Usha Alexander in Pangyrus: Human beings are the type of animal that depend upon the diversity and plenitude of other life to sustain us. It’s no coincidence that our presence arrived concomitant with the richest biota the earth has ever developed. This wealth of life created the … | Continue reading
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Joseph Epstein at First Things: Perhaps Stefan Zweig’s current low reputation as a storyteller is owing to his not having written a single great work of fiction of novel length, unlike his friend Joseph Roth (whom Zweig financially supported for nearly a decade) with The Radetzky … | Continue reading
Jiayang Fan at The New Yorker: Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in … | Continue reading
Siddhartha Deb at The Paris Review: I first came across the work of Nabarun Bhattacharya (1948–2014) about a decade ago in Calcutta, after a long afternoon of wandering conversation of the kind that Bengalis call adda, a session that no doubt included numerous cups of tea, many c … | Continue reading
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see ………………………………………….. the people of the world …………. exactly at the moment when ………………………. they first attained the title of ………………………………………………. ‘suffering humanity’ ………..…….They writhe upon the page ……………………………………………….. in veritable rage ………… … | Continue reading
A Conversation with Barbara Tversky in Edge: How do we structure our moving, changing thoughts and how do we structure the world we design and move and act in? The venerable view of the movement of thought is association; thought is associative. Sure, but a three-year-old would a … | Continue reading
Vanessa Ruta in Phys.Org: As animals explore their environment, they learn to master it. By discovering what sounds tend to precede predatorial attack, for example, or what smells predict dinner, they develop a kind of biological clairvoyance—a way to anticipate what’s coming nex … | Continue reading
Peter Martin in Aeon: In the United States, the name Noah Webster (1758-1843) is synonymous with the word ‘dictionary’. But it is also synonymous with the idea of America, since his first unabridged American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 when Webster was 7 … | Continue reading
Pamela B. Paresky in Psychology Today: Jordanian-American Natasha Tynes is an award-winning author who faced government prosecution in Egypt for her work defending free speech and a free press. In May, Tynes saw a Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) worke … | Continue reading
Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: The conventions of mainstream journalism make it difficult to challenge America’s self-conception as a peace-loving nation. But the unlovely truth is this: Throughout its history, America has attacked countries that did not threaten it. To carry out … | Continue reading
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R. Jeffrey Smith in the New York Times: Griffin was referring to a revolutionary new type of weapon, one that would have the unprecedented ability to maneuver and then to strike almost any target in the world within a matter of minutes. Capable of traveling at more than 15 times … | Continue reading
Howard W. French at The New York Review of Books: There is a broad strain in Western thought that has long treated Africa as existing outside of history and progress; it ranges from some of our most famous thinkers to the entertainment that generations of children have grown up w … | Continue reading
James Parker at The Atlantic: It was the event of his lifetime, and yet it had been a dull event. The language which now would sing of this extraordinary vault promised to be as flat as an unstrung harp.” In such terms did Norman Mailer, 50 years ago, frame the first landing of m … | Continue reading
Tom Holland at Literary Review: Herculaneum, a town on the Bay of Naples that was buried beneath volcanic ash when Vesuvius erupted in AD 79, has only been partially excavated. Some buildings stand open to the sky; others, such as the theatre, can only be accessed through cramped … | Continue reading
Erin O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine: HOW DID LIFE begin on Earth? On a young, rocky planet, how might chemicals have come together in just the right way to form the very first cells? How did those primitive cells start behaving like life: growing, dividing, and passing on advantag … | Continue reading
Matthew Warren in Nature: Some time in the past 160,000 years or so, the remains of an ancient human ended up in a cave high on the Tibetan Plateau in China. Perhaps the individual died there, or parts were taken there by its kin or an animal scavenger. In just a few years, the f … | Continue reading
Sanjukta Paul in The American Prospect: Antitrust law, established originally to limit corporate power, has become its friend. Think about the following anomalies: • If a group of independent truck drivers forms an association to jointly bargain their prices, that combination is … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Games play an important, and arguably increasing, role in human life. We play games on our computers and our phones, watch other people compete in games, and occasionally break out the cards or the Monopoly set. What is the origin of this hu … | Continue reading
Rashid Khalidi in the New York Review of Books: “You cannot do without us,” Lord Curzon condescendingly told the Indians over whom he ruled as British imperial viceroy more than a century ago. As the Trump family rubbed shoulders with the Windsors during their recent visit to Lon … | Continue reading
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Devorah Goldman in National Affairs: Ronald Dworkin has written in these pages about the evolving identity of the American physician, from gentleman-doctor to benefactor to technician to scientist. In recent years, a combination of new laws and technologies have again redefined t … | Continue reading
Donal McNeil Jr. in The New York Times: In 1998, with 250,000 of its citizens dying of AIDS each year, South Africa’s Parliament legalized the suspension of drug patents so the government could import generic drugs. Almost immediately, 39 drug companies sued to overturn the law, … | Continue reading
Original Fire —for Aza I watch my daughter build a fire not from a match or cigarette lighter but from the original elements, two sticks, a length of sinew, friction. She has formed a cup of juniper shreds, and when she spins out a black ember and breathes it to life she transfer … | 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 Jessica Collins The basic details of the story are known to almost everyone: a Malaysian Airlines flight simply disappeared one night in March 2014 and, more than five years later, the plane has still not been found. An article by William Langewiesche in the July 2019 edition … | Continue reading
by Holly A. Case On Sunday, May 17, 2015, there was a Lutheran church service in Delmont, South Dakota. Just one. A week earlier—on Mother’s Day—there had been two, one at Hope Lutheran, another at Zion Lutheran. At around 10:45 that morning, during Sunday school at Zion Lutheran … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. “Steep-le-chase!”; June, 2019, Rwanda. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Dave Maier The relation between mind and matter is a perennial philosophical conundrum for a reason. If the workings of the mind depend too much on the physical material that seems to house it, then it can be hard to see how there’s conceptual room for human agency. On the oth … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss It is a big cross. A really big cross. Forty feet in height, made of granite and concrete, The Bladensburg Peace Cross stands tall and straight for all to see. The Peace Cross, sponsored by the American Legion, was built in 1925 in the aftermath of World War I to … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt A wave of friends is having babies. I’m 51 years old so this is nothing new. Friends of mine have been having babies for nearly three decades. However, this time it feels different, and not because I’m now old enough to be a grandfather. Rather, as we approach t … | Continue reading
by Robert Fay I’m not typically a reader of White House memoirs, but after finishing the new biography of diplomat Richard Holbrooke, Our Man (2019) by George Packer, I became intrigued by depictions of Obama’s management style in dealing with Holbrooke, Hilary Clinton and others … | Continue reading
by Sarah Firisen Many years ago, my father and I were at a backyard BBQ in New Jersey hosted by someone we barely knew, I think they were somehow connected to my step-mother. At some point, the topic of flag burning came up and, before we knew it, we were engaged in an extremely … | Continue reading
Cars seen through a rusty metal fence in Brixen, South Tyrol, in May, 2016. | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon How, then, do we get from H. Rider Haggard to Anthony Bourdain? Let’s start with the easy and straightforward. Both are white men, as are Joseph Conrad and Francis Ford Coppola for that matter. Haggard was British; he was born in the 19th century and died in the 20 … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray A few months ago, Mikhail Saakashvili, ousted leader of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and the Ukrainian town of Odessa, predicted that Russia would next attack either Sweden or Finland. A few days ago I visited the Finnish and Russian border towns of Lappee … | Continue reading
Isabella Hammad in the New York Review of Books: Adam Dannoun, the protagonist of Elias Khoury’s powerful new novel, calls himself a child of the ghetto. He does not mean the Warsaw ghetto — although, growing up in the newly established state of Israel, he allows his university c … | Continue reading
Michael Greshko in National Geographic: But a new study shows that many species plan out intricate detours to reach their prey—smarts usually associated with far bigger creatures. The arachnids, already well known for their colors and elaborate mating rituals, have sharp vision a … | Continue reading
Robert Wiblin and Keiran Harris in 80,000 Hours: It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn’t despair. La … | Continue reading
Joseph Darda in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Since the Truman administration dissolved the Department of War and replaced it with a Department of Defense in the early years of the Cold War, our presidents — Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal — have used the ide … | Continue reading
Colm Toibin in Bookforum: Henry James did not wish to be known by his readers. He remained oddly absent in his fiction. He did not dramatize his own opinions or offer aphorisms about life, as George Eliot, a novelist whom James followed closely, did. Instead, he worked intensely … | Continue reading
Jipson John and Jitheesh P.M. interview Akeel Bilgrami in Frontline: How do you engage with the term populism, its emergence and its philosophical and political connotations? There is so much punditry on this subject that it is tempting to say that one should just put a moratoriu … | Continue reading
Sheila Fitzpatrick in The Nation: Vasily Grossman is hard to pigeonhole. A Jewish novelist and journalist and not a party member, he was one of the Soviet Union’s leading war correspondents during World War II, first at Stalingrad, then with the Soviet Army moving westward. He wr … | Continue reading