Deepa Bhasthi at The Paris Review: Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a conversation without using it. Depending on the … | Continue reading
Dream Variations To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the… | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien First, some good news: I finally understand the Monty Hall problem. Or, at least, I feel like I do, which is still a triumph of sorts, given that this riddle’s empirically incontestable answer tends to evoke visceral, intuitive rejections, even among people who un … | Continue reading
by Eric Schenck I’ve been surfing for about three years. Not enough to be a guide of any sort, but certainly enough to realize what a miracle the sport really is. What follows are nine life lessons surfing has taught me. The more you do anything, the more you realize it can teach … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. After The Rain. Vermont, July 2024. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Yascha Mounk: What I’ve learned all of my life is that it’s good for people to be politically engaged. We want a politically active citizenry. We want people to care about politics. You don’t completely disagree with that, but you worry that too … | Continue reading
Daniel Kehlmann in The Guardian: The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, Darwin spoiled our species’ idea of divine creation, Freud showed that we neither know no … | Continue reading
From Project Syndicate: Project Syndicate: A year and a half ago, you criticized the US Federal Reserve’s response to inflation in the United States, arguing that, if anything, “disinflation has happened despite central banks’ actions, not because of them.” Now, many observers ar … | Continue reading
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Derek King in The Hedgehig Review: College campuses have a literacy problem. According to many humanities professors, the current crop of students demonstrates significantly less interest in reading books, and they are generally unprepared to meet the reading expectations that we … | Continue reading
From Medical News Today: Unlike previously proposed life-extending drugs and treatments, which often have poor side-effect profiles, work in only one sex, or extend life without improving health, IL-11 does not seem to have these limitations. Although these findings are currently … | Continue reading
Joel Sandelson at Aeon Magazine: We habitually associate literary realism with things like down-to-earth subject matter, plausible detail and convincing chronology. For the ancients, though, realism had just the opposite meaning. Aristotle argued that art should transcend the mas … | Continue reading
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Jonathan Romney at Literary Review: Twisters, with a budget estimated at $200 million, is that enduring Hollywood paradox: the blockbuster that uses capitalism as shorthand for moral corruption. We know from the start that Javi’s business is compromised just by seeing its natty c … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman Imagine a hunter, a tree, and a squirrel. The hunter is on the ground, the squirrel is clinging to the tree, and the tree is between two of them. As the hunter moves, the squirrel moves, always keeping the tree between them. The hunter goes around the tree. Does … | Continue reading
by Eleni Petrakou It’s late 2022. Scientists announce the creation of a spacetime wormhole. A flurry of articles and press releases of the highest caliber spread the news. Involved researchers call the achievement as exciting as the Higgs boson discovery. Pulitzer-winning journal … | Continue reading
Drinking It All In A long way up Bray Road past the point where the first of two small brooks cross beneath it came to me in a new way that you and I are still breathing four decades after we met at the threshold of the unknown, the part that comes after now and here… | Continue reading
Steve Paulson in Nautilus: Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for—by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Revol … | Continue reading
James Bradley at Literary Hub: Each night, as the line that separates day from night sweeps across the face of the ocean, a vast wave of life rises from the ocean’s depths behind it. Made up of an astonishing diversity of animals—myriad species of minute zooplankton, jellyfish an … | Continue reading
Ken Roth in The Guardian: Friday’s international court of justice (ICJ) ruling was a wholesale repudiation of Israel’s legal justifications for its 57-year (and counting) occupation of Palestinian territory. But it is not a magic bullet. Political pressure will be needed to back … | Continue reading
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Chris Berdik in Harvard Magazine: ALARMINGLY, the rate of obesity in the United States has tripled during the past six decades: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 42 percent of American adults are obese. Globally, more than a billion people live w … | Continue reading
From Nature: Picturing the Mind Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka MIT Press (2023): The groundbreaking 2019 book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul saw Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka — biologists well known for their philosophical expertise — argue that multicellular organisms mu … | Continue reading
by Malcolm Murray As AI evolves, so do the risks it poses on society. The risks of AI today are already unrecognizable from those of a few years ago. As a dual-use technology, similar to nuclear power, the capabilities of AI bring great benefits as well as great risks. As opposed … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal Karl Ove Knausgaard went around for many years claiming that he was sick of fiction and couldn’t stand the idea of made-up characters and invented plots. People understood this to be an explanation of why he had decided to write six long books about his own life. Th … | Continue reading
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Michael Pollak over at Left Business Observer: Here is what mainstream economics thinks we know about managing the economy: There was a debate in the 1920s and 1930s and central planning lost. It was proven, by people like Hayek and others, that central planning couldn’t work. It … | Continue reading
Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq in The Ideas Letter: After much wrangling and back-and-forth with myself, alternately accepting and refusing, believing and disbelieving, asking what the point would be, I have decided to start writing. 106 days since we were suddenly, startlingly, swept into … | Continue reading
Suzanne Schneider at Know Your Enemy: Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Jacob Baynham in Noema: The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size … | Continue reading
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Tim Adams in The Guardian: He begins with Rousseau, and in particular his 1755 Discourse on Inequality, the Swiss philosopher’s entry to an essay competition run by the Academy of Dijon – a sort of Enlightenment France Has Got Talent – that addressed how we ended up in a world in … | Continue reading
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by Robert Jensen Smart people sometimes say not-so-smart things about freedom of speech. Let’s start with Elon Musk, the boss at Tesla and SpaceX, and his often-quoted declaration that he is a “free-speech absolutist.” Whatever one thinks about Musk, he seems to be a smart person … | Continue reading
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi “Aik Shaam,” “An Evening (By the River Neckar)” is Iqbal’s ode to silence. A short lyric poem, it describes a rare personal moment in the vast corpus of a poet who is known by such hefty honorifics as “Allama” (the “learned one”), the “national” poet, “poet … | Continue reading
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Tim Adams in The Guardian: He begins with Rousseau, and in particular his 1755 Discourse on Inequality, the Swiss philosopher’s entry to an essay competition run by the Academy of Dijon – a sort of Enlightenment France Has Got Talent – that addressed how we ended up in a world in … | Continue reading
The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go. ……………… Human movements, ……………… but for a few, ……………… are Westerly. ……………… Man follows the Sun. This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go. ……………… Or follows what he thinks to be the ……………… … | Continue reading
Huw Price in Pearls and Irritations: In 2012 I was in Cambridge, newly enthroned as the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. The town had a new Duke and Duchess that year, too, in William and Kate. When they announced they were expecting their first child, I wrote a piece fo … | Continue reading
Erica Klarreich in Quanta: A group of nine mathematicians has proved the geometric Langlands conjecture, a key component of one of the most sweeping paradigms in modern mathematics. The proof represents the culmination of three decades of effort, said Peter Scholze, a prominent m … | Continue reading
Gary Saul Morson in Commentary: Western intellectuals expected that novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, once safely in the West after his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1974, would enthusiastically endorse its way of life and intellectual consensus. Nothing of the sort happened. … | Continue reading
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Claire Dederer at The Guardian: I know too much about Joan Didion. I’ve seen her image on tote bags and Celine ads; I’ve scrolled past her beautiful sulking face on countless Instagram feeds; I’ve streamed multiple documentaries about her. You’ll notice that I’m not describing he … | Continue reading
Robert Schmerling in Harvard Health Publishing: Not so long ago, a friend texted me from a coffee shop. He said, “I can’t believe it. I’m the only one here without a tattoo!” That might not seem surprising: a quick glance around practically anywhere people gather shows that tatto … | Continue reading
Michael Kimmage in TNR: Alcove 1 at the City College of New York is surely the most famous lunch table in American intellectual history. No Ivy League dining hall can compete. In the 1930s, a remarkable coterie of students gathered there. (The neighboring alcove, Alcove 2, was a … | Continue reading
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