John Self at The Guardian: Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trap … | Continue reading
Karan Mahajan in Bookforum: THE LINGUIST ROSS PERLIN is an encyclopedist of New York City’s microworlds. In 2016, when he took me and ten others on a tour of Ridgewood, Queens, he alerted us to the presence of a dozen languages spoken in a two-square-mile radius, including Syriac … | Continue reading
Olaf Lipinski in Singularity Hub: In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she dis … | Continue reading
by Eric Schenck Rowing is a sport that you naturally underestimate. You think of canoes, of guys with perfect hair, of leisurely strolls on a lake while the glorious sun shines down. From my experience, that’s not even close to the truth. In reality, it’s brutal. If you’re doing … | Continue reading
Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings: As you know, I am a scholar of literature, with no more than a high school background in math. Yet together we shall reach up and touch the thinnest, most delicate branches in the canopy of modern mathematics. Most likely, we will snap them by … | Continue reading
Kelly Lambert at The Conversation: We crafted our first rodent car from a plastic cereal container. After trial and error, my colleagues and I found that rats could learn to drive forward by grasping a small wire that acted like a gas pedal. Before long, they were steering with s … | Continue reading
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Stephen M. Walt in The Ideas Letter: This introductory essay advances two main claims. First, I argue that although America’s relative power has declined from its post-Cold War peak, this trend is not as profound as pessimists maintain. The United States still retains enormous ad … | Continue reading
Just a Bit of Wisdom If I had just a bit of wisdom I should walk the Great Path and fear only straying from it. Though the way is broad People love shortcuts. The court is immaculate, While the fields are overgrown with weeds, And the granaries are empty. They wear silk finery, C … | Continue reading
Michael Atkinson at The Current: More than the films of any other genre, horror movies are the phenotypes of cultural anxiety—often, you can read the turbulence right on the skin, like hives. In Japan, a nation always rich with wild expressions of social stress, this phenomenon y … | Continue reading
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Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist: Tucked away in a dusty corner of St. Mary’s Hospital in London lies a tiny, one-room museum dedicated to one of the most important discoveries in the history of medicine: a mold that changed the world. Curators have recreated Alexander Fleming’s l … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Johns Hopkins University-led researchers, working with the Biomarkers for Older Controls at Risk for Dementia (BIOCARD) cohort, have found that certain factors are linked to faster brain shrinkage and quicker progression from normal thinking abilities to mild cogni … | Continue reading
Yiyun Li at Harper’s Magazine: At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I led a virtual discussion of War and Peace, with the thought that someone else might enjoy reading the novel with me. Three thousand people ended up following along, which seemed to me a good way to connec … | Continue reading
by Philip Graham For over twenty years I have been in awe of David Jauss as a writer, as a colleague and teacher, and above all for his insight into the contradictory human heart. His short stories have been gathered together in two essential collections, Glossolalia and Nice Peo … | Continue reading
by Gary Borjesson Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows. —Henry David Thoreau What does being true to ourselves feel like? The question goes to the heart of authenticity. Rousseau viewed our innermost feelings—the feeling of our existence (“le sentimen … | Continue reading
I went a bit “meta” this week with this self-portrait by reflection in a framed photograph of my wife taken by Tanyth Berkeley which hangs in my office. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
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Patricia Parks at The Millions: In Vermeer’s Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, the observer is drawn into a simple domestic scene: the titular woman stands illuminated in the light of, we presume, an unseen window. The expression on her face as she reads is perhaps one of surprise, … | Continue reading
Jamie Hood and Charlotte Shane at Bookforum: JAMIE HOOD: Hello! CHARLOTTE SHANE: Hi! You look gorgeous—make sure to put that in. HOOD: Oh, I will. An Honest Woman (Simon & Schuster, $26) is a sort of origin story, about the boys you grew up with and the cultural milieu of your yo … | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review: When, on January 19, 1939, W.H. Auden boarded at Southampton a ship bound for New York City, he could not have known that he would never live in England again. But some months earlier, he had told his friend Christopher Isherwood that he wanted … | Continue reading
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: An important goal for Prothero is to explain how we know what we know so that readers understand how the climate works and why it changes. As such, much attention is given to the numerous lines of evidence on which palaeoclimatology draw … | Continue reading
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Adam Grant in the New York Times: In a landmark study, the psychologist Philip Tetlock evaluated several decades of predictions about political and economic events. He found that “the average expert was roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee.” Although skilled forecast … | Continue reading
Kwame Anthony Appiah in The Washington Post: I want to make the case for the power of thinking in the third person. The first person, of course, comes quite naturally to us. We have a vivid sense of our experiences and perspectives: This is who and what I am. People will live the … | Continue reading
Helen Pearson in Nature: When Sam Rodriques was a neurobiology graduate student, he was struck by a fundamental limitation of science. Even if researchers had already produced all the information needed to understand a human cell or a brain, “I’m not sure we would know it”, he sa … | Continue reading
Full of Days Job died when he was “full of days”, a wonderful expression. I too would like to arrive at the point of feeling “full of days,” and to close with a smile the brief circle that is our life. I can still take pleasure in it, yes; still enjoy the moon reflected on… | Continue reading
by Rebecca Baumgartner A seat by the fire I remember listening to President Obama’s first Inaugural Address fifteen years ago because of something Obama said which, according to the political pundits, had never been expressed in a Presidential speech before. This was the moment i … | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien It has been a busy few months in the field of animal studies. It seems like every month is a busy one for animal studies these days, which is salutary. As a hobbyist follower of this area of study, every time I turn around there is a new line of research to… | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Jesse Sheidlower at Literary Hub: In all of English there are few words rich enough in their history and variety of use to warrant a dedicated dictionary that runs to hundreds of pages and multiple editions. That fuck is at the same time one of the most notorious, popular, and em … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Emergence is a centrally important concept in science and philosophy. Indeed, the existence of higher-level emergent properties helps render the world intelligible to us — we can sensibly understand the macroscopic world around us without a … | Continue reading
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Michael Tomasky at The New Republic: Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harri … | Continue reading
Lynne Peeples in Undark Magazine: Living things began tracking the incremental passage of time long before the human-made clock lent its hands. As life grew in harmony with the sun’s daily march through the sky, and with the seasons, phases of the moon, tides, and other predictab … | Continue reading
Kai Kupferschmidt in Science: As a young boy growing up in the Netherlands in the 1990s, Sander van der Linden learned that most of his mother’s relatives, who were Jewish, had been killed by the Nazis, in the grip of racist ideology. At school, he was confronted with antisemitic … | Continue reading
Barry Schwabsky at Art In America: What abstraction does best is take painting apart and then put it back together differently. Paige Beeber understands that principle better than most artists, and she puts it into practice at both material and perceptual levels, melding physical … | Continue reading
Colm Tóibín at The Nation: Fiction about young girls has often been in thrall to silence, secrecy, and evasion. In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, for example, young Fanny Price moves on tiptoe, daring anyone to notice her. Instead, all the noticing is done by her. Her duty is not … | Continue reading
The Way of It punt twilight not yet supper father not yet home boy and brother playing at football in the front yard, punting, eight year old proud he can kick it farther than his five year old brother. old car pulls up, releases father from another work day he stops, watches the … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene In 524, the Roman philosopher Boethius was imprisoned in exile awaiting his execution. He was used a as a political tool and was convicted on false charges, including the charge of sorcery. In these dire conditions, he wrote The Consolations of Philosophy … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal On November 5, 2024, at around 10:30 pm, I walked into a bar, approached the counter, and sat down on the stool second from the right. I ordered a stout because there was a slight chill in the air. As this was the night of the American presidential election, I pulle … | Continue reading
Max Waldman. Judith Jamison in “Cry”, 1976. “This 1976 portrait by Max Waldman shows Judith Jamison dancing her signature role in “Cry,” a ballet described as “a hymn to the sufferings and triumphant endurance of generations of black matriarchs.” – Smithsonian. Legendary dancer J … | Continue reading
Jinal Dadiya at Psyche: In the 19th and early 20th century, under English and Unites States law, jilted lovers could sue former partners for breaking their hearts. ‘Heartbalm torts’, which continue to be on the rulebooks of some US states to this day, were a category of legal act … | Continue reading
Adriana Craciun at The Conversation: Two-thirds of the world’s food comes today from just nine plants: sugar cane, maize (corn), rice, wheat, potatoes, soybeans, oil-palm fruit, sugar beet and cassava. In the past, farmers grew tens of thousands of crop varieties around the world … | Continue reading
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Ramin Skibba at Undark: In the plains of western South Dakota, about 25 miles northeast of Mount Rushmore, the Ellsworth Air Force Base is preparing to receive the first fleet of B-21 nuclear bombers, replacing Cold War-era planes. Two other bases, Dyess in Texas and Whiteman in … | Continue reading
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Ryan Smith in Newsweek: Author JK Rowling has clarified her political views after a social media user accused her of having “far-right” sympathies over her views on transgender women. Over the past few years, the Harry Potter writer has sparked debate—and backlash—over her expres … | Continue reading