Einstein & Etta James (reading below) I’m fourteen when Einstein is in Princeton he’s old & heading out of breath as I am fresh and new at breathing in some but there the landscapes of the space between our ears divides Al used levers of mind to lift mass in time while mine took … | Continue reading
Making good moral judgements is difficult. Could there be an app to improve our moral decision making, and should we use it? | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa Nearly four years ago here at 3QD we talked about how Euler became interested in a trifling little puzzle in 1736. He asked if it was possible to take a walk through the city of Königsberg, Prussia and cross each of its seven bridges once and only once. It seem … | Continue reading
Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to more than 20 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same f … | Continue reading
by Elizabeth S. Bernstein To follow the popular discourse about the gender wage gap in the United States is to confront perpetual confusion. It is a confusion created at least in part by pronouncements of the type many of us have heard: “Women are paid only 82 cents for every dol … | Continue reading
by Adele A. Wilby On occasions, while meandering the various English countryside and woodland paths, I have been pleasantly surprised to come across anglers. I have met fishermen dangling their lines in either a pond in some remote corner of the low-lying areas, or wading in wate … | Continue reading
by Chris Horner To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play. —Nietzsche Freud is supposed to have claimed that the two key things for happiness in life are work and love. If he did, he should have added a third: play. It’s this that N … | Continue reading
Most of the recent surge in mindfulness practices arises from people’s need to alleviate depression and anxiety in a depressing, anxiety-inducing world. We shouldn’t forget that there are many other ways to feel better, such as going for a walk, sitting in a park, doing breathing … | Continue reading
Alpine meadow near my house in July, 2019. | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Unfortunately, you have a brain tumor. You don’t know it yet. Your doctor doesn’t know it yet. But you are beginning to have symptoms. The tumor is pressing on surrounding brain tissue and causing you develop a number of delusional beliefs. You believe you are the … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley It’s not every day that a small, unexpected masterpiece shows up in your mailbox, arriving with the same modest ‘ping’ that announces the other electronic missives. This was no ordinary masterpiece. It was the photograph of a detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco L … | Continue reading
Alan Weisman in the New York Review of Books: Climate scientists’ worst-case scenarios back in 2007, the first year the Northwest Passage became navigable without an icebreaker (today, you can book a cruise through it), have all been overtaken by the unforeseen acceleration of ev … | Continue reading
Erica Chenoweth in Nature: The recent revolutions in Algeria and Sudan remind us that bottom-up movements of people power can create sweeping political transformations. They did this in part by mobilizing huge numbers of active protestors—1 million in Algeria, and around 1 millio … | Continue reading
Kavita Krishnan in The Independent: The Hindu-supremacist government of India, headed by Narendra Modi, has just carried out a coup of India’s constitution and with Kashmir’s autonomy. Jammu and Kashmir has been “put in its place”: stripped not only of its nominal autonomy but ev … | Continue reading
Parul Sehgal in the New York Times: Writers have their pet themes, favorite words, stubborn obsessions. But their signature, the essence of their style, is felt someplace deeper — at the level of pulse. Style is first felt in rhythm and cadence, from how sentences build and bend, … | Continue reading
Alfred Tauber in iai: One of the explanations for the rise of populist nationalist myths today goes back to the complicated dynamics between the individual and society, and between reason and fantasy. The thinker who might help us understand our current political storms is no oth … | Continue reading
Frances Wilson in New Statesman: In Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Richard Holmes described how, aged 18, he followed the route taken by Robert Louis Stevenson and his donkey almost 100 years earlier as they walked through the Massif Central in France. Sleeping, … | Continue reading
American Cavewall Sonnet . Wolf milk and wilderness America. Romulus and Remus built a city but it couldn’t hide the animal in their hearts: a river-child discovers blood when he searches for a blessing. Hold your motherland in your… | Continue reading
Marshall Sahlins in Counterpunch: The journalist and author Sam Quinones became aware of it even before the 2016 election, when he saw those Trump/Pence yard signs all over opioid country. Within days of Trump’s electoral victory, he published the disturbing story, as did the his … | Continue reading
The late Anges Heller in Public Seminar: As the Bible (Exodus) teaches and, more recently, Hannah Arendt warns, liberation is not yet liberty. The institutions of liberty must first be constituted, and people need to learn how to make them work while breathing spirit into them. T … | Continue reading
Joy James in Boston Review: Released only weeks before the author’s death on August 5, Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am opens with artist Mickalene Thomas making a collage of an elderly Morrison superimposed upon an image of her as a young woman, embellished with flowers and patter … | Continue reading
Andreas Huyssen in n+1: There is no question that radical right-wing fringe phenomena have been normalized under Donald Trump, most spectacularly when he claimed that there were good people on both sides in the Charlottesville riots. What used to be called the lunatic fringe in A … | Continue reading
Peter E. Gordon in The New York Review of Books: The German philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno died fifty years ago this week, in the late summer of 1969. Even at the time of his death, he was entangled in controversy. Student militants, many of them aligned with t … | Continue reading
Ed Simon at The Millions: However, it was an invention seven years earlier that restructured not just how language appears, but indeed the very rhythm of sentences; for, in 1496, Manutius introduced a novel bit of punctuation, a jaunty little man with leg splayed to the left as i … | Continue reading
Jenann Ismael at the TLS: Some claim that the idea of human freedom is built on illusions about human specialness that are a holdover from a religious conception of the world, and that they should be swept aside with the advancing tides of science. This position has been trumpete … | Continue reading
Ian Martin at The New Statesman: Fifty years ago this month, Bob Dylan played the Isle of Wight Festival. They say if you can remember 1969 you weren’t there, but I do and I was, boomerphobes. I can even tell you what half a century feels like if you’re interested, although it’s … | Continue reading
Bernardine Evaristo in The Guardian: It’s hard to overstate the significance of Toni Morrison in the pantheon of global black literature. For many of us she was the lodestar who inspired us to write from within our own cultures, often from female perspectives, and to dignify the … | Continue reading
From The New York Times: Toni Morrison spoke at Harvard Divinity School on the subject of altruism in 2012. Her lecture is published here for the first time. On an October morning in 2006, a young man backed his truck into the driveway of a one-room schoolhouse. He walked into th … | Continue reading
John Maier in Prospect: When I met him, Bryan Magee was nearly 89, marvellously lucid, curious to hear about my time at Oxford, and paralysed from the waist down: in many ways the ideal interviewee. For a generation of young viewers, Magee’s legendary television series about phil … | Continue reading
Ali Minai in Barbarikon: India’s decision two days ago to revoke most of Article 370 of its constitution and annex the part of Jammu & Kashmir it holds has sent Subcontinental and transcontinental punditocracy into a frenzy of analysis, interpretation, speculation, and prediction … | Continue reading
C. Brandon Ogbunu and C. Malik Boykin in the Boston Review: In recent years, biology’s “nature vs. nurture” war has reemerged with advanced weapons, although the central questions have not changed: What makes us human? Why are we different from one another? Nonetheless, the metho … | Continue reading
David Chalmers in Edge: We’ve got these bodies and these brains, which work okay, but we also have minds. We see, we hear, we think, we feel, we plan, we act, we do; we’re conscious. Viewed from the outside, you see a reasonably finely tuned mechanism. From the inside, we all exp … | Continue reading
Charlie Parker (1950) Bird is building a metropolis with his horn. Here are the gates of Babylon, the walls of Jericho cast down. Might die in Chicago, Kansas City’s where I was born. Snowflake in a blizzard, purple rose before the thorn. Stone by stone, note by note, atom by ato … | Continue reading
Joseph O’Neill in the New York Review of Books: “I claim the right to the United States, for myself and my children and my uncles and cousins, by manifest destiny.” The claimant is Suketu Mehta, in This Land Is Our Land: An Immigrant’s Manifesto. The reference to manifest destiny … | Continue reading
Kevin Hartnett in Quanta: When we design a skyscraper we expect it will perform to specification: that the tower will support so much weight and be able to withstand an earthquake of a certain strength. But with one of the most important technologies of the modern world, we’re ef … | Continue reading
Mohammed Hanif in the New York Times: The cheerleaders for Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India are cheering for Partition redux, a world-class massacre, ethnic cleansing. The brute power of Hindu supremacy has its own logic, and it requires not only that Kashmiris be denied a f … | Continue reading
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Helen Pearson at Literary Review: The authors find little proof of increasing busyness among the population. Yes, as expected, people were spending far more time on digital devices in 2015 than they were in 2000. But the data provides little evidence that people now spend more ti … | Continue reading
Peter E. Gordon at the NYRB: The German philosopher and social theorist Theodor W. Adorno died fifty years ago this week, in the late summer of 1969. Even at the time of his death, he was entangled in controversy. Student militants, many of them aligned with the so-called “extra- … | Continue reading
Michiko Kakutani in The Guardian: In novels spanning several hundred years of history, Toni Morrison used her historical imagination and her remarkable gifts of language to chronicle the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow, and their continuing fallout on the everyday lives of black … | Continue reading
The Blades In the new world, as the goddess dictated, each time a man touched a woman against her will, each time he exposed himself, each time he whistled, dropped something in her drink, photographed her in secret she sprouted a wing from her spine. Not feathered, like birds or … | Continue reading
Jon Cohen in Science: Drugs work stunningly well to control HIV—but not in everyone, and not without side effects. That’s why a small cadre of patients known as elite controllers has long fascinated researchers: Their immune system alone naturally suppresses HIV for decades witho … | Continue reading
Paula Erizanu at the IAI: What is your view regarding the idea that there might be a subjective or objective morality? I think it’s very difficult to make the case for an objective morality if you’re using the word ‘objective’ in a strong sense, either to mean a universal moralit … | Continue reading