Joseph Howlett in Quanta: In 1896, the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius realized that carbon dioxide (CO2) traps heat in Earth’s atmosphere — the phenomenon now called the greenhouse effect. Since then, increasingly sophisticated modern climate models have verified Arrhenius’ c … | Continue reading
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Shikha Dalmia at Persuasion: Populism, the rule of many, and authoritarianism, the rule of one, might seem like antipoles. But they are intimately related. Wherever populism appears, so do various forms of illiberalism that if allowed to run their course result in strongman polit … | Continue reading
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Tim Bayne at Noema Magazine: It’s not just a scientific theory of consciousness that’s controversial; attempts to define “consciousness” are too. Language might not be necessary for consciousness, but you can’t study consciousness without using words. Some theorists define “consc … | Continue reading
Michael Gilson at Aeon Magazine: The reaction of the Smiths and millions of other working-class families to their new suburban environments rarely surfaced at the time. John’s quotes above were recorded almost 70 years later as he looked back fondly on that momentous move. And ye … | Continue reading
From Science: Science—meaning the Western tradition of testing hypotheses and writing research papers—has its roots in the Enlightenment of 17th and 18th century Europe. When this new way to understand the natural world emerged, colonialism was already well established, with a ha … | Continue reading
Galen Watts in The Point: According to Alexandre Lefebvre, professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney and author of the new book Liberalism as a Way of Life, the allegory that best captures the liberal self-conception was given to us by the late David Foster … | Continue reading
The Dugout I’m learning a kind of skill a delicacy in handling despair It’s like the earth that absorbs and absorbs and turns and grows endlessly and dies fires burn through ten forests huge pressures squeeze down on so much carbon and preserve it, fuse it. There are substances u … | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara Idray Novey Ways to Disappear Jennifer Croft The Extinction of Irena Rey Haruki Murakami on The Great Gatsby 1. A translator living in Pennsylvania is worried, because her favorite client is missing. And it’s not just any client but the Brazilian cult novelist … | Continue reading
by Monte Davis Climate change first came to many Americans’ attention in June, 1988. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources that the signal of long-term warming from increasing CO2 in … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Colm Tóibín in The Paris Review: Baldwin’s imagination remained passionately connected to the destiny of his country. He lacked the guile and watchfulness that might have tempted him to keep clear of what was happening in America; the ruthlessness he had displayed in going to liv … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten: Fine, the title is an exaggeration. But only a small one. GLP-1 receptor agonist medications like Ozempic are already FDA-approved to treat diabetes and obesity. But an increasing body of research finds they’re also effective against stroke, h … | Continue reading
Alexandre Lefebvre in Aeon: John Rawls, the preeminent political philosopher of the 20th century whose masterpiece, A Theory of Justice (1971), fundamentally reshaped the field, lived a quiet and – I mean this the best way – boring life. After an eventful and sometimes tragic you … | Continue reading
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Isaac Butler at The Current: When Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages (2007), he had little left to prove. After breaking through in the 1990s with a series of scene-stealing performances in films like Boogie Nights, Happiness, The Big Lebowski, and The … | Continue reading
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For James Baldwin Black cat, sweet brother, Walk into the room On cat’s feet where I lie dying And I’ll start breathing regularly again. Witch doctor for the dispossessed, Saint dipping your halo to the evicted, The world starts remembering its postponed loyalties When I call out … | Continue reading
Colm Tóibín at the NYRB: I read James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain just after my eighteenth birthday, at a time when I presumed that my Catholic upbringing would soon mean little to me. During my first year at university, which I had just completed, I told no one that I h … | Continue reading
Emily Cataneo in Undark: When the Godwin sisters would visit their grandmother Jeanne in Carson City, Nevada when they were growing up in the 1970s, Jeanne would pull out the dreaded juicer. She’d pulverize a mixture of carrot, celery, and spinach juice for the girls, then coax t … | Continue reading
Shelby Bradford in The Scientist: Beata Mierzwa studies cell division as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California San Diego. In 2013, she founded Beata Science Art, a science art brand where she produces science illustrations, fashion, and other interactive conte … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss The principles of Jefferson are the definition and axioms of free society…. All honor to Jefferson—to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a mer … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurri … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. M – Through The Honeycomb. Oolloo House, August 2024. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Catherine Tumber in The Hedgehog Review: It must be dismal to come of age in an era so drenched in utility as ours. What was once called soul hunger is now relentlessly thwacked aside by engines of ever greater efficiency, from effective altruism to generative AI. Even the animat … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Being rational necessarily involves engagement with probability. Given two possible courses of action, it can be rational to prefer the one that could possibly result in a worse outcome, if there’s also a substantial probability for an even … | Continue reading
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Karman Lucero at Project Syndicate: Central to the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was a rivalry to develop the technologies of the future. First came the race to deploy nuclear weapons on intercontinental missiles. Then came the space race. Then came US P … | Continue reading
Cara Blue Adams at The Baffler: OVER THREE DAYS in October 1974, the French experimental writer Georges Perec sat in cafés and a tabac in a Parisian public square called Place Saint-Sulpice and jotted down everything he saw. His observations became a book called An Attempt to Exh … | Continue reading
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John Adamson at Literary Review: Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity. Overnight, they transformed a figure who had hithe … | Continue reading
Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature: An age ‘clock’ based on some 200 proteins found in the blood can predict a person’s risk of developing 18 chronic illnesses, including heart disease, cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease. The clock’s accuracy raises the prospect of developing a s … | Continue reading
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by Steve Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan Jokes about JD Vance’s romantic entanglements with living room furniture have been ubiquitous for about two weeks now. Professional comedians like Chelsea Handler and John Oliver have leaned into them. Friends on social media have traded quip … | Continue reading
by David Kordahl Accusatory reevaluations of the COVID-19 era are underway. Anthony Fauci’s new memoir addresses the accusations—or does it? Oversight and Accountability Some six weeks ago, Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared before the Committee on Oversight and Accountability, an invest … | Continue reading
No Address —in memory of B.D. my oldest friend has left us he now has no address or his address is now not numbered there’s no street to be remembered there’s no place that I can place him and, now ephemeral, I miss him he was a bollard I could tie to I could call… | Continue reading
Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld in Public Books: In the face of institutional and economic pressures that privilege the “supra-disciplinary” organization of knowledge and emphasize “humanism” broadly conceived, Jonathan Kramnick believes that the knowledge practices of distinct discipline … | Continue reading
Daron Acemoglu in Project Syndicate: According to tech leaders and many pundits and academics, artificial intelligence is poised to transform the world as we know it through unprecedented productivity gains. While some believe that machines soon will do everything humans can do, … | Continue reading
Catharine Stimpson in The Ideas Letter: On Christmas Eve, 2016, three grandmothers made a late afternoon pilgrimage to a small pizza place on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC. On previous visits, they had walked with their grandchildren down the Avenue to eat pizza and pasta … | Continue reading
Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne in e-flux Architecture: Carbon offsetting injects market logic into thin air. It demands that certain activities become measured and standardized, reduced to the single dimension of the carbon dioxide molecule. The goal is fungibility—to assert equivale … | Continue reading
Hamza Hajjaj in Cartoon Movement: More here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Jessica Grose in The New York Times: Three times a day my phone pings with a notification telling me that I have a new happiness survey to take. The survey, from TrackYourHappiness.org, asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whethe … | Continue reading
by David Greer A group of island neighbours were enjoying a glass of wine in the old wooden boathouse when our quiet conversation was interrupted by an explosive Whupf! from the direction of the sea. We turned to look just in time to see the black-and-white hulk of a six-ton orca … | Continue reading
Céline Henne in Aeon: How could gaining knowledge amount to anything other than discovering what was already there? How could the truth of a statement or a theory be anything but its correspondence to facts that were fixed before we started investigating them? Some philosophers h … | Continue reading
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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Free speech is under attack. In the United States, government officials are increasingly telling social media companies which forms of damaging “misinformation” they should censor, and now have the Supreme Court’s implicit blessing to do so. In E … | Continue reading
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