Paul Lindholdt at JSTOR Daily: Around Christmas Eve 1955, Alfred Matthew Hubbard turned Aldous Huxley on to LSD. Their meeting took place at Huxley’s home in the Hollywood Hills. Seemingly from different universes, these two figures found a curious point of convergence via lyserg … | Continue reading
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Jarod K. Anderson at Atmos: I have difficulty interpreting the nature of my own life, a thing I feel intimately and continuously, so it’s not surprising that we can’t all agree on the nature of herons. What, then, is a blue heron? They live about 15 years. They stand around four … | Continue reading
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Chloe Nannenstad in Reader’s Digest: Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s a reason sarcasm quotes are all over the internet. Like funny sayings, sarcasm quotes play with the interpretation of words and tone in a way that can stretch your brain if you’re not expecting it. To use sarcasm, … | Continue reading
Paula Span in The New York Times: About a month ago, Judith Hansen popped awake in the predawn hours, thinking about her father’s brain. Her father, Morrie Markoff, was an unusual man. At 110, he was thought to be the oldest in the United States. His brain was unusual, too, even … | Continue reading
Judith Thurman at The New Yorker: The French philosopher Simone Weil was a soul at odds with herself and with a world of affliction. The causes she espoused as a social activist and the faith she professed as a mystic were urgent to her and, as she saw it, to humanity. Little of … | Continue reading
The End and the Beginning After every war someone’s got to tidy up. Things won’t pick themselves up, after all. Someone’s got to shove the rubble to the roadsides so the carts loaded with corpses can get by. Someone’s got to trudge through sludge and ashes, through the sofa sprin … | Continue reading
Jerry Saltz at Vulture: Abigail Goldman’s micro-renderings of scenes of carnage, created at 1:87 scale, are a testament to the pull of the small, especially at a time when art is getting bigger and more elaborately produced. In one tableau that could have come out of Breaking Bad … | Continue reading
Costică Brădăţan in Commonweal: When history is about to take an abrupt turn, is there something in people’s eyes or in their secret longings that pre-announces it somehow—and that minds of a particular cast (poets and visionaries or perhaps psychiatrists) can read clearly and ev … | Continue reading
Christian Sonne in Nature: The Arctic is under stress, that much is known. Between 1979 and 2021, the region warmed four times faster than the global average, with effects — as yet poorly understood — on its ecology and ability to store carbon, on global sea levels and on wider o … | Continue reading
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Matt Glassman in Matt’s Five Points: In 2016, Nate Silver was panned in the press and on social media for his presidential election forecast. His model gave Clinton a 71% chance of winning, and she lost. He and other forecasters totally missed the Trump phenomena; the polls were … | Continue reading
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Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a… | Continue reading
Alexander Menden at Prospect Magazine: In the spring of 1961, Gerhard Richter, a young East German artist noted mainly for his portraits and socialist wall paintings, slipped through the last chink in the Iron Curtain—West Berlin—and fled to the Federal Republic of Germany. A few … | Continue reading
Elica Le Bon in Newsweek: My first visceral memories of the regime in Iran were formed before I was born. My mother had been in the notorious Evin prison in the 1980s, when hanged bodies were lined up along the entrance path so that prisoners knew what to expect. Although natural … | Continue reading
Linda Carroll in Time Magazine: With multiple game-changing developments over the past two decades, kidney cancer patients are now living longer and better. A big part of the reason is that many are being diagnosed at earlier stages of the disease, when it can often be more easil … | Continue reading
Joseph M Keegin at Aeon Magazine: The prairie schools of philosophy were not just local curiosities; over the course of their roughly three decades of existence, they exerted a lasting influence on US intellectual culture, however much they themselves have been forgotten. They en … | Continue reading
Rachel Cooke in The Guardian: Twenty-five years ago, my father and I were out walking in the Peak District. Beside us was his dog; ahead of us was a familiar fell, low and craggy and bare. My dad was boasting, as he often did, about the cairn at its top, a pile of rocks he… | Continue reading
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: Though bears loom large in our collective imagination, their flesh-and-blood counterparts are increasingly losing ground. Eight Bears, the debut of environmental journalist Gloria Dickie, draws on visits to key hotspots where Earth’s rem … | Continue reading
Emily R. Klancher Merchant in the Los Angeles Review of Books: In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to wh … | Continue reading
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Sam Weller at the LARB: SEVENTY YEARS AGO, Ray Bradbury, then 33 years old—the author of The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—stood in front of a mirror in a London hotel room and declared, “I … am Herman Melville!” It was a last-di … | Continue reading
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Steven Poole in The Guardian: As befits a writer whose breakout work, Sapiens, was a history of the entire human race, Yuval Noah Harari is a master of the sententious generalisation. “Human life,” he writes here, “is a balancing act between endeavouring to improve ourselves and … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Depression doesn’t mean you’re always feeling low. Sure, most times it’s hard to crawl out of bed or get motivated. Once in a while, however, you feel a spark of your old self—only to get sucked back into an emotional black hole. There’s a reason fo … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. Living It’s a long row to hoe but worth every seed, no shame in endless generations mimicking heaven, our effort for never knowing, roots gathering at the edge of time, finished with endings and beginnings, the frag … | Continue reading
Charlie Markbreiter in the Los Angeles Review of Books: In 2009, A US security intelligence operative stationed in Iraq began to notice some gaps in the American government’s “surgical precision” drone strategy. “I was trained to be an all-source analyst,” writes Chelsea Manning … | Continue reading
Josephine Quinn at Literary Hub: In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations o … | Continue reading
Luke Harding in The Guardian: On 24 February 2022, workers at the Chornobyl nuclear power station in Ukraine woke to the sound of explosions. A battle was going on, not far from the contaminated exclusion zone. By late afternoon, the Russians had arrived. A column of military veh … | Continue reading
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Nick Stang at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: Readers of Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, are presented with a set of puzzles about the unity, indeed, the very existence, of the very book before them: why did Kant think his critical system was ‘inco … | Continue reading
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Len Gutkin in The Yale Review: We tend to think of blasphemy—an offense against God—as a relic of an antique past. It seems to belong to times and places where religion and law speak with one voice. And a stern one: in Leviticus, God tells the Israelites that “he that blasphemeth … | Continue reading
Alice Callahan in The New York Times: Turmeric has been used as a spice and medicine for thousands of years. And in recent decades, it’s become popular as a dietary supplement, often sold as curcumin — a chemical compound found in dried turmeric — with claims that it can soothe j … | Continue reading
Rhoda Feng at Artforum: JONATHAN LETHEM is perhaps best known as a writer of pastiche-driven, omnidirectionally intelligent fiction. His novels include a Chandler-inspired detective story (Gun, with Occasional Music), an academic satire (As She Climbed Across the Table), and a wo … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. Do not go gentle into that good night Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at the close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark… | Continue reading
Robert Pinsky at Poetry Daily: I first read “Johnson on Pope” by David Ferry in his 1960 first book, On the Way to the Island. I felt immediately that I had learned something about the art of poetry. Ferry’s poem demonstrated the crucial difference between prose and poetry as voc … | Continue reading
William Taylor in The Conversation: Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now. Doing so has proven to be surprisingly challenging. … | Continue reading
Dan Gardner at Past Present Future: I am not a Wikipedian. I’m an observer. And what I observe is that hardcore Wikipedians – the sort of people who spend their precious summer holidays attending a conference of Wikipedians — are some of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Which … | Continue reading
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Cabinet Books at Cabinet Magazine: The Virtual Sentence is an exercise book for the era of ChatGPT. Its title is indebted to Gilles Deleuze, who uses “virtual” to name a reality that is neither actual (already here), nor potential (not yet here). Said of the sentence, the term po … | Continue reading
Laura Tran in The Scientist: The lungs are a prominent target for cancer metastasis. Traditional drug delivery methods rely on passive diffusion, but Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang, both nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego, wanted to test active and targeted … | Continue reading
Rachel Brazil in Nature: The term ‘REF-able’ is now in common usage in UK universities. “Everyone’s constantly thinking of research in terms of ‘REF-able’ outputs, in terms of ‘REF-able’ impact,” says Richard Watermeyer, a sociologist at the University of Bristol, UK. He is refer … | Continue reading
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