by Steve Szilagyi “Body and spirit are twins. God only knows which is which” –Algernon Swinburne When I was ten or eleven, the Great Geauga County Fair still displayed what it called human oddities (the term Freak Show had fallen from use by that time). These included the Lizard … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela I begin writing this essay the morning after dumping into the woods the sixth porcupine I have had to kill this growing season. It used to be that I would not see any evidence of porcupine damage in my apple trees until early August, but this year I began seeing … | Continue reading
Interior wall in the very high-ceilinged lobby of the Munich airport Hilton, showing some of the rooms. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Barbara Purcell at Salmagundi: “A work needs only to be interesting,” Judd continued. And Judd’s work is interesting, even more so in Marfa than, say, MoMA, where a metal box installed in a white cube gallery contained on a city block amidst a vast grid plan makes for a rectiline … | Continue reading
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Joe Banks in Vice: Explaining to the uninitiated exactly who Vinay Gupta is, and what he does, isn’t easy. The last time I interviewed him for VICE, nine years ago, the article was headlined ‘The Man Whose Job It Is to Constantly Imagine the Total Collapse of Humanity in Order to … | Continue reading
Rohini Subrahmanyam in The Scientist: When a protein folds, its string of amino acids wiggles and jiggles through countless conformations before it forms a fully folded, functional protein. This rapid and complex process is hard to visualize. Now, Martin Gruebele, a chemist at th … | Continue reading
Kathryn Shulz at The New Yorker: Consider that sandstone, which began, some two billion years ago, as quartz crystals buried deep inside mountains towering over what is now the Upper Midwest and southern Canada. Time took apart the mountains, and rain dissolved most of the minera … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. My Papa’s Waltz The whisky on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf My mother’s countenance Could not un … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey Scarcity of water brings out the evil propensities in men quicker than anything else. —Greeley Tribune, July 1, 1874 The summer of 1874 was a particularly dry year in Colorado, and the drought led to a water war between the fledgling towns of Fort Collins and Greel … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Gozo Yoshimasu at Words Without Borders: I only write in Japanese, a language that is plural by nature. It’s a language that has embraced several languages in its making, so you may hear the Chinese of the Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing periods, or the languages of Okinawa, Ainu, or K … | Continue reading
Ferris Jabr in The Guardian: Broadly speaking, plankton fall into two big categories – the plant-like phytoplankton and the animal-like zooplankton – though quite a few species have characteristics of both. Cyanobacteria and other microbial, ocean-dwelling phytoplankton are Earth … | Continue reading
From Project Syndicate: We all know the trope: a machine grows so intelligent that its apparent consciousness becomes indistinguishable from our own, and then it surpasses us – and possibly even turns against us. As investment pours into efforts to make such technology – so-calle … | Continue reading
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Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum: MICHEL LEIRIS WAS A SMALL, polite French man who stayed alive for most of the twentieth century and wrote a deliciously dense memoir in four bricks called The Rules of the Game. The final chunk—Frêle Bruit, whose title has been translated by Richar … | Continue reading
Erik Van Aken at Aeon Magazine: A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. Th … | Continue reading
The Way of Art It seems to me that, paralleling the paths of action, devotion, etc., there is a path called art and that the sages of the East would recognize Faulkner, Edward Hopper, Beethoven, William Carlos Williams and address them as equals. It’s a matter of intention and di … | Continue reading
Elyse Weingarten in Undark: In 2016, Canada enacted the Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, law, allowing individuals with a terminal illness to receive help from a medical professional to end their life. Following a superior court ruling, the legislation was expanded in 2021 t … | Continue reading
Lisa Marie Conklin in Reader’s Digest: Why did the nurse need a red crayon? She needed to draw blood. Why are nurses afraid of the outdoors? Too much poison IV. What do transplant nurses hate? Rejection. How do you know when a nurse is having a bad day? She won’t stop needling pe … | Continue reading
by Mindy Clegg This month’s post might be shorter than usual, as the semester kicks off next week. I do want to address a couple of things going into the final stretch of the election season. Some historians and scholars have long debated what matters most, the zeitgeist (or vibe … | Continue reading
Chakaia Booker. Romantic Repulsive, 2019. ” The artist first emerged in the early 1990s, creating striking outdoor public sculptures made from discarded industrial materials, namely rubber tires, which she transformed through a laborious process of machine and physical labor, int … | Continue reading
Camille Ralphs at The Poetry Foundation: Who else could have imagined such a motley ensemble but someone who had jostled with the many flavors of humanity? The medleyed voices of the Miller, who can break down doors by running at them with his head; the “gat-toothed,” half-deaf W … | Continue reading
Maarten Boudry and Simon Friederich at the PhilSci Archive: Some philosophers and machine learning experts have speculated that superintelligent Artificial Intelligences (AIs), if and when they arrive on the scene, will wrestle away power from humans, with potentially catastrophi … | Continue reading
Megan Kang in Aeon: From the viewpoint of today, it is difficult to imagine a world in which guns were less central to US life. But a gun-filled country was neither innate nor inevitable. The evidence points to a key turning point in US gun culture around the mid-20th century, sh … | Continue reading
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From PeterAttia.com: Sebastian Junger is an award-winning journalist, bestselling author, and previous guest on The Drive. In this episode, Sebastian returns to discuss his latest book, In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife. This episode delve … | Continue reading
Jacob Baynham at Noema: Scientists generally consider it uncool to anthropomorphize, but as a nonscientist, I can say that if lithium were a friend, it would be the sort of friend who is humble and unassuming and yet also seemingly everywhere all at once doing really fabulous and … | Continue reading
Max Kozlov in Nature: Breaking a fast carries more health benefits than the fasting itself, a study in mice shows1. After mice had abstained from food, stem cells surged to repair damage in their intestines — but only when the mice were tucking into their chow again, the study fo … | Continue reading
Cynthia Zarin at The Paris Review: A myth about Yoko Ono is that she came from nowhere and became a destroyer of worlds. The truth is otherwise. Yoko Ono—now ninety-one—was born in 1933, in Tokyo. Her father was a successful banker and a gifted classical pianist; her mother an ar … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr I will use this column to defend myself against the accusation, first made by my surgical assistant Mr. Alan Turing, that I was negligent in the death of an individual under my medical care. Or, as one armchair prosecutor has said, that I am “a stereotypically Bri … | Continue reading
by Katalin Balog It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do… | Continue reading
Before I Entered Time I’m not blowing smoke, nor am I a sage. It’s a simple condition: The universe may as well not have been before; in fact, “before” did not exist until I entered time. There’s not one memory I can hang a word upon before I entered time. Before was just void, a … | Continue reading
James Butler and Malin Hay at the London Review of Books: https://lrb-website-production-assets.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/audio/b8b374f823b6cff822110e74f6b25238.mp3 Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
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Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World: A recent visitor to the Amazon rainforest was surprised by the animal that was most conspicuous: instead of exotic jaguars, the region was populated by “the humpbacked, floppy-eared, glossy white Nelore cow, the ultimate conqueror of the fro … | Continue reading
Jamieson Webster in LA Review of Books: IT’S WELL-WORN KNOWLEDGE that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fac … | Continue reading
Leo Robson in Sidecar: Is there a ‘Seventh Generation’ of Chinese film-makers? It has not materialised in any formal sense, and the term is not in use. As a mode of classification, the idea of succession, one cohort following another – with no gaps in between – encompasses more t … | Continue reading
Samuel Bagg in Boston Review: In late 2018 a massive protest movement shook French society. Named for the yellow vests, or gilets jaunes, worn by demonstrators, the movement was initially sparked by opposition to a fuel tax hike, but its demands soon expanded. Among them were ref … | Continue reading
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Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post: “We’re Alone,” a new collection of essays by the acclaimed novelist and short-story writer Edwidge Danticat, opens with an English translation of lines by the Haitian poet Roland Chassagne. Danticat first encountered the lines in an English … | Continue reading
The QPP The quietly pacifist peaceful always die to make room for men who shout. Who tell lies to children, and crush the corners of old men’s dreams. And now I find your name, scrawled large in someone’s blood, on this survival list. by Alice Walker from Her Blue Body Everything … | Continue reading
by John Hartley How does Leonardo’s masterpiece, arguably representative of the fatal juncture of Western Art, provide the philosophical basis for pornography? And how does the lost work of an obscure German painter seek to correct what Pavel Florensky called ‘dis-integrated pers … | Continue reading
Kimberly Przeszlowski in The Conversation: In 2021, a driver in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ran a red light, striking and killing a 7-year-old and injuring his father. The suspect fled the scene and eventually escaped to Mexico. Using camera footage and cellphone data, the Albuquerq … | Continue reading
Jan H. J. Hoeijmakers in Nature: We are born; we grow up; we become an adult and perhaps reproduce. Then we might increasingly develop ailments or chronic diseases, before we decline and eventually — inevitably — die. These are the facts of life, at least hitherto, however much m … | Continue reading