Enzo Traverso at Literary Hub: The press and especially the news channels are constantly warning us that antisemitism is everywhere on the rise. They don’t point to specific episodes, content instead to denounce an ancient prejudice that in the context of a Middle East crisis is … | Continue reading
Pankaj Mishra at n+1: At a time of widespread economic distress, ethnonationalists in the United States and United Kingdom as well as Germany, France, Hungary, Poland and Italy are united by their antipathy to immigrants, and targeting of institutions deemed insufficiently patrio … | Continue reading
Marta Figlerowicz at the Paris Review: Like her other works—including Sister Deborah, the English translation of which is forthcoming from Archipelago later this month—Cockroaches is a reckoning with history, a steadfast commemoration of a community and culture that others tried … | Continue reading
Rachel Fraser in aeon: Suppose you want to be a better person. (Lots of us do.) How might you go about it? You might try to become more generous and commit to donating more of your income to charity. Or you might try to become more patient, and practise listening to your partner, … | Continue reading
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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature: One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells1. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated wit … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss We are now on opposite sides of the moral universe. —Joseph Buckingham, journalist and Massachusetts State Senator, speaking of his once esteemed friend, Daniel Webster. What a wonderful quote. Thirty years of amicable relations destroyed in the course of a three- … | Continue reading
by William Benzon “Georgia on My Mind” was composed and recorded by Hoagy Carmichael (lyrics by Stuart Gorrell) in 1930. Born in 1899 and dying in 1981, Carmichael composed several hundred songs, many of which became hits, including “Stardust,” “The Nearness of You,” “Heart and S … | Continue reading
Death of Star HD 62166 & It’s Nebula Although you are distant ………….. distant distant distant I can see by your past aura against a black further distance, the most distant distance I can see by your billowing… | Continue reading
Over at Princeton University Press’s Ideas Podcast, an interview with Paul North and Paul Reitter, editors of the new translation of Capital Volume 1, and Simon Vance: Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of t … | Continue reading
Hal Foster in Sidecar: Richard Serra, who died in March of this year at the age of eighty-five, sought out the resistance of other voices, in part to clarify his own. The composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich performed that role early on, as did the artist Robert Smithson. Criti … | Continue reading
Simon Torracinta in Boston Review: When Bernie Sanders was asked in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate what “democratic socialism” meant to him, he responded that we should “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway.” Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her reply: … | Continue reading
Astra Taylor in The Nation: Early in January at Le Mars, in northwestern Iowa, a mob of a thousand farmers seized the attorney for an insurance company, dangled a rope before his eyes, and threatened him with immediate lynching.” So begins an article by the journalist Charlotte P … | Continue reading
The Dance In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick- sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bel … | Continue reading
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Lizette Ortega in The Washington Post: Scientists discovered that bacteria commonly found in wastewater can break down plastic to turn it into a food source, a finding that researchers hope could be a promising answer to combat one of Earth’s major pollution problems. In a study … | Continue reading
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by Dwight Furrow In philosophical debates about the aesthetic potential of cuisine, one central topic has been the degree to which smell and taste give us rich and structured information about the nature of reality. Aesthetic appreciation involves reflection on the meaning and si … | Continue reading
Amitava Kumar at his Substack: “McNeal,” Ayad Akhtar’s play that just opened at Lincoln Center, stars Robert Downey Jr. in the role of a novelist named Jacob McNeal. The set is bathed in the soft blue glow of an iPhone screen. In fact, when the play starts in the dark, the backdr … | Continue reading
Kerri Smith & Chris Ryan in Nature: The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars. Nature crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 wi … | Continue reading
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Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs: Regular Current Affairs readers know that I have a tendency to make grumbling remarks about a magazine called The Atlantic. In fact, in our print edition we recently awarded The Atlantic a prize for “Worst Magazine In America.” This prompted … | Continue reading
Douglas Small at Aeon Magazine: In the winter of 1886, William Alexander Hammond – a famed neurologist and the former Surgeon General of the United States Army – took an enormous amount of cocaine. A reporter from the New York paper The Sun who interviewed him waggishly observed … | Continue reading
Silver Maple, Solstice And still, forty years later, I lean my cheek to your trunk, breathe familiar summer. I imagine the sap pulse running through, what your roots tell the lake, what they told the other two other maples you once knew, network of under earth shared in the black … | Continue reading
Tom Lamont at Literary Review: In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for Peopl … | Continue reading
Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine: In 1999, nearly a decade after he first devoted himself to poetry, Phillips drove through a blizzard to interview the poet Geoffrey Hill. The esteemed, Oxford-educated, English poet had been Phillips’s teacher at Boston University. When In the … | Continue reading
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Victoria Livingstone in Time Magazine: This fall is the first in nearly 20 years that I am not returning to the classroom. For most of my career, I taught writing, literature, and language, primarily to university students. I quit, in large part, because of large language models … | Continue reading
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Nandi Theunissen at The Point: Academic philosophers—people for whom philosophy is a profession—like to joke about their discomfort on airplanes. As you make light conversation with your neighbor, the question of what you do for a living tends to come up, and then you have to cop … | Continue reading
by David J. Lobina An apparently non-negotiable assumption of modern identity politics, though this was not always the case (see this regarding a certain non-philosopher), is that the individuation of personal characteristics is an intrinsic affair – that is, it is down to an ind … | Continue reading
Samm Deighan at The Current: An ominous figure with an obscured face, clad in a trench coat, fedora, and leather gloves—all black—stalks a young model through a gloomy antique shop packed with statues, lamps, and ornate furniture. Though the store is in near darkness, pink and te … | Continue reading
Brendan Riley at the LARB: CISCO BRADLEY’S The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (2023) chronicles a vital and now-vanished facet of American musical and cultural history in New York City from the mid-1980s to 2015. The book investi … | Continue reading
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Alex King at Aesthetics for Birds: AK: Let’s start off where your story with philosophers begins. Could you tell me a bit about the original “Philosophers” series? SP: I’ve made two series of portraits of philosophers. The first series was during the late ’80s and ’90s and contai … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in the New York Times: A fruit fly’s brain is smaller than a poppy seed, but it packs tremendous complexity into that tiny space. Over 140,000 neurons are joined together by more than 490 feet of wiring, as long as four blue whales placed end to end. Hundreds of scien … | Continue reading
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Simon Torracinta in the Boston Review: When Bernie Sanders was asked in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate what “democratic socialism” meant to him, he responded that we should “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway.” Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her rep … | Continue reading
Two Poems by Octavio Paz ……….. DAYBREAK Hands and lips of wind heart of water ………………….. eucalyptus campground of the clouds the life that is born everyday the death that is born every life I rub my eyes: the sky walks the land ……….. NIGHTFALL What sustains it, half-open, the clar … | Continue reading
C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine: In 2021, U.S. Sen.Ted Cruz compared critical race theory — an academic subfield that examines the role of racism in American institutions, laws, and policies — to the Ku Klux Klan, the most notorious homegrown terrorist organization in U.S. h … | Continue reading
Smith and Ryan in Nature: The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars. Nature crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 winners (Nob … | Continue reading
by Laurence Peterson I am writing this on Sunday afternoon, the 29th of September, 2024. The Guardian (UK version) informs me that the Israel Defense Force (IDF) have confirmed that dozens of Israeli aircraft are attacking what they say to be “military targets belonging to the Ho … | Continue reading
by Eleni Petrakou Let this text be a string of anecdotes this columnist has been exposed to, mostly through her work in research and academia. Said work was spread in space and time. The anecdotes, however, come from the western world and its sphere of influence. * The first-year … | Continue reading
Road near Meransen, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Jennifer Ouellette at Ars Technica: Ars Technica: People who are not mathematically inclined usually see all those abstract symbols and their eyes glaze over. Let’s talk about the nature of symbols in math and why becoming more familiar with mathematical notation can help non-mat … | Continue reading