Amy Maxmen in Nature: Hospitals in New York City are gearing up to use the blood of people who have recovered from COVID-19 as a possible antidote for the disease. Researchers hope that the century-old approach of infusing patients with the antibody-laden blood of those who have … | Continue reading
From Caltech Magazine: Are you optimistic that these measures combined with research will be enough to combat the coronavirus? I personally believe we will blunt this epidemic, but I think we wasted a good four to six weeks largely because of lack of testing and lack of a certain … | Continue reading
Jade French at the TLS: As the subtitle of this collection of essays plainly implies, Barnes did modernism her way. She might have been ambivalent about the movement, resulting in what Daniela Caselli calls her “aesthetics of uncertainty”. But there is no doubting her credentials … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in The Easel: When you look at the work of an artist like Richard Serra, or better yet, stand next to a classic Serra piece, you begin to understand how important the physical problem of balance and uprightness is for contemporary sculpture. Take one such classic work … | Continue reading
From the EconTalk podcast of The Library of Economics and Liberty: Raza argues that we have made little progress in fighting cancer over the last 50 years. The tools available to oncologists haven’t changed much–the bulk of the progress that has been made has been through earlier … | Continue reading
Richard Brody at The New Yorker: Those young movie nuts would launch the French New Wave, along with Rohmer, who was its virtual godfather; yet it took him two decades to put his ideas into practice. What made the difference for this group’s movies was a new mode of production—sc … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Tim Wu at the NYRB: To most people, the assertion that we are living in Skinner boxes might sound alarming, but The Age of Surveillance Capitalism goes darker still. Skinner, at least, saw himself as a do-gooder who would save humanity from its own delusions. His behavioral engin … | Continue reading
Jill Lepore in The New Yorker: When the plague came to London in 1665, Londoners lost their wits. They consulted astrologers, quacks, the Bible. They searched their bodies for signs, tokens of the disease: lumps, blisters, black spots. They begged for prophecies; they paid for pr … | Continue reading
Jop de Vrieze in Science: Researchers in four countries will soon start a clinical trial of an unorthodox approach to the new coronavirus. They will test whether a century-old vaccine against tuberculosis (TB), a bacterial disease, can rev up the human immune system in a broad wa … | Continue reading
At the Un-National Monument along the Canadian Border This is the field where the battle did not happen, where the unknown soldier did not die. This is the field where grass joined hands, where no monument stands,| and the only heroic thing is the sky. Birds fly here without any … | 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 Stoicism has been enjoying a renaissance lately. Popular books with Stoic advice are widespread, it’s being marketed as a life-hack, and now with the global coronavirus pandemic, Stoicism is a regular touchstone in prescriptions for maintai … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa For mathematics, 1666 was the Annus Mirabilis (“wonderous year”). For the rest of humanity, it was pretty terrible. The plague once again burnt across Europe [1]. Cambridge University closed its doors and Issac Newton moved home. Although only twenty-three year … | Continue reading
Kazuo Shiraga. Untitled 1964. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Anitra Pavlico There has been much discussion lately of whether the COVID-19 pandemic will spell the end of globalization. It’s hard to get economists to agree on the meaning of the numbers, or foreign policy analysts to commit to a vision of the future in a world that changes … | Continue reading
Dr. Patrizia Paterlini-Bréchot is a tenured Professor of Cell and Molecular Biology and Oncology at Paris Descartes University and head of a research team at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM). She studied medicine at the University of Modena an … | Continue reading
by Michael Klenk Manipulation often seems to involve a hidden influence. Manipulators are pushing the emotional buttons of their unsuspecting victims, exploiting their subconscious habits and leading them astray. That view of manipulation explains a lot of the current moral outra … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley 1. As the coronavirus continues to disrupt human life in many corners of the globe, a phrase from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah has wormed its way through the background noise of my attention span. It occurs in a Part III recitative usually sung by a bass with … | Continue reading
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi We get half a sunny day every other day since Corona has coaxed us to quit public spaces. In the past fortnight or so, sunlight has been in short supply just as masks, disinfectant spray and toilet paper. When the sun is out, it’s no ordinary gift; it bring … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Here’s a story that is almost certainly not true, even though I have heard it many times. A philosopher, or anyway a philosophy professor, is on an airplane listening to a businessperson explain what they do. There’s a lull in which the businessperson asks, “By the … | Continue reading
Empty main street of Brixen, South Tyrol, at midday in mid-March, 2020, because of the lockdown. | Continue reading
by Chris Horner The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —Gramsci Does a crisis shows us what we are ‘really like’? Whether it does or not, it has been already been i … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt Stuck is a weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday through early April. The Prologue is here. The table of contents with links to previous chapters is here. I was a minor mess in high school. Had no idea what to do with my curly hair. Unduly influenced by a … | Continue reading
Laura Kolbe in the New York Review of Books: When I became an attending physician at New York–Presbyterian’s Weill Cornell Hospital last summer, after graduating from a residency at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, I became a hospitalist: a doctor of general internal medic … | Continue reading
Mark Blyth and Eric Lonergan in Foreign Policy: After sitting on its hands last week, the European Central Bank has now announced its own “bazooka”—a 750 billion euro ($800 billion) bond-buying program, looser collateral requirements, a new refinancing program for banks, and an e … | Continue reading
Steven Levy in Wired: LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to t … | Continue reading
Walt Whitman writing of a walk in the woods —and now that we’re left to walk outdoors somewhat alone and think… : A Quintette “While I have been kept by the rain under the shelter of my great oak, (perfectly dry and comfortable, to the rattle of the drops all around,) I have penc … | Continue reading
Susan Sontag in NYRB (February 23, 1978): Punitive notions of disease have a long history, and such notions are particularly active with cancer. There is the “fight” or “crusade” against cancer; cancer is the “killer” disease; people who have cancer are “cancer victims.” Ostensib … | Continue reading
Terry Eagleton at The Guardian: Solitude is not the same as loneliness. Lonely people feel the need for company, while solitary types seek to escape it. The neatest definition of loneliness, David Vincent writes in his superb new study, is “failed solitude”. Another difference be … | Continue reading
Patricia Hampl at The Paris Review: Mother Tongue is “an American life,” as its subtitle says, lived in provincial, family-laden Parma (not international Rome, not the Amalfi coast, nor a restored Tuscan villa). This is a life knocked wonderfully off-balance (well, wonderful for … | Continue reading
Arthur Goldhammer reviews Branko Milanovic’s Capitalism Alone: The Future of the System that Rules the World over at Democracy: In certain quarters of the United States it is taken for granted nowadays that capitalism has failed or at the very least fallen into desperate crisis, … | Continue reading
Anna Stansbury and Lawrence H. Summers (yes, that one!) over at Brookings: Increased monopoly power is commonly believed to explain the trends in labor income and corporate profits—but it is hard to reconcile with the substantial falls in average unemployment and inflation over t … | Continue reading
Nick Martin in TNR: This is a time to sustain. To find ease where we can in a world rapidly placing us into chaos. “We do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” Odell wrote. But we should. This piece, the one you’re reading right now, took roughly an … | Continue reading
Adam Tooze in the NYT: For the second time this century, the world is facing an acute shortage of dollar funding. This is a big problem: An enormous amount of global financial activity depends on the use of the dollar. If we are to contain the fallout from the crisis, America’s c … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: The president of the United States is a menace to public health. I don’t mean that I disagree with him on policy, although I do. I don’t mean that I abhor the president’s expressed bigotry toward religious and ethnic minorities, although that is also … | Continue reading
Alex Perez in Tablet Magazine: The woke literati have trouble understanding how a Cuban American whose first language is Spanish can feel a deep kinship with writers like Richard Ford and Barry Hannah, a pair of Southerners who look absolutely nothing like me and certainly don’t … | Continue reading
Redbud Flamingo-beaked buds open on bare branches. Pollen-drunk, the long-tongued bees mount bright blossoms. Startled, petals burst pink against a blue sky. Only after the gaudy show— tender leaves, red-rimmed, unfold, grow into a heart. Monarch Butterflies on Joe-Pye Weed You c … | Continue reading
Paul Elie in The New Yorker: In retrospect—in the rueful retrospect we are living in already—we’ll say that the virus was there all along, in the circumstances that enabled it to spread. It was there in a globally integrated society of travel, work, and commerce, the connecting a … | Continue reading
Martin Gayford at The Spectator: To ‘review’ such supreme paintings is slightly absurd. These are the touchstones from which Rubens, Velazquez and Rembrandt learnt and their successors still do. Van Dyck actually owned ‘Perseus and Andromeda’; Lucian Freud confessed that he, too, … | Continue reading
Will Wiles at Literary Review: There are few reading pleasures that compare with a passionate expert describing their work, and Ziminski stands proudly in this field. He is a mason working in the West Country, repairing and restoring prehistoric tombs, stone circles, Roman fragme … | Continue reading