Jim Everett and M Crockett in Scientific American: The inhabitants of Westeros and Essos repeatedly face versions of a classic moral dilemma: When is it morally permissible to cause harm in order to prevent further suffering? Philosophers have debated moral dilemmas like this for … | Continue reading
Stephen Ellis at the NYRB: In 1955, de Kooning was at one of several artistic peaks. By then, he had completely internalized his synthesis of Cubist structure, including Picasso’s Surrealist variations, with Pollock’s innovative materials and expansive scale. Soutine had shown de … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: Now the raucousness begins in earnest, as Ives renders the Independence Day parade—a drunken, lurching revel with horses on the loose and church bells clanging and a fife-and-drum corps playing intentionally off-key (recalling those lusty if de … | Continue reading
Gillian Moore at Literary Review: The Gustav Mahler industry, in particular, is vicious in its representation of Alma as a self-serving narcissist who exaggerated her own role in the life of the great man, massaged the facts and was even, on account of her affair with Gropius, re … | Continue reading
The Pinch I said out loud for the first time ever, I want to deface a car. I wanted other things too, as it happened — the things I wanted were so specific. You see I was looking at the bodies all day. The unrolling skins of the politicians. Due to recent developments I could… | Continue reading
Viv Groskop in Literary Hub: The author of Fathers and Sons and A Month in the Country was easily the most colorful and hedonistic figure in Russian literary history. He had a longtime mistress who was an opera singer he followed around Europe. He was grumpy, volatile, and camp. … | Continue reading
K. C. Cole in Quanta: The flashier fruits of Albert Einstein’s century-old insights are by now deeply embedded in the popular imagination: Black holes, time warps and wormholes show up regularly as plot points in movies, books, TV shows. At the same time, they fuel cutting-edge r … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: From America to the Philippines, the rise of populist movements reveals a yearning for belonging and identity that liberalism cannot satisfy. The emergence of non-liberal economic powers such as China calls into question the postwar ‘liberal order’. P … | Continue reading
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Caroline Eden at Literary Hub: Odessa is a young city by European standards, but what it lacks in historical gravitas it makes up for with its splendid architectural bones and worldliness. Cosmopolitan from its inception, its life began when Neapolitan officer General Don Jose de … | Continue reading
David Wootton at Lapham’s Quarterly: This problem is particularly acute in our modern consumer economy, in which political institutions, the economic system, and popular culture are all now primarily dedicated to the pursuit of happiness. This has had the perverse effect of creat … | Continue reading
Andrei Codrescu at The Paris Review: At the end of the nineteenth century, Lafcadio Hearn was one of America’s best-known writers, one of a stellar company that included Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Twain, Poe, and Stevenson have entered the establishe … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes. First, it shoves one of its arms into the predator’s vulnerable … | Continue reading
Ashley Yeager in The Scientist: “Anytime we take Tylenol because we have the flu and we feel terrible, that’s actually you playing with tolerance,” says Stanford University microbiologist David Schneider, Ayres’s former advisor. By quieting the immune reaction that is making you … | Continue reading
—from “Nikes” Just as the President who could only say, “If I had a son he’d look like Trayvon” instead of, “If I had a son he’d look just like me.” So often the body is used as a way to mediate chaos. Just like the Statue of Liberty looked “just like Trayvon” but America… | Continue reading
Elizabeth Winkler in The Atlantic: On a spring night in 2018, I stood on a Manhattan sidewalk with friends, reading Shakespeare aloud. We were in line to see an adaptation of Macbeth and had decided to pass the time refreshing our memories of the play’s best lines. I pulled up La … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: What does it mean to be a good person? To act ethically and morally in the world? In the old days we might appeal to the instructions we get from God, but a modern naturalist has to look elsewhere. Today I do a rare solo podcast, where I tal … | Continue reading
Rita Koganzon in The Hedgehog Review: Liberalism today finds itself in the strange position of being the political philosophy that everyone lives by and no one wants to defend. On one side, conservative or self-described “postliberal” critics like Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, … | Continue reading
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Audrey Farley at Marginalia Review: Under the influence of mind-altering drugs, individuals cannot distinguish between subjective experience and external objects. Even after the ego returns and normal cognitive processes resume, people have an unshakable belief in what they encou … | Continue reading
Rita Koganzon at The Hedgehog Review: Rosenblatt’s effort to vindicate liberalism by demonstrating that it was never what critics on the right and left said it was in the first place results in a highly readable and engaging history of nineteenth-century French politics, but it’s … | Continue reading
Alejandro Zambra at The Believer: Its body is light blue and 100 percent synthetic. It’s a good-natured and naive octopus, and its smile is genuine. Its eyebrows are green, as are the two blushing spots on its cheeks. It weighs 11.4 ounces. It’s clearly intelligent—as nearly all … | Continue reading
Charles McGrath in The New Yorker: Rudyard Kipling used to be a household name. Born in 1865 in Bombay, where his father taught at an arts school, and then exiled as a boy to England, he returned to India as a teen-ager, and quickly established himself as the great chronicler of … | Continue reading
Inspired by Frank Relle’s “Amano,” Jack Bedell composed his ekphrastic poem of the same name. Amano Even what’s left of this broken cypress tree hasn’t given up reaching for the sky. Busted dead center, and toppled over into the lake, its branches still climb toward the stars bur … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in … | Continue reading
Dear Reader, Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and profes … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber In a few more months I’ll be teaching my course in the history of 20th century analytic philosophy. In that course we begin with Frege and Russell and end with topics covered in the 1980s and ’90s that interest the students. This means that the course covers a w … | Continue reading
Flight and Gravity a story, a poem a recollection of 77 summer solstices bundled into a single thought of when a young carpenter with muscles, sweating, carries a 2 by 10 joist from lumber pile to house, its skeleton being assembled in the sun, a thought that segues into a later … | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford C.S. Lewis, the Evangelical icon who would be thoroughly nauseated by Evangelicals, once wrote we should not kid ourselves into believing the Reformation had anything to do with religious freedom. Once he escaped the stake, John Calvin had no problem watching Mi … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. For Pride’s Sake. January 2017, Guangzho. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Abigail Akavia Short Talk on Why Some People Find Trains Exciting / Anne Carson It is the names Northland Sante Fe Nickle Plate Line Delta Jump Dayliner Heartland Favourite Taj Express it is the long lit windows the plush seats the smokers the sleeping cars the platform questi … | Continue reading
by Amanda Beth Peery MOTEL IN AN OASIS TOWN Jungle-blooms unfold shiveringly out of sun-baked stretches and creases in the streets where round-hipped women wear second-hand silk dresses over bodies that have been worn and worn again. In the motel, we leave handprints griming the … | Continue reading
An admirer of Nietzsche finally visits the inspiring alpine region where he spent many summers. | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow In giving an account of the aesthetic value of wine, the most important factor to keep in mind is that wine is an everyday affair. It is consumed by people in the course of their daily lives, and wine’s peculiar value and allure is that it infuses everyday life w … | Continue reading
Photo taken while walking with Robin Varghese near Prospect Park in Brooklyn in May of 2015. | Continue reading
by Eric Miller There is no hope for me but poetry. —Rafaël Newman 1. Toronto in the Seventies was still a filthy city. I was a teen then and because I dropped out of school I got to know the city very well at all hours and in all weathers. I would walk the day… | Continue reading
Daniel W. Drezner in the New York Times: A diverting Beltway pastime during the heyday of the Washington Consensus was to gently mock Joseph E. Stiglitz. It was remarkably easy for pundits to wave away his prestigious awards (Nobel Prize in Economics) and positions (World Bank ch … | Continue reading
Claire Armitstead in The Guardian: When Guy Gunaratne was a teenager he would catch the bus home from school in north-west London, listening out for the chat of his fellow passengers. “Like this one kid who said to his friend, ‘Come on, you’re moving like molasses.’ That rattled … | Continue reading
Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger in The Conversation: The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything … | Continue reading
Emma Brockes in The Guardian: There is something very moving about the conversation between these young women, a sense of generational rise that, as we know from every precedent from the Renaissance onwards, has the power to ignite movements and change history. Alexandria Ocasio- … | Continue reading
Brian Gallagher in Nautilus: The popularity of video games is staggering. Last year, the top 25 public game companies—China’s Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft ranking highest—had annual earnings of more than $100 billion for the first time.1 The United States video game industry earn … | Continue reading
Eimear McBride in The Guardian: Within the first few pages of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights the narrator writes of her fondly remembered, now long-deceased mother: “I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was.” It’s an unsen … | Continue reading
Discover my Resemblance to Myself inconstant flower. ………………………. I am the wood you crackle in, the human stone inside its kidney, the sedentary clutching at the seed, your bridge traversed. Discover me. ………….…….. I am the one who turns to cast a shadow, what strikes itself and spl … | Continue reading
Rachel Syme at Bookforum: One evening in early 1950, the film mogul Louis B. Mayer hosted a small dinner party for the actress Gloria Swanson. She was fifty-one years old, which was not considered an ancient, crone-like age, even in an industry that values youth above all else. S … | Continue reading