Perry Anderson reviews Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, in the LRB: …[T]he historian Chen Jian has published a monumental biography of Zhou Enlai that makes him the pre-eminent scholar of the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Today Zhou occupies a generally benign, if increasingly bl … | Continue reading
Alex Clark at The Guardian: Janet Frame’s third novel, published in 1962, after she had spent several years away from her native New Zealand (and now republished by Fitzcarraldo to celebrate the centenary of her birth this year), features a trio of characters similarly seduced an … | Continue reading
Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis Dispatch: This week the Brian Deese — former WH National Economic Council director of Bidenomics — essay in Foreign Affairs calling for a “green US Marshall Plan” has inevitably drawn a lot of attention. We’re planning a bigger analy … | Continue reading
Linsey McGoey in The Ideas Letter: The front lawn of the small bungalow where Jessie lives with her wife and daughter is freshly mowed. Two vehicles are parked in the driveway: a pick-up truck and a small silver Pontiac. A few loose tools lie on the Pontiac’s trunk. Its back fend … | Continue reading
J. W. McCormack in the NY Review of Books: Television’s best jokes turn hierarchies upside-down. In some cases ghoulish beauty standards are treated as ordinary, like when Morticia Addams clips the heads off roses to display the thorny stems, or when comely Marilyn Munster feels … | Continue reading
Dan Kois in Slate: The central gag of Slough House, the organization, is that the worst spies in London have been thrown together in one building and punished with terrible, useless jobs. When MI5 rookie River Cartwright is sent to Slough House, for example, he’s put to work sor … | Continue reading
Veronique Carignan in Undark Magazine: In 2022, a few years into a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in chemical oceanography, I watched my department rally around a multi-million-dollar robotics program. The goal was to make a splash (pun intended) and impress fund … | Continue reading
Jeffrey Kluger in Time Magazine: Sleep is a moving target. When you were a newborn, you slept for most of the day, then less as an older child; as a teen, you slept later. A senior’s bedtime is earlier—part of a lifetime journey of rising and falling sleep needs depending on age. … | Continue reading
From Ross Barkan: What is a novel, or any work of art, but the product of its time, of commerce? What is it but another colorful consumer unit, to be slid dutifully on a shelf or hawked through the internet? I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone … | Continue reading
Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet: But I’d like to turn, at least at the outset, to a consideration of the sheer artistry of Morrison’s film, how even though its pacing is entirely dictated by the inevitable facticity and specificity of the tick-tock of the film’s method (all Mo … | Continue reading
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Colin Dickey at Lit Hub: On its surface, the book is deceptively simple. At first hating Svalbard and seeing only bleak desolation, she undergoes a change, learning a great deal about herself, humanity, and the wild in the process. This is a cliched appraisal of the book, but par … | Continue reading
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Seth Whidden at the TLS: The same week this new two-volume edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes arrived in bookshops, Spotify unveiled a new advert in the Paris Métro. It read: “You knew Le Spleen de Paris, here’s the Spleen of La Courneuve”. In the heart of the Seine … | Continue reading
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Danny Kelly at Literary Review: From its inception, pop (and rock) music was about youth. It offered a sound and a culture that stood in direct contrast, if not opposition, to the smugness of America’s Greatest Generation and to the choking conformity of postwar austerity Britain … | Continue reading
Niki Smith in New Humanist: Ken Loach is a film director who has spent his career of more than half a century chronicling the lives of working people in Britain and beyond. We’re talking the day after the general election. How do you feel about Labour winning power? When Corbyn s … | Continue reading
Mark Greif in Harper’s Magazine: It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of … | Continue reading
Ellen Ioanes in Vox: The rape and killing of a 31-year-old woman medical resident has touched off protests across India as the country grapples with inadequate protections for women and increasing reports of gender-based violence. The demonstrations began in Kolkata — the capital … | Continue reading
Behind the Curtain of Madness I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness.” Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poor thing, s … | Continue reading
Meeri Kim in The Washington Post: A new study adds to a growing body of evidence that Parkinson’s disease, long believed to have its origins in the brain, may begin in the gut. Gastrointestinal problems are common in patients with neurodegenerative disorders, to the point where a … | Continue reading
Ken Makin in The Christian Science Monitor: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 turns 60 on Tuesday. Its birthday is important because it is a living piece of legislation and a predecessor for laws impacting women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. I can’t help but think about this momentous act and … | Continue reading
Ed Park at Bookforum: THIS IS A GOTHIC TALE. In the summer of 2002, a professional illustrator and single mom in Chicago went to her fortieth-birthday bash, a gypsy-themed affair that her young daughter told her not to attend. A premonition? At the party, a mosquito bit her. Perh … | Continue reading
Jamie Hood in Bookforum: MARRIAGE IS A GRIM BUSINESS—worse still if you’re a woman in a Rachel Cusk book. The blame lies with Christian iconography, she writes in her 2012 memoir, Aftermath, and pictures of the “holy family, that pious unit that sucked the world’s attention dry.” … | Continue reading
Sophia Chen in Nature: The fastest supercomputer in the world is a machine known as Frontier, but even this speedster with nearly 50,000 processors has its limits. On a sunny Monday in April, its power consumption is spiking as it tries to keep up with the amount of work requeste … | Continue reading
Deep Shukla in Medical News: After a lull of nearly 2 decades, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved some novel drugs for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease since 2021. Most of these drugs are antibody therapies targeting toxic protein aggregates in the brain. The … | Continue reading
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Hunter Dukes at Cabinet Magazine: At some point in the early morning, having forfeited my grip on the laminate, I was squeezed onto a balcony between Klaus and a very tall Polish American man, who was telling us about an upcoming trip to Kerala, where he would seek ayurvedic real … | Continue reading
Light It’s beyond me, the pinhole in Hubble’s eye tomorrow as predicted, (and lingo beyond me—some chicken scratching, a few noises standing up for red giants, string theory) and Sol his own self making stuff take place, beyond me the melting ice fern on the window, these four le … | Continue reading
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Oscar Schwartz at The Paris Review: This disinclination to reread the books I treasure alienates me not just from Nabokov, but from a vast pro-rereading discourse espoused by geniuses who regard rereading as the literary activity par excellence. Roland Barthes, for instance, prop … | Continue reading
Ellen Peirson-Hagger at The New Statesman: Opening her late-summer set in Gunnersbury Park, west London, PJ Harvey sang: “Wyman, am I worthy?/Speak your wordle to me.” A pink haze had settled across the sky just before she appeared onstage to the sound of birdsong, church bells, … | Continue reading
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Morgan Meis at The Easel: The impact of this work probably has nothing to do with whether it is high art masquerading as low art or low art masquerading as high art. Haring himself never seemed particularly interested in those divisions anyway. He liked Dubuffet and Alechinsky in … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. I’m a Fool To Love You Some folks will tell you the blues is a woman. Some type of supernatural creature. My mother would tell you, if she could, About her life with my father, A strange and sometimes cruel gentlema … | Continue reading
Jyoti Madhusoodanan in Undark Magazine: In April 2019, Chloe Meadows was diagnosed with ADHD and began working with her doctor to find a drug cocktail to relieve her symptoms. Among the medicines she took was Wellbutrin, in late 2020. She recalls that about a month into taking it … | Continue reading
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Lisa Dittrich in Phys.Org: Picture two people sitting in a movie theater, both watching the screen: Are they seeing the same thing? Or is the movie playing out differently in each of their minds? Researchers from the Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU) have found that it’s the … | Continue reading
Lewis Lapham in Harper’s Magazine (1975): On first opening a book I listen for the sound of the human voice. Instead of looking for signs, I form an impression of a tone, and if I can hear in that tone the harmonies of the human improvisation extended through 5,000 years of space … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Alzheimer’s disease slowly takes over the mind. Long before symptoms occur, brain cells are gradually losing their function. Eventually they wither away, eroding brain networks that store memories. With time, this robs people of their recollections, … | Continue reading
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Colin Burrow at the LRB: In 1904 Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis at Close Reading: I was reading some Goethe recently, both in German, since I’m constantly working on my German these days for reasons not entirely clear to anyone, myself included, and also sometimes in an English translation, since it is pretty hard, actually, to re … | Continue reading
Carolyn Eastman in Smithsonian: In 1796, when slavery remained both legal and common in New York, a white man named Aquila Giles set out to free Hannah, a 30-year-old woman he enslaved, and her daughter, Abigail, who was about 5. The manumission deed he signed declared his commit … | Continue reading
Jonathan Portes in The Guardian: In the immediate aftermath of this summer’s riots, what did the British public consider to be the most important issue facing the country? Immigration, the polls said, replacing the economy at the top of the worry‑list for the first time since 201 … | Continue reading