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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
Zoe Corbin in Nature: A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation. Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a … | Continue reading
Abigail Tulenko at Aeon Magazine: Austen’s keen observation extends to her rich aesthetic sensibility. And, yet, beauty figures strangely in a naturalist’s worldview. Darwin, who develops the naturalistic worldview to a new extreme, was deeply troubled by ‘ornament’ in the animal … | Continue reading
India Ennenga and Kaveh Akbar at The Believer: BLVR: You’ve said you want to honor all the poets “whose rapturous ecstasy overwhelmed even language’s ability to transcribe it.” Many of those, I imagine, are the authors you included as the editor of The Penguin Book of Spiritual V … | Continue reading
by Martin Butler Fewer than half the population in the UK believe in God according to the latest surveys, even though religious belief is growing globally and the heady days when the ‘new atheists’ were in full flight are now behind us. The internet has given those on opposite si … | Continue reading
by Malcolm Murray What does the election of Trump mean for risks to society from advanced AI? Given the wide spectrum of risks from advanced AI, the answer will depend very much on which AI risks one is most concerned about. The AI risk spectrum can be drawn from the near-term, h … | Continue reading
Song Behind a Rear-Tined Tiller They believed consciousness resided in the heart, Aristotle believed this, and the Egyptians who scooped out dead pharaoh’s brain through his nose with a spoon and stuffed his skull with rags assuring that he would not be thinking in the other worl … | Continue reading
Doug Henwood in Jacobin: I often say that the Democrats’ political problem is that they’re a party of capital that has to pretend otherwise for electoral purposes. This time they hardly even pretended. Kamala Harris preferred campaigning with the inexplicably famous mogul Mark Cu … | Continue reading
Peter E. Gordon in Boston Review: From 2016 to 2020 Donald J. Trump served as forty-fifth president of the United States; now, he has secured his reelection and will assume office once again as president number forty-seven. It was Marx who left us with the memorable claim that ev … | Continue reading
Gabriel Winant in Dissent: The most important image of the 2024 election, to my eye, was generated one evening of the Democratic National Convention, when delegates had to file past protesters chanting the names and ages of dead Palestinian children. The attendees did not simply … | Continue reading
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Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Guardian: The second part, chiefly told from Johannes’s point of view, chronicles the eerie hours after he wakes up one morning, late in his old age. Johannes is a now retired fisherman. His wife, Erna, is long dead. His mornings are “sad and lonely”. Jo … | Continue reading
Jenny Morgan in Harper’s Magazine: More here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Pollen of Life —poem for Jack Micheline He was the high note of a wailing saxophone The spark that ignites a fire He was a fifth of Jack Daniel’s A glass of imported beer A shaman A vagabond poet shuffling words Like a river-boat gambler Ravished by illness Ravished by time He pa … | Continue reading
by Dick Edelstein Catalan jazzman Ignasi Terraza and his trio lit up Barcelona with eight sets in October at Jamboree, a cutting edge Gothic Quarter club in the neoclassically-styled Plaça Reial, once an historic crossroads of the Camino de Santiago with the Roman Via Augusta, no … | Continue reading
by Jerry Cayford On June 28 this year, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Chevron U.S.A v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984). This was big, since that Chevron decision was the heart of the administrative state’s legal authority. Chevron formalized the executive civil servic … | Continue reading
Tony Ho Tran in Slate: It’s a good way to spend a Saturday morning—if, admittedly, a strange one. I wake up and pack a tote bag with leather gardening gloves, a water bottle, a towel, and headphones. Then I drive to one of Chicago’s 272 cemeteries and spend hours taking pictures … | Continue reading
Sarah Treleaven at The Walrus: Laskowski revealed that her ambition had drawn her into the web of prolific spider researcher Jonathan Pruitt, a behavioural ecologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Pruitt was a superstar in his field and, in 2018, was named a Canada … | Continue reading
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Damon Linker in Persuasion: The results this time weren’t, to put it in poker terms, a rare inside straight easily manipulable by nefarious forces. Trump gained ground in nearly every corner of the country, among nearly every segment of the electorate. Which means Trump has real … | Continue reading
Freya Johnston at Literary Review: Does anything ever truly happen in the Messiah? This extraordinarily popular tripartite choral work, first performed in Dublin in 1742, consists almost entirely of saying rather than of doing. Circling around the redemptive power of Christ, it c … | Continue reading
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How I Read Gertrude Stein —for Joseph Kepecs The poem is not the heart’s cry (Though it seems to be if you have craft enough) The poem is made to carry the heart’s cry And only to carry it. And the cry is always the Same . . . for all times and every place… | Continue reading
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Patrick Jack in Inside Higher Ed: Large numbers of biomedical scientists have tried and failed to replicate their own studies, with many not publishing their findings, a survey suggests. Authors of the study warn that researchers’ failure to approach their own work rigorously cre … | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder I dipped my toe into Stoic Week again this year. I’ve done it before a decade ago, and even went to StoicCon once! I was hoping to find the attitude necessary to manage all this (gestures broadly at everything). I got stuck on the first day. They start with Epicte … | Continue reading
by Eric Feigenbaum Professor Paul Heyne practiced what he preached. I had the good fortune of having Professor Heyne’s Microeconomics class in my very first quarter at the University of Washington. He may have been tenured faculty whose own textbook we used, but he was a natural … | Continue reading
Cal Flyn interviewed at Five Books: What are the novels everyone is talking about in Fall 2024? Well, the most obvious answer to this question is Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Intermezzo. Every Rooney book is a major publishing event, and this latest offering—which centres on the … | Continue reading
Davide Castelvecchi in Nature: Last week, technology giants Google and Amazon both unveiled deals supporting ‘advanced’ nuclear energy, as part of their efforts to become carbon-neutral. Google announced that it will buy electricity made with reactors developed by Kairos Power, b … | Continue reading
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Hafsa Kanjwali in Aeon: Even as Nehru proclaimed the moral superiority of India for taking a stance against colonialism in all forms, he oversaw India’s colonial occupation of Kashmir. In Kashmir, Nehru said, ‘democracy and morality can wait’. In the middle of the 20th century, a … | Continue reading
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Dale Markowitz in Nautilus: In 1936, the economist John Maynard Keynes purchased a trove of Isaac Newton’s unpublished notes. These included more than 100,000 words on the great physicist’s secret alchemical experiments. Keynes, shocked and awed, dubbed them “wholly magical and w … | Continue reading
Evan Grillon at the LARB: LAST FALL, I was rereading Resentment: A Comedy (1997) on the train on the way to a screening of Sweet Smell of Success (1957), the most perverted Hays Code movie I know, and came upon a passage I knew was coming, where a man is, to put it mildly, fisted … | Continue reading
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Mark Krotov at n+1: Hadn’t it been dimming for years? Last weekend the Atlantic ran a juicy piece about the chaos and despair inside the Trump campaign. It should have reminded me more than it did at the time of the hundreds of similar articles published during his first term and … | Continue reading
In the Dark Time —excerpt In a dark time, the eye begins to see, I meet my shadow in the deepening shade; I hear my echo in the echoing wood— A lord of nature weeping to a tree. I live between the heron and the wren, Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.… | Continue reading
by William Benzon A couple of weeks ago The New York Times ran an op-ed in which Drew Lictenberg, who is the artistic producer at Shakespeare Theatre Company, pointed out that there has been a drop in Shakespeare productions recently: American Theatre magazine, which collects dat … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman Last Saturday, November 2, 2024, at a collective atelier in Zurich’s Wiedikon neighborhood, I attended the launch of a new periodical. TETI Journal, available both online and in print form, is a publication presenting academic and artistic work in line with the a … | Continue reading
In the woods, near Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Quico Toro in Persuasion: Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Che … | Continue reading
Charlie Wood at Quanta: Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun m … | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk at his eponymous Substack: Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confid … | Continue reading
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There is no escape from the angst outside but the world within; find it. — Roshi Bob Hiding Places There are hiding places in my room where beautiful poems are hidden Poems hidden away in boxes on sheets of brown paper Poems of spirit and magic workers hands hidden in boxes beaut … | Continue reading