Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist: Purine nucleotides are essential for cell growth and function as they serve as nucleic acid building blocks, signaling molecules, and energy carriers. Treatments that inhibit their synthesis offer a powerful strategy to hinder cancer cell gro … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr Even if you are sympathetic to Marx — even if, at any rate, you see him not as an ogre but as an original thinker worth taking seriously — you might be forgiven for feeling that the sign at the East entrance to Highgate Cemetery reflects an excessively narrow view … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela How happy to have discovered the history of other species, as well as our own. How fortunate to be alive during the time when the evolutionary puzzle has been so masterfully worked out, assembling a picture so stunning in its completeness, that mere school childr … | Continue reading
‘Tis The Little Things ‘tis the little things, y’ know. the way we came to inhabit a sphere ninety-three million miles from a blazing star —a few million closer, we’d be toast ‘tis the little things, for sure‘tis a little thing the way I wake in the morning dreaming a new day, su … | Continue reading
T.J. Clark in the LRB [h/t: Leonard Benardo]: 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 psy … | Continue reading
David C Krakauer in Aeon: What makes computation possible? Seeking answers to that question, a hardware engineer from another planet travels to Earth in the 21st century. After descending through our atmosphere, this extraterrestrial explorer heads to one of our planet’s largest … | Continue reading
David Feldman in The Ideas Letter: Over the last 100 years, the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against racism have at times appeared inextricably connected, firmly allied in a single fight against bigotry. Today, it is the disconnections that appear most visible. … | 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
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Stephanie Zacharek in Time Magazine: The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping … | Continue reading
Anthony Cummins in The Guardian: Isabella Hammad, 33, was born in London to a Palestinian father and British-Irish mother. Named last year as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, she is the author of The Parisian (2019) and Enter Ghost, which was shortlisted for this yea … | Continue reading
Samuel Johnson’s Other Life Thirty years after his father had asked him to watch the bookstall, his family’s only livelihood, and Sam being seventeen, too in love with sneering, had refused, the author of arguably the greatest dictionary ever, returned to his native village and i … | Continue reading
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by Gary Borjesson Become who you are, having learned what that is. -Pindar Become who you are. —Nietzsche I want to be authentic and so probably do you. It’s a virtue fostered by philosophic and therapeutic inquiries. In popular culture, “authenticity” is broadly used to mean bei … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong Once a real irritant and frustration, the routine has become a slap-stick show staged in our living room. Today, it’s only slightly tinged with impatience. Someone wants to watch a movie, which is a challenge itself, since that means having to find one worth wat … | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Things we don’t want to know that we know. Donald Rumsfeld’s famous distinctions between knowledge and ignorance: [T]here are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do … | Continue reading
Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist: In 2016, scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith made a huge splash with his book Other Minds in which he explored the evolutionary origins of a mind quite unlike ours, that of the octopus. In 2020, he followed this up with the alto … | Continue reading
Philip Graham in The Millions: I opened the library’s glass door and placed a fresh copy of my latest novel, What the Dead Can Say, on the bottom shelf. Then I returned to the car. For months my wife and I had been driving around the country, dropping off free copies of What the … | Continue reading
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Mary Ellen O’Connell in The Conversation: The operation that used pagers and walkie-talkies to kill members of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah was ingenious – but was it legal? Certainly, there are those who will argue that it was. That thinking goes like this: Hezbollah ha … | Continue reading
David Goldman in Tablet: No idea has fallen flatter than the “end of history,” popularized by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his eponymous 1993 book. Few still believe that all human beings will accept liberal democracy and free market capitalism as the final forms of … | Continue reading
Gemma Conroy in Nature: An ideas generator powered by artificial intelligence (AI) came up with more original research ideas than did 50 scientists working independently, according to a preprint posted on arXiv this month1. The human and AI-generated ideas were evaluated by revie … | Continue reading
Working the Stacks Reach up for the light cord and tug through its little knot of resistance, and there’s Samuel Johnson, sharing the floor with Nietzsche, Anthony Trollope, Franz Fanon, Isbert and Edith Sitwell, German small-print dictionaries, black bound insurance tables, hist … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman Rich and powerful people commit a vast amount of crime. According to Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime, by law professor Jennifer Taub: White collar crime in America, such as fraud and embezzlement, costs victims an est … | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe Though there are stories about people trading their souls with the devil in exchange for power and knowledge before, it was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s 1592 play that firmly entrenched that variety of character in … | Continue reading
by John Hartley “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible.” Noted the Russian novelist Fydor Dostoevsky, “God and the devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.” When 18th century Scholars used anthropology, physiognomy, and phrenology to apportion value a … | Continue reading
Danny Crichton in City Journal: Digital quantification determines Americans’ quality of life. Algorithms select job applicants for interviews and employees for performance bonuses. They aggregate stories and products as we shop for news and goods, matching our preferences to the … | Continue reading
Brian J. Chen in the Boston Review: The United States doesn’t really make chips these days, instead relying on a complex process of design, production, assembly, and testing that spans the globe. The vast majority of fabrication is done in East Asia; Taiwan, in particular, produc … | Continue reading
Seán Columb in The Guardian: It is illegal to buy or sell an organ anywhere in the world, with the exception of Iran. Nevertheless, estimates suggest that around 10% of organs for transplantation come from illegal sources. Most cases, however, go unreported, so the true number is … | Continue reading
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Eileen Myles at the Paris Review: I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I wen … | Continue reading
Nahil Mohana at LitHub: On the first day of November, I stopped writing my diary of this despicable war. Not because I was bored and desperate for it to end, nor because I was unable to preserve my memories amid all the trauma, but simply because my phone broke. I had been writin … | 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
Nick Thompson in Vice: South Bronx-born, but raised in Long Island, Meryl Meisler returned to New York City in 1975 and fell in love with the place. Known for her intimate and evocative photography of New York’s late-night pavements and clubs, Meisler’s immersive work captures an … | Continue reading
Enriching the Earth To enrich the earth I have sowed clover and grass to grow and die. I have plowed in the seeds of winter grains and various legumes, their growth to be plowed in to enrich the earth. I have stirred into the ground the offal and the decay of the growth of past… | Continue reading
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by Rebecca Baumgartner Carpets…chairs…shoes…bricks…crockery…anything you like to mention – they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories – well – they’re just another product, like car … | Continue reading
by Laurence Peterson It is said that money talks, but recent signals from markets, economic indicators, and utterances from monetary policy makers all over the world now display all the comprehensibility of an overly enthusiastic believer speaking in tongues. Things had been hype … | Continue reading
by Jochen Szangolies In the last column, I have argued against the idea that understanding in mathematics and physics is transmitted via genius leaps of insight into obscure texts rife with definitions and abstract symbols. Rather, it is more like learning to cook: even if you ha … | Continue reading
by Eric Schenck The first time I hear about couchsurfing is in a political science class. It’s 2013 and I’m a sophomore in college. Our guest speaker is a guy in his 30’s that’s traveled the world. His secret to doing it on the cheap? A website called Couchsurfing that lets you s … | Continue reading
Clothespins in Spiluck, South Tyrol, with the Dolomites and Brixen in the background. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Adwait Patil in the New York Times: On Oct. 27, 2022, the photojournalist Saiyna Bashir was interviewing the musician Michael Brook in his Los Angeles studio when she learned something that prompted an urgent text to Zakir Thaver, her filmmaker colleague in Pakistan: “New undisco … | Continue reading
Killian Fox in The Guardian: What jumps to mind when you think about the impending AI apocalypse? If you’re partial to sci-fi movie cliches, you may envisage killer robots (with or without thick Austrian accents) rising up to terminate their hubristic creators. Or perhaps, a la T … | Continue reading
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Joya Chatterji at Literary Hub: How did we become ‘Indians’, ‘Pakistanis’ and ‘Bangladeshis’ after the two divisions of the subcontinent? Given that national identity was so fragile and contested before 1947, how did it become a matter so ‘natural’ after it? Or did it? Did nation … | Continue reading
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Ryan Gilbey at The Current: The Long Good Friday whisks audiences across late-1970s London, taking in everything from the Concorde landing at Heathrow Airport to the desolate undeveloped Docklands, from the chauffeur-driven cars at the Savoy Hotel to the beat-up jalopies south of … | Continue reading