Jay Tolson at The Hedgehog Review: To be sure, enlightened progressives were committed to science, positivism, and liberal democratic values—all of which the reactionaries rejected in favor of hierarchy and a highly traditionalist, and exclusively Catholic nationalism. It would s … | Continue reading
Darcey Steinke at The Paris Review: “I see no reason not to consider the Brontë cult a religion,” writes Judith Shulevitz. She calls the thousands of books inspired by the Brontës midrash, “the spinning of gloriously weird backstories or fairy tales prompted by gaps or contradict … | Continue reading
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My Twitter Feed Becomes Too Much I come across pictures of two rubber bullets nestled in a palm, their nose tips black and rounded like a reporters’ foam-covered mic. The caption reads These maim, break skin, cause blindness. Another photo—a hollow caved into a woman’s scalp, flo … | Continue reading
Debbie Koenig in WebMD: When Howard Wolinsky was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, he expected to kiss bagels goodbye — too many carbs. But a personalized diet based on his own gut microbiome offered a pleasant surprise: “It turns out those little bugs in my guts seem to like bread … | Continue reading
Isaac Chatiner in The New Yorker: In her 2019 book, “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil,” the philosopher Susan Neiman examines the different ways in which Germany and the United States have confronted their past sins. Neiman, who grew up in the American South … | Continue reading
Leanne Ogasawara in the Dublin Review of Books: A man finds himself in Antwerp with nothing to do. Then he remembers, among other things, that this is the town where the painter Peter Paul Rubens made his home. At first, this annoys him, because he has no interest whatsoever in t … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become creative, what is happening in their bra … | Continue reading
Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, John McWhorter, and many others, in Harper’s Magazine (also published in Le monde, Die Zeit, La Repubblica, and El País): Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are lea … | Continue reading
Editor’s Note: We at 3QD stand fully behind Steven Pinker. Please also see this public statement published today in Harper’s, Le monde, Die Zeit, La Repubblica, and El País with signatories such as Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, John McWhorter, and many others. Sc … | Continue reading
Hilton Als at The New Yorker: As a boy in Brownsville and in Bed-Stuy, I was tormented by the question of protection, because, of course, I, too, wanted to be protected. Like any number of black boys in those neighborhoods, I grew up in a matrilineal society, where I had been tau … | Continue reading
Sarah Ditum at Literary Review: What is to be done with hope? Ali Smith is a great artist of possibility. Think of the role chance plays in her work, from The Accidental to How to be Both’s thrillingly shuffled structure that meant you had a fifty-fifty chance of getting the cont … | Continue reading
Notes from the Camino de Santiago Compostela Outside a bar in Santillana del Mar, I am drinking café con leche where the bella donnas & bleeding hearts decant the eye with the same pitch as your arms swelling Alberta. The Torture Museum only charges 3.50 Euro to cruise iron maide … | Continue reading
Aaron Hirsh in Nautilus: Many historians have noted the intimate connection between the theory of natural selection and the ascendant political and economic views of the society in which Darwin was a well-placed member. The Victorian elite were committed to the idea that the unfe … | Continue reading
Apurv Mishra in Scientific American: A patient suspected of having cancer usually undergoes imaging and a biopsy. Samples of the tumor are excised, examined under a microscope and, often, analyzed to pinpoint the genetic mutations responsible for the malignancy. Together, this in … | Continue reading
by Ali Minai “I’ll just google it again”, said my daughter when I asked her to remember something. It was a very reasonable suggestion, but it led me down an interesting line of thought about the nature of knowing and its recent transformation. Much has been said and written abou … | Continue reading
by Fabio Tollon You’ve heard about AI. Either it’s coming for your job (automation), your partner (sex robots), or your internet history (targeted adverts). Each of the aforementioned represent very serious threats (or improvements, depending on your predilections) to the economy … | Continue reading
Time is a static in the mind.”—Malachi Black, poet Timesea In the days when there were bona fide summers when months were loyal to the expected, when they stayed more or less within their lanes, December not copping the joys of July, for instance, when seasons honored tradition a … | Continue reading
by N. Gabriel Martin Perhaps there is no greater testament to the triumph of individualism than the pro-gun slogan “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” It takes an extremely narrow conception of responsibility to deny that lax gun laws are to blame for high rates of gun … | Continue reading
by Charlie Huenemann By 2025, protective living communities (PLCs) had started to form. The earliest PLCs, such as New Promise and New New Babylon, based themselves on rationalist doctrines: decisions informed by best available science, and either utilitarian ethics or Rawlsian p … | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey Let’s face it, I’m tired. A phrase completely knotted up in the rather damaged circuitry that is my brain with Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles who managed to out-Dietrich Dietrich while being her own amazing self (if you haven’t watched this in at least the past f … | Continue reading
by Callum Watts I worry. Asking someone out, speaking in public, stepping onto a flight, for me these mundane moments percolate with anxiety. These are personal fears, inner battles of no real relevance to the wider world and disconnected from any broader social meaning. Over the … | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer Our world (made of atoms) is crammed with paradoxes. Particles act like waves, waves like particles And your cat can be dead and alive at the same time. Just step through your looking glass and welcome to the quantum world. “If you think you understand quantum m … | Continue reading
Mother Writes to the ‘Lion of Kashmir,’ Long Deceased February 2020 Dear Sheikh Sahib, They tell me, you are buried on the left bank of Naseem lake with views of Hazratbal shrine, your tomb guarded by India’s troops. I tell them, this represents one of those paradoxes’ history ke … | Continue reading
by Joshua Wilbur There are times when I can’t look away from The Avenue at Middelharnis. Completed in 1689 by the Dutch Golden Age artist Meindert Hobbema, the painting has entranced viewers for centuries. The English landscapists of the Romantic period admired and emulated its … | Continue reading
by Mindy Clegg In our modern society, we are awash in a near constant barrage of information. It can be difficult for even the most critically-minded among us to sift through all of that information and vet it for truthfulness. It’s likely that we all are subject to some misinfor … | Continue reading
This alpine meadow near my house went through yellow, purple, and white phases before finally blooming with all three colors simultaneously in a “second wave” now. It probably does this every year but I had not noticed until the coronavirus lockdown got me into the habit of walki … | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien It’s a bountiful feast for discriminating worriers like myself. Every day brings a tantalizing re-ordering of fears and dangers; the mutation of reliable sources of doom, the emergence of new wild-card contenders. Like an improbably long-lived heroin addict, the s … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat Because I have a lot of experience with depression, I approached George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed with an almost professional curiosity. Scialabba takes a creative approach to the depression memoir, blending personal essay, interview, and his own medical reco … | Continue reading
The apparently liberal project of saving endangered languages is not as liberal as it first appears. The appropriate liberal response to language decline is not to oblige people to use what we consider to be their ‘correct’ language, but to allow them to use the language they wan … | Continue reading
Haider Shahbaz in The Caravan: I was slightly nervous before my first meeting with the author Mirza Athar Baig, in the winter of 2017, at the Big M restaurant in Lahore’s Shadman Market. I had recently signed a book deal for my translation of his 2014 Urdu novel Hassan’s State of … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Cooking is art, but it’s also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can’t think of anyone better to talk to about the intersection of thes … | Continue reading
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Andy Martin in The Independent: We weren’t always racists. We were always mean, murderous bastards, of course. Rape, slaughter, and slavery were once fairly normal and frequent. The plot of Taken has been rehearsed over and over again throughout history. Rousseau’s “noble savage” … | Continue reading
From Art Radar: In a short video documentary produced by the Tate Modern in London, the artist talks about her exhibition, “Letters from Home,” which opened on 28 March 2013. Through personal letters, the exhibition illustrates an immigrant’s disconnection from his or her homelan … | Continue reading
Robin Wright in The New Yorker: The real saga of the Statue of Liberty—the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show—is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clu … | Continue reading
New World I did not walk through a wardrobe or follow a rabbit into a hole or stare too long into a looking glass. My house was not swept up in a tornado The naïve woman I was, secure in my belief that shocking lies and bad behavior could never bear fruit, died when the… | Continue reading
Damilola Oyedele in The Mantle: The first thing that strikes the reader about Yahia Lababidi’s Revolutions of the Heart is its ‘genre-bending’ element. The book is divided into ‘Essays, Appreciations, Reflections,’ which delves into literature, religion, and global politics, and … | Continue reading
Robert Brenner in New Left Review: The Fed’s 23 March declaration that it intended to provide loans to non-financial corporations was decisive in indicating the Fed’s assumption of leadership of the government’s corporate bailout, signalling what was expected of Congress and the … | Continue reading
Kate Streader in Beat: Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a name that – despite her recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 – is still widely unknown considering the invaluable influence she had on the generations of rock’n’roll acts which followed in her wake. When we … | Continue reading
An interview with Wendy Brown in The Drift: Margaret Thatcher famously said “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In a way, social distancing tests out the limits (and fundamental incoherence) of this idea. Are we learning … | Continue reading