community, worthy or unworthy of its membership—a reader suggested I should have included Mark Twain in my list, mentionin … | Continue reading
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William E. Scheuerman in the Boston Review: Democracy seems in bad shape these days. In contrast, its global political rivals appear to be prospering and gaining confidence in their ability to offer a viable alternative. Commenting gleefully a few weeks after Donald Trump’s elect … | Continue reading
From the Columbia University Press blog: Idan Landau: This book develops many ideas and themes that your readers will recognize from your earlier works. Still, I sense a new, or at least a more pronounced thread of skepticism running through it—especially as regards the limits of … | Continue reading
Luke Brown in TLS: When Philip Roth died in 2018 an era of unpalatable writing by men about men seemed to close. Roth, who often wrote about antagonistic relationships, was dogged by accusations of misogyny for his portrayals of women. Carmen Callil, the founder of Virago resigne … | Continue reading
Michele Solis in Scientific American: What makes the human brain special? That question is not easy to answer—and will occupy neuroscientists for generations to come. But a few tentative responses can already be mustered. The organ is certainly bigger than expected for our body s … | Continue reading
Vancouver Island The hummingbird beak-deep in fireweed makes clumsy the worming robin, but that brown orangey breast brightens the greens of the lawn so the bluish green blacks of the firs are deepened. How many greens there are – grass, fern, cedar, each has a thousand. Now I … | Continue reading
Rob Doyle at The Guardian: When the first volume in the punk-feminist writer Virginie Despentes’s Vernon Subutex trilogy appeared in English in 2015, it was a cause for excitement. Here was a big, brash, enjoyable slab of French recession fiction, a social novel full of ageing ro … | Continue reading
Nicholson Baker at Columbia Journalism Review: When I first started watching YouTube—in 2006, just before it was bought by Google—it was a fairly intimate place. Renetto (a/k/a Paul Robinett) made a clip with “EXTREME GRAPHIC CONTENT,” in which he chewed a mouthful of Mentos and … | Continue reading
Sanjay G. Reddy over at Reddy to Read: My academic institution, like many others in the world, forecasts a severe financial crisis as a result of the response to COVID-19. It has, as a result, preemptively announced job furloughs and other severe measures, including pay cuts to f … | Continue reading
Ragnar Fjelland in Nature: In 1976 Joseph Weizenbaum, at that time professor of informatics at MIT and the creator of the famous program Eliza, published the book Computer Power and Human Reason (Weizenbaum, 1976). As the title indicates, he made a distinction between computer po … | Continue reading
Göran Therborn in The Conversation: The possibilities of flourishing as a human are shaped by processes of (in)equality. Differences are either given – by God or by Nature – or chosen as lifestyles. Unlike difference, inequality is a historical social construction. The three-dime … | Continue reading
Sophie Gilbert in The Atlantic: Food, at its essence, is sustenance; that much is simple. Where things get complicated is in all the manifold ways it sustains us. Consider the burrito. In the first episode of Padma Lakshmi’s new Hulu show, Taste the Nation, the food writer and lo … | Continue reading
Martha Jones in Smithsonian: The 19th Amendment, ratified in August 1920, paved the way for American women to vote, but the educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune knew the work had only just begun: The amendment alone would not guarantee political power to black women. Thanks … | Continue reading
Lauren Masceranhas in CNN: More research emerged this week in potential support of using the tuberculosis vaccine Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) as a tool in the fight against coronavirus. Researchers found that countries where many people have been given the vaccine have had les … | Continue reading
Cajas/Boxes with Zero Tolerance …….. -excerpts In 1930, my tatarabuela still spoke Rarámuri. Detribalized now as we’ve been from Turtle Island, south and north of the río grande, west and east it’s no surprise that we’re still writing about our identities, brown women regarded as … | Continue reading
Katrin Redfern and Richard Whatmore in The Conversation: Identity politics has become a secular religion and, like any strict sect, apostates are severely punished. This can lead to a “purity spiral”, with the more extreme opinion the more rewarded in a pattern of increasing esca … | Continue reading
Stephen Ornes in Quanta: Here’s a deceptively simple exercise: Come up with a random phone number. Seven digits in a sequence, chosen so that every digit is equally likely, and so that your choice of one digit doesn’t affect the next. Odds are, you can’t. (But don’t take my word … | Continue reading
Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction: Sadly, you know that your side is losing the war of ideas when they start handing propaganda victories to the side you despise on a platter. Three years ago, in the context of a Lee statue that was going to be taken down, after that … | Continue reading