Michelle Orange at Bookforum: Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe’s probing, recursive study, per the subtitle, of “women, crime, and obsession,” attempts to explain to themselves and the rest of us those women running in place while fixed on a master broadcast of ritual female destr … | Continue reading
Paul J. Griffiths at Commonweal: László Krasznahorkai is a Hungarian writer born in 1954. His first novel, Satantango, published in 1985, established his reputation as a novelist with a uniquely idiosyncratic voice, a melancholic passion for sin and the apocalypse, and a compassi … | Continue reading
Francesca Wade at the TLS In her 1931 essay “Professions for Women”, Woolf recalled that thrill of transforming from “a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand” to “a professional woman”, her opinions solicited and rewarded by wages she could spend, once rent and bills were cove … | Continue reading
The Joy of Writing Why does this written doe bound through these written woods? For a drink of written water from a spring whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle? Why does she lift her head; does she hear something? Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth, she pricks … | Continue reading
Cade Metz in The New York Times: SAN FRANCISCO — Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk. But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Goo … | Continue reading
Burnd Brunner in Nautilus: Winter is changing its character. Since the beginning of the 21st century, glaciers have been melting at record speed. In Central Asia, they’ve lost approximately one quarter of their volume over the past 50 years. An ice grotto in Switzerland that is c … | Continue reading
Jonny Diamond in Literary Hub: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 Years of Solitude Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. [AI continues as follows] His father had been at … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Maxwell’s Demon is a famous thought experiment in which a mischievous imp uses knowledge of the velocities of gas molecules in a box to decrease the entropy of the gas, which could then be used to do useful work such as pushing a piston. Thi … | Continue reading
Ed Tarkington in Chapter 16: In prose both sophisticated and accessible to the lay reader, Robert B. Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy sets forth the case for a national reckoning on how our addiction to politics is undermining the purposes for which democracy was conceived. Talisse, … | Continue reading
Emer Nolan at The Dublin Review of Books: November 22nd, 2019 is the bicentenary of the birth of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80). Eliot was the last in an extraordinary sequence of women novelists in nineteenth century England that included Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters … | Continue reading
Andrea K. Scott at The New Yorker: Prunella Clough, a superbly weird British modernist who died in 1999, at the age of eighty, was fond of a quote by Édouard Manet: “Painting is like throwing oneself into the sea to learn to swim.” Looking at art can be like that, too—both a cras … | Continue reading
Susan Owens at Literary Review: ‘Pre-Raphaelite Sisters’ takes the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, fades out the central figures and asks those previously known for their supporting or peripheral roles to step forward. It pays attention to models such as Fanny Cornforth and Annie Mil … | Continue reading
Markus Gabriel in Edge: One of the central questions I’m asking myself is how to fit the human being into our current understanding of both natural scientific fact and the social and general mental and interpretative facts unearthed by the humanities and social sciences. Where do … | Continue reading
Drew Pendergrass in Harvard Magazine: The authors’ argument goes like this. The emergence of agriculture 12,000 years ago favored societies that could work together on big projects, like growing crops. This kind of collaboration required people to be members of tightly bound soci … | Continue reading
Netty Moore Lost John’s sittin’ on a railroad track Something’s out of whack Blues this mornin’ fallin’ down like hail Gonna leave a greasy trail Gonna travel the world is what I’m gonna do Then come back and see you All I ever do is struggle and strive If I don’t do anybody any … | Continue reading
Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books: Accounts of the muse–artist relation were anchored in the idea of male cultural production as a special category, one with particular needs—usually sexual—that the muse had been there to fulfill, perhaps even to the point of exploitati … | Continue reading
John Horgan in Scientific American: Azra Raza, an oncologist at Columbia, has watched too many people die from cancer. They include her patients and her husband, also a cancer specialist. She has poured her frustration into a new book, The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursu … | Continue reading
Yanis Varoufakis in The Guardian: Good Economics for Hard Times is the latest attempt by economists to defend their profession. It is, happily, an excellent antidote to the most dangerous forms of economics bashing: the efforts of opportunistic politicians to weaponise discontent … | Continue reading
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Johanna Fateman at Bookforum: In 1988, Valerie Solanas, the author of the 1967 female-supremacist pamphlet SCUM Manifesto, died from pneumonia at the age of fifty-two, in a single-occupancy hotel room in San Francisco. The decomposing body of the visionary writer, who famously se … | Continue reading
Conor Hale in Fierce Biotech: New, early data from Grail showed its liquid biopsy test not only was able to detect the presence of 12 different kinds of early-stage cancer but could also identify the disease’s location within the body before it spreads using signatures found in t … | Continue reading
Nell Zink at Harper’s Magazine: The rule of thumb for temperate rainforests is one third live trees, one third snags, one third nurse logs. I saw almost no dead trees in Amazonia, standing or otherwise. Things rot too fast. A dead tree can’t defend itself or maintain a symbiotic … | Continue reading
Jane Brody in The New York Times: Efforts to reduce deaths from breast cancer in women have long focused on early detection and post-surgical treatment with drugs, radiation or both to help keep the disease at bay. And both of these approaches, used alone or together, have result … | Continue reading
Jude Rogers at The New Statesman: When walls are built through a city, strengthened with reinforced concrete and steel, separated by a strip of land where you can be shot and left to die, you don’t expect things to break through. But radio broadcasts don’t stop at borders. Politi … | Continue reading
Kelly Recalls 1963 I still call The year 1963 Season of Nightmares After Medgar Evers Was killed I Would lie awake And wait for My uncle Joe To get home Safely he and My Aunt Blanche Had the same Carport Mr. Evers Had I know Because I read The story concerning His assassination o … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss Economics. The dismal science. All those numbers and graphs, formulas and derivations, tombstone-sized copies of Paul Samuelson and William Nordhaus’s Macroeconomics (now apparently in its 19th edition), and memories of the detritus that came with them: half-fille … | Continue reading
If you talk about it, it’s not Tao If you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternal Naming splits the eternal to smithereens …………………………… —Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC Lao Tzu Lament at first I think, I’ve got it! then I think, Ah no, that’s not it I think, it’s more… | Continue reading
by Eric J. Weiner The word “schlep” comes from the Yiddish “schlepn,” which means to drag or haul. You don’t have to be Jewish to be a schlepper, although it couldn’t hurt. Amidst the deepening economic and political inequities informing everyday life, schlepping is one of the gr … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Hydroglyphs with black fish, Ubud, Bali, 2019. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by John Schwenkler This is the second in a series of posts discussing different ways of pursuing philosophical understanding. My first post in this series explained how philosophy can aim to help us become articulate about things we already understand at a practical or intuitive … | Continue reading
by Dave Maier The blog post screams: “If you think 2 + 2 always equals 4, you’re a racist oppressor.” It then proceeds to attribute this ghastly sentiment to the Seattle Public School district, on the basis of a preliminary document for a proposed curriculum in “Math Ethnic Studi … | Continue reading
Dr Robert Gallo, a biomedical researcher, is renowned for his role in the discovery of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the infectious agent responsible for AIDS and in the development of HIV blood tests. He co-founded Profectus BioSciences, Inc., a biotechnology company. Pr … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman In the spring of 1991 I crossed the German-Polish border at Görlitz and travelled through Zgorzelec, the city’s one-time other half across the river Neisse, into Poland. The Gulf War had just ended, and the streets of Berlin, where I was spending the year at the … | Continue reading
by R. Passov The British Boxing Board of Control (BBBofC) provides a short history of boxing. It’s an ancient sport. The Romans fought each other wearing cestus, sometimes to the death. Before them so the Greeks. In the fourth century AD, tired of the violence, the Romans outlaw … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray Americans stood as implacable enemies of National Socialism. As an American myself, on the anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall, I want to tell you about my dear friend the Nazi soldier. “I don’t like Polish people,” he says, and raises an eyebrow suggesting “How … | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon AI – artificial intelligence – is all the rage these days. Most of the raging, I suspect, is a branding strategy. It is hype. Some of it isn’t, and that’s important. Alas, distinguishing between the hype and the true goods is not easy, even for experts – some of wh … | Continue reading
The river Eisack flows into Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol from the north on a clear night, November 10, 2019. | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt Stuck is a new weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. A table of contents can be found here. Prologue: Full of Sound and Fury Last year we drove across the country. We had one cassette tape to listen to on the entire trip. I don’t remem … | Continue reading
Justin E. H. Smith in his blog: I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judg … | Continue reading
Daniel Immerwahr in The Nation: In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams published The Epic of America, a one-volume history of the country. At more than 400 pages, it was a formidable volume, but Adams’s lyrical prose and insistence on putting everyday people at the center of his … | Continue reading
Viviane Callier in The Scientist: From Alaska down to the Baja Peninsula, the rocky tide pools of North America’s West Coast are separated by hundreds of kilometers of sandy beaches. Inside those tide pools live Tigriopus californicus copepods, small shrimp-like animals that evol … | Continue reading
Noreen Malone in Slate: According to the Associated Press Stylebook— Slate’s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related—there are two main prose uses—the abrupt change and the series within a phrase—for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can us … | Continue reading
There’s something in both of these poems pointing the same way: A Few Delicate Needles It’s so delicate, the light. And there’s so little of it. The dark is huge. Just delicate needles, the light, in an endless night. And it has such a long way to go through such desolate space. … | Continue reading
Barbara Ehrenreich in The Baffler: IN 1940, FOUR TEENAGE BOYS stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog a … | Continue reading
Grant and Grant in The Atlantic: As anyone who has been called out for hypocrisy by a small child knows, kids are exquisitely attuned to gaps between what grown-ups say and what grown-ups do. If you survey American parents about what they want for their kids, more than 90 percent … | Continue reading
Oliver Franklin-Wallis in MIL: The submarine DSV Limiting Factor bobbed in the Atlantic swell. Gleaming white, with a hull the shape of a hip flask, its lights gave the water an otherworldly glow. Stooping slightly inside the crew compartment – a snug titanium sphere 1.5 metres a … | Continue reading