Jason Dorrier in Singularity Hub: Computer chips are a hot commodity. Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the Taiwanese manufacturer of Nvidia’s chips, TSMC, has been called a geopolitical force. It should come as no surprise, then, that a growing n … | Continue reading
Sasha Frere-Jones at The Nation: Like many creative ventures in cities that are in thrall to the real estate industry, the Poetry Project was itself a miracle, a space emerging out of the chaos and communal energy of a small circle. In 1966, a set of poets who had been gathering … | Continue reading
Jim Holt chats with Lewis Lapham at the Paris Review: It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has la … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey When eating an elephant take one bite at a time. ––Creighton Abrams In the game of chess, some of the greats will concede their most valuable pieces for a superior position on the board. In a 1994 game against the grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik, Gary Kasparov sacrifi … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr In 2001, in order to become an American citizen, I had to “absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen.” Abjure. Princ … | Continue reading
Cameron Abadi and Adam Tooze over at Foreign Policy’s podcast Ones and Tooze: Joe Biden still has six months left in his presidency, but it’s not too early to size up his economic legacy. Adam and Cameron dig in. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Gordon F. Sander in NY Review of Books: While I was in Stockholm I met with Swedish defense minister Pål Jonson, who belongs to the Moderate Party, the largest member of the rickety center-right coalition—which also includes the Liberals and the Christian Democrats—that took offi … | Continue reading
Nesrine Malik in The Ideas Letter: Some 20 years ago, the Darfur region of Sudan was in the throes of a brutal war against rebel African groups protesting their economic and political marginalization. Arab militias known as the Janjaweed joined the central government to quell the … | Continue reading
Gabriel Winant in The LRB: In 1963, June Croll and Eugene Gordon took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Gordon was African American, raised in New Orleans; Croll was Jewish, born in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as ch … | Continue reading
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From The Christian Science Monitor: One of this year’s most influential people on TikTok and YouTube does not see himself as an influencer. He is Thích Minh Tuệ, a middle-aged man who adopted a humble, ascetic life a few years ago and began to walk barefoot up and down Vietnam. H … | Continue reading
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White Corn Boy —Before the Coming of the White man I am the White Corn Boy I walk in sight of my home. I walk in plain sight of my home. I walk on the straight path which is towards my home. I walk to the entrance of my home. I arrive at the beautiful… | Continue reading
by Gary Borjesson I invite you to explore with me what hospitality is, and why it’s an essential and cosmic principle of all life, but especially human life. The heart of hospitality is to provide the occasion for getting to know anyone or anything. I assume here that “getting to … | Continue reading
The Kitchen Gods Carnage in the lot: blood freckled the chopping block — The hen’s death is timeless, frantic. Its numbskull lopped, one wing still drags The pointless circle of a broken clock, But the vein fades in my grandmother’s arm on the ax. The old ways fade and do not com … | Continue reading
Ryan Nourai in Esquire: I was sitting in a funeral home in San Pedro, California, surrounded by carpeted floors, inaudible footsteps, and clasped hands. And then—I couldn’t help it—I imagined her body ripped apart. Would the powder in the bullet explode in the flames? My body tri … | Continue reading
Michael Le Page in New Scientist: Drinking even small amounts of alcohol reduces your life expectancy, rigorous studies show. Only those with serious flaws suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies looking at how drinking alcoh … | Continue reading
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Musa al-Gharbi at Symbolic Capital(ism): Symbolic capitalists are strange people. Actually, it might be more apt to say we are particularly WEIRD. In decades-worth of empirical studies carried out across the globe, anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his collaborators have document … | Continue reading
Stephen Smith at The Guardian: What do TS Eliot, the Coen brothers, Dorothy Parker, Mel Brooks, Clive James and Woody Allen have in common? The answer is that they all admired SJ Perelman, the droll New York prose stylist and Oscar-winning screenwriter. There’s a crowded field in … | Continue reading
Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian: The man who may very well become the vice-president of the US once told Fox News that the country is governed by a dastardly deep state comprised of cat lovers. His exact words from the 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson: We are ef … | Continue reading
Albert Li in Science: It sounded like the right thing to do. I was a first-year Ph.D. student in educational psychology, and my research adviser told me I should consider practicing open science—“being open and above board,” as he put it. He suggested I make my first-year researc … | Continue reading
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Alec Wilkinson at the NYT: In “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” Kate Kitagawa, a mathematics historian, and Timothy Revell, a science writer, intend by reasoned and scholarly means to overthrow the “assumption that the European way of doing things is superior.” Their book begins wit … | Continue reading
Temples of Smoke Fire shimmied and reached up From the iron furnace and grabbed Sawdust from the pitchfork Before I could make it across The floor or take a half step Back, as the boiler room sung About what trees were before Men & money. Those nights Smelled of greenness & sweat … | Continue reading
by John Hartley “To err is human,” observed the poet, Alexander Pope. Yet, why do we consciously choose to err from right action against our better judgement? Anyone who has tried to follow a diet or maintain a strict exercise regime will understand what can sometimes feel like a … | Continue reading
John Simpson in The Guardian: Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the … | Continue reading
Grace Wade in New Scientist: A newly identified brain pathway in mice could explain why placebos, or interventions designed to have no therapeutic effect, still relieve pain. Developing drugs that target this pathway may lead to safer alternatives to pain medications like opioids … | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider st … | Continue reading
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Ed Simon at Lit Hub: My desire to write a cultural history of the Faust legend goes back a few years earlier than my pilgrimage to the Deptford churchyard, around the time that I attended an adaptation of the play entitled faustUS staged by the theater collective 404 Strand in my … | Continue reading
H. Alan Scott in Newsweek: If you ask Bette Midler how she got her part in the new film The Fabulous Four, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her legendary status as a performer, or that she’s an Oscar-nominated actor. “I think they needed a ham, a big ole ham. So, I got that p … | Continue reading
Jeff Tollefson in Nature: A climate scientist who was demoted for speaking out by the administration of former US president Donald Trump is seeking an investigation into her case and demanding changes to personnel policies to prevent similar retaliation against others in future. … | Continue reading
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A.W. Moore at the LRB: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book he published during his lifetime, is one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. It might have been expected, when it first appeared in 1921, to have limited appeal. It is … | Continue reading
On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, in New England It is what he does not know, Crossing the road under the elm trees, About the mechanism of my car, About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, About Mozart, India, Arcturus, That wins my praise. I engage At once in whirling s … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene In Discourse on the Method, philosopher René Descartes reflects on the nature of mind. He identifies what he takes to be a unique feature of human beings— in each case, the presence of a rational soul in union with a material body. In particular, he point … | Continue reading
Vineyard in Neustift, South Tyrol. Apparently they put these rose bushes at the ends of the rows of grape vines because they are more susceptible to certain diseases and insects and act a bit like canaries in coal mines. From Le Blog IdealWine: Despite their different appearances … | Continue reading
Tracy Fessenden in The Conversation: Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher … | Continue reading
Ethan Siegel at Big Think: Perhaps the greatest quest in particle physics, for perhaps half a century now, has been to find a discrepancy between theory and experiment when it comes to the Standard Model. One fascinating place to look is at the magnetic moment of the muon: a heav … | Continue reading
Guido Núñez-Mujica at Persuasion: Last Tuesday, President Biden signed into law America’s first comprehensive nuclear energy bill since 2005. The landmark ADVANCE Act provides incentives for new nuclear technologies, reduces licensing fees, offers prizes for deploying improved nu … | Continue reading
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Jessie Kindig at The Point: Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the ratio … | Continue reading
Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist: The gut’s sensory system is a touchy subject thanks to specialized epithelial cells that line the gut and behave like touch sensors in the skin.1 These cells are sensitive to mechanical stimuli and communicate information about “gut feelings” to n … | Continue reading
Dante Stewart in Time Magazine: America currently finds itself in a storm. A dreadful, at times unbelievable storm. A storm so dire and visceral that it seems to be the stuff of fiction and fantasy. From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 … | Continue reading
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