All the Carefully Measured Seconds Back then I still believed it was possible to prevent certain things, until that hot afternoon. It was the middle of grain harvest, August of ’54, when Fred climbed down from his stalled combine and took off to Montrose to buy a part. Later I re … | Continue reading
Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker: In 2013, a mysterious producer named Sophie released “Bipp,” a minimalist club track that sounded like it had been formed on another planet and squeezed through hyperdrive before arriving on ours. “Bipp” was black space latticed with radically str … | Continue reading
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A conversation between Philip Graham and Michele Morano: Michele Morano: Philip Graham has long been one of my favorite writers to read and to teach because of his insights, humor, and ability to challenge what we think we see. A versatile author of fiction and nonfiction— whose … | Continue reading
Samuel Moyn in The Nation: In the chilling speech he gives at the end of the film Margin Call, Jeremy Irons says that no one should say they believe in equality, because no one really thinks it exists: The very idea camouflages the endurance of hierarchy in an essentially unchang … | Continue reading
Nathaniel Johnson and Madeline Comeau in The Conversation: Both of us understand the powerful effects that food has on your health and longevity. A poor diet may lead to cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity and even psychological conditions like depression and anxiety. Diet- … | Continue reading
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Yascha Mounk at his Substack: People volunteer at organizations that fail to advance the causes to which they are supposedly devoted. They donate to their local cat shelter even though there are already enough organizations caring for stray pets in their affluent neighborhood. Th … | Continue reading
Someone, Anonymous Someone, anonymous, brought me daffodils, slogged up through snow and mud on foot—impossible by car—to bring me these left on the table in a little vase, a special one, they took the trouble to pull down from the highest shelf. Six daffodils, with feathered gre … | Continue reading
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Eric Cortellessa in Time Magazine: J.D. Vance looks annoyed. It’s a Tuesday afternoon in August, and we’re sitting near the front of his campaign plane, flying from a rally in Michigan to a fundraiser in Tennessee. Across the aisle is his mother Bev, whose role in Vance’s traumat … | Continue reading
Mariana Lenharo in Nature: There’s a bar in Baltimore, Maryland, that very few people get to enter. It has a cocktail station, beer taps and shelves stacked with spirits. But only scientists or drug-trial volunteers ever visit, because this bar is actually a research laboratory. … | Continue reading
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T.J. Clark at the LRB: Frantz Fanon is a thing of the past. It doesn’t take long, reading the story of his life – the Creole childhood in Martinique, volunteering to fight for the Free French in the Second World War, his career in Lyon as arrogant young psychiatrist, the part he … | Continue reading
by Steve Szilagyi Herb Gobel opened Trophy Recording in downtown Boston in 1948. It was a state-of-the-art studio. Perfect for the artists Herb idolized. Big bands like Artie Shaw and Stan Kenton. Vocalists like Frank Sinatra and Peggy Lee. An era of composers, arrangers and sigh … | Continue reading
by Daniel Shotkin I was in 9th grade when I first heard the name Rudyard Kipling mentioned in school. My history teacher had decided to inaugurate a unit on imperialism, and Kipling’s zealous verses soon rang loudly through the classroom: Take up the White Man’s burden— Send fort … | Continue reading
Rain on the Autobahn from Innsbruck to Munich. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Aaron Brown in The Hedgehog Review: The monomyth, otherwise known as the “hero’s journey,” attempts to set structure to story. First developed by folklorist Joseph Campbell, the monomyth is the type of concept you are quizzed on in a college literature survey course—a multi-stage … | Continue reading
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: Entomologist Erica McAlister, the Curator of Diptera at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM), has previously written two popular science books on flies, The Secret Life of Flies and The Inside Out of Flies. Her mission is to change y … | Continue reading
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Carol Bishop Mills in The Conversation: I am an interpersonal communication researcher and the co-founder and co-director of the Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet Political Communication Lab. Our lab investigates and analyzes public opinion and political trends nationwide. W … | Continue reading
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Paul Collins at The Believer: I suppose I’d once imagined the history of American voting rights as a steady march toward greater equality. But the more you look at American suffrage, the more it feels like a visit to the Winchester Mystery House: there are bafflingly constructed … | Continue reading
Richard Schifman in Undark Magazine: Peter Godfrey-Smith does not use the word miracle in the title of his ambitious new book, “Living on Earth: Forest, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World,” but there is scarcely a page that does not recount one. His subject is the … | Continue reading
Sarah Harrison in The New York Times: Here are two abortion stories. Both are mine. Both came with heartache and upheaval — and both prevented heartache and upheaval. One was an experience common to many abortion patients, but one that people often look on with disdain. The other … | Continue reading
The Skin Inside Out there past the last old windmill and the last stagnant canal— the no-man’s land of western Dithmarschen— cabbage and horseradish in rows of staggering accuracy stretching all the way out to the frigid gray-brown waters of the North Sea— hard-hatted Day-Glo-ves … | Continue reading
Sascha Cohen at The Baffler: “People look for themselves in books and movies,” Lily Burana wrote in her 2001 memoir Strip City. “But for strippers, there is no Giovanni’s Room . . . no Well of Loneliness.” Times have changed. Over the past two decades, dozens of writers with expe … | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima Sometimes it’s a single detail that hits home: a little girl’s pink shoe, for instance, with remnants of the delicate fabric still intact, unearthed among the hundreds of worn-down shoe soles and other objects found in the course of an archaeological excavation o … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook In our third year of medical school we began our clinical studies. After two full years of classroom work, it was time to apply what we learned to real patients. One can spend years in the library, reading all the books and journals that you can get your hand … | Continue reading
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Oskar Oprey at Artforum: I THINK I’M GOING TO LEARN FRENCH, if only to keep up with Michel Houellebecq. The aging bad boy of letters has been embroiled in a fresh crop of scandals these past few years, the plotlines worthy of an X-rated soap opera on Canal+. First there’s his leg … | Continue reading
John Keay at Literary Review: After writing a string of award-winning books on India, the historian and literary phenomenon William Dalrymple has forsaken the glamour of the Mughals and the murky dealings of the English East India Company to look beyond the Indian subcontinent an … | Continue reading
Ezra Klein in the New York Times: Sometimes you stumble across a line in a book and think, “Yeah, that’s exactly how that feels.” I had that moment reading the introduction to Zadie Smith’s 2018 book of essays, “Feel Free.” She’s talking about the political stakes of that period … | Continue reading
Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized: When Rafi invited me to open this event, it sounded like he wanted big-picture pontification more than technical results, which is just as well, since I’m getting old for the latter. Also, I’m just now getting back into quantum computing after … | Continue reading
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Alex Trembath at the Breakthrough Institute: It’s election season, which means a return to the quadrennial tradition of yelling at Nate Silver on the Internet. While I think most people at this point have made their peace with his probabilistic forecasts, many progressives, demon … | Continue reading
The Pathetic Fallacy —an excerpt The Saint Meets His Match, The Saint Goes Underground, Pope’s translation of The Aeneid, The Collected Trollop, the last five issues of Baseball Digest, a whole library of French semanticists piled on the hospital bed, on the bed table. If he was … | Continue reading
Jim Lorraine in Newsweek: My family has always served in the military. My father was one of six brothers. They all went to World War Two, each in a different service and theater, and all came home. I was around 10 when my brother-in-law was in Vietnam, which was impactful, and my … | Continue reading
Smriti Mallapaty in Nature: Since war broke out in the Gaza Strip almost a year ago, the official number of Palestinians killed exceeds 41,000. But this number has stoked controversy. Some researchers think it is an underestimate, owing to the difficulties of trying to count dead … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey On September 1, 2004, a middle-aged Russian journalist named Anna Politkovskaya boarded a plane in Moscow on her way to Ossetia to cover a hostage crisis in the town of Beslan. During the flight, she drank a cup of tea that almost killed her. After she drank the te … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray It’s raining in Russia. Thunderheads boil up in the afternoon heat over there, behind the limestone block fortress on the other side of the river. Which is not a wide river. You can shout across it. Here’s how close Russia is: on Victory Day, May ninth, commemorati … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. On the Train to Franzensfeste. September, 2024. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
George Scialabba in Commonweal: All men are brothers.” (Women too, of course.) If asked to agree or disagree with this statement, taken in a normative sense, most people would agree. At the moment, Ukrainians might make an exception for Russians, and Israelis and Palestinians for … | Continue reading
John Pavlus in Quanta: A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how many numbers is a word worth? The question may sound silly, but it happens to be the foundation that underlies large language models, or LLMs — and through them, many modern applications of artificial intelli … | Continue reading
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Jonathan Portes in The Guardian: Thomas Piketty has come a long way. He first captured public attention in 2014 with his wildly ambitious, 704-page updating of Marx’s Das Kapital, entitled Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Part of its appeal – it became both an international b … | Continue reading
Chris Power in The Guardian: ‘We were elsewhere people,” André Aciman writes in this memoir of the year he spent in Rome in the mid-1960s. Aged 15, he left Egypt with his deaf mother and younger brother while his father remained in Alexandria to sell whatever they couldn’t take. … | Continue reading