Corey Robin in The New Yorker: My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we gettin … | Continue reading
Nelson Lichtenstein in Dissent: After visiting the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City in 1947, C. Wright Mills wrote that the most impressive thing about the union was “the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power.” While he considered union president … | Continue reading
David J Linden in Aeon: Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I gradually came to realise that my father was not the stereotypical psychoanalyst. Yes, he had an office with enigmatic modern art on the walls, copies of The New Yorker in the waiting room and the requisite analyti … | Continue reading
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Christian Winam in Harper’s Magazine: This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, … | Continue reading
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What The Fish Say My godson wanted to go look at fish but I told him, today, beauty is canceled. We cried. I felt bad. I counted the unbeautiful like broken ribs. Shrapnel in the olive tree. Child-sized tourniquet. Saint Porphyrius’ watching and weeping. My father phones to tell … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela Today is a bit of an experiment. I take the row covers off of two forty-foot rows of beans (three varieties) as the plants have become so big so fast in the ungodly heat they are pressing against the cloth. Afterwards, in the early evening, I let the chickens out … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook I first recognized discrimination against women while I was in the 1st grade. I attended a Catholic school run by nuns, the Sisters of the Holy Family. When Sister asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I answered, “A Priest!” It made sense to me. I cou … | Continue reading
Paul Cooper at Literary Hub: One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta gives the first known story about the invention of writing, by a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can’t remember them all. His speech was substantial, and its conten … | Continue reading
William Mark Stuckey in The Conversation: Today, researchers are looking toward building quantum computers and ways to securely transfer information using an entirely new sister field called quantum information science. But despite creating all these breakthrough technologies, ph … | Continue reading
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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: I first came to the United States for an academic exchange at Columbia University in 2005, and have spent the bulk of my time here since starting my PhD at Harvard University in 2007. No country changes nature overnight, and America still retains … | Continue reading
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Jenessa Abrams at the LARB: SHORTLY AFTER Alice Munro died, a line from the title story of her 2009 collection Too Much Happiness began circulating on the internet: “Always remember that when a man goes out of the room, he leaves everything in it behind […] When a woman goes out … | Continue reading
Davide Castelvecchi in Nature: The medals keep coming for US swimmers at the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris — and that’s in part thanks to science. Several of the athletes on Team USA have improved their times dramatically in recent years, and some of these improvements could be dow … | Continue reading
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Tanya Harrod at Literary Review: This remarkable book begins dramatically and truthfully: ‘A monstrous child is blocking my view and has carved a nest in the soft darkness of my head. It eats the hours, this child, leaving me only crumbs.’ Motherhood can be overwhelming, however … | Continue reading
The Chilean Forest Under the volcanoes, beside the snow-capped mountains, among the huge lakes, the fragrant, the silent, the tangled Chilean forest… My feet sink down into the dead leaves, a fragile twig crackles, the giant rauli trees rise in all their bristling height, a bird … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray Countries can be sensitive as teenage girls about their names. The change from Turkey to Türkiye aligned Türkiye’s name in Turkish with its internationally known name, but mainly, disassociated itself from the bird with the goofy reputation. Some countries’ names b … | Continue reading
by Daniel Shotkin This week marks one year since Affirmative Action was repealed by the Supreme Court. The landmark ruling was a watershed moment in how we think of race and social mobility in the United States. But for high schoolers, the crux of the case lies somewhere else ent … | Continue reading
Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader: Fifty years ago, a young woman was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag group of revolutionaries willing to kill for gentle causes. For weeks, she recorded strident, sarcastic messages at her captors’ bidding, messages th … | Continue reading
James Woodford in New Scientist: A backup of life on Earth could be kept safe in a permanently dark location on the moon, without the need for power or maintenance, allowing us to potentially restore organisms if they die out. Mary Hagedorn at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Con … | Continue reading
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Traditionally, Donald Trump has been the expert at creating insults that get under his opponents’ skin. But over the past week or so, Kamala Harris and her allies have come up with a put-down so devastating that Republicans seem to have no answer for it. … | Continue reading
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Sandra Simonds at Poetry Magazine: While Knott may have alienated his peers in what Charles Bernstein dubbed “official verse culture,” by the 1970s and ’80s his irreverent style, trickster persona, and anti-establishment ethos were precisely why he found fans in the emerging punk … | Continue reading
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David Gelles in The New York Times: David Keith was a graduate student in 1991 when a volcano erupted in the Philippines, sending a cloud of ash toward the edge of space. Seventeen million tons of sulfur dioxide released from Mount Pinatubo spread across the stratosphere, reflect … | Continue reading
Jonathan Blake at Noema: Baldwin Hills juts up 500 feet from the flat expanse of the Los Angeles Basin, the result of millennia of seismic activity along the Newport-Inglewood Fault, a dextral strike-slip fault that runs for 47 miles from Culver City through Signal Hill to Newpor … | Continue reading
James Baldwin in The New Yorker: I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis. I use “religious” in the common, and arbitrary, sense, meaning that I then discovered God, His saints and angels, and His blazing Hell. And since I had been born … | Continue reading
Starfish This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says, Last night, the channel was full… | Continue reading
by Steve Szilagyi An air of the erotic hangs over “Norman Rockwell: The Scouting Collection” – a show of 65 paintings by America’s master illustrator currently on display at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio. The pictures came to the Medici Museum after a Los Angeles Times … | Continue reading
by David Introcaso Arguably the greatest global health policy failure has been the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) refusal to promulgate any regulations to first mitigate and then eliminate the healthcare industry’s significant carbon footprint. With US healthca … | Continue reading
Paraglider over the center of Brixen, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Dearest Reader, Thanks to your support, today it has been exactly 20 years since I started 3QD. Not many small websites last this long, especially in the increasingly difficult media landscape and the onslaught of information begging for our attention from multiple channels: soci … | Continue reading
Rachelle Bergstein at Literary Hub: Like many adolescents, Deenie has a secret. Or maybe “secret” isn’t the right word. Deenie has a private ritual, something she does when she can’t sleep. She doesn’t know why, but it makes her feel better. Touching her “special place” helps sta … | Continue reading
Dean W. Ball in The New Atlantis: This notion — that LLMs are “just” next-word predictors based on statistical models of text — is so common now as to be almost a trope. It is used, both correctly and incorrectly, to explain the flaws, biases, and other limitations of LLMs. Most … | Continue reading
by Raafat Majzoub In this conversation—excerpted from the Aga Khan Award for Architecture’s upcoming volume, Beyond Ruins: Reimagining Modernism (ArchiTangle, 2024) set to be published this Fall, and focusing on the renovation of the Niemeyer Guest House by East Architecture Stud … | Continue reading
by Katalin Balog Not so long ago, people had a very different concept of the mind and human nature. Our European heritage is a vision of the body as our mortal coil which we feel and command with our soul. The soul was thought to be immortal and exempt from the laws of nature so… | Continue reading
Michael Wang. Holoflora, 2024 Pigment prints and silver halide holograms; 12 artworks. “Holoflora names a series of artworks that tell the story of Birmingham’s vanished flora. Each work documents a location in Birmingham, as it appears today, where an individual plant species wa … | Continue reading
Namir Khaliq at Psyche: The day I met Daniel Kahneman, he had asked me to join him for lunch at the Bowery Road restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Danny proposed this venue because it has comfortable booths and ‘is mostly deserted’. I arrived 15 minutes early, palms sweaty with the a … | Continue reading
Alex Wilkins in New Scientist: The IMO is considered the world’s most prestigious competition for young mathematicians. Correctly answering its test questions requires mathematical ability that AI systems typically lack. In January, Google DeepMind demonstrated AlphaGeometry, an … | Continue reading
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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion: In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of … | Continue reading
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Joshua Keating in Vox: In the past, Washington has served as a sort of relief valve for Netanyahu, a place he could count on strong support, even when his political position looked rocky at home. In that first speech back in 1996, after receiving a five-minute standing ovation fr … | Continue reading