Lily Lynch in Sidecar: Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) – the indirect successor to Austria’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party – used to generate apocalyptic headlines. Its successes were once treated as major news stories on both sides of the Atlantic, especially … | Continue reading
Over at Frieze: Gary Indiana, the novelist, playwright and critic who rose to prominence in the art world as a writer for the Village Voice in the 1980s, has died aged 74. Born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire in 1950, Indiana briefly studied at the University of Californi … | Continue reading
Bhaskar Sunkara in The Ideas Letter: Can you build social democracy without workers? This question would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Today, it captures a central challenge that left-of-center parties face around the world. In the United States, even as the Democratic … | Continue reading
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Jonmaas in Medium: At first, the poet Emily Dickinson and the novelist Franz Kafka might not seem connected. They are both influential writers to be sure, but beyond their general impact, the similarities seem to end. They wrote in different formats, addressed different themes, l … | Continue reading
Alexandra Alter in The New York Times: This summer, Ayad Akhtar was struggling with the final scene of “McNeal,” his knotty and disorienting play about a Nobel Prize-winning author who uses artificial intelligence to write a novel. He wanted the title character, played by Robert … | Continue reading
Even the words that we are speaking now thieving time has stolen away, and nothing can return, —from the Odes or Horace The Greatest Mystery I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time. This is time, familiar and intimate. … | Continue reading
by Mindy Clegg As I start this essay, early voting just began in my state of Georgia which is a critical swing state. Our secretary of state announced record turn out on the first day of early voting. By the time this is posted, I will have already voted, and perhaps that might b … | Continue reading
George Scialabba in Commonweal: The passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century was perhaps the most deeply felt crisis in European intellectual history. The Age of Reason had seen such extraordinary strides in scientific discovery and political … | Continue reading
Carissa Wong in New Scientist: Beginning in late September, 62 cases and 15 deaths had been reported by 17 October, mostly among healthcare workers in Kigali, the capital city. More than 800 contacts of infected people have been followed up in an effort to catch infections early … | Continue reading
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Kelsey Klotz in The Common Reader: In May 2018, Childish Gambino (Donald Glover’s musical alter-ego) dropped the single “This Is America.” ¹ Critics generated think piece after think piece dedicated to analyzing the video, which was laden with visual symbolism, including referenc … | Continue reading
Ralf Webb in The Guardian: In 1960, Oliver Sacks, a 27-year-old University of Oxford graduate, arrived in San Francisco by Greyhound bus. Born in Cricklewood, London, Sacks spent the better part of his 20s training to be a doctor, but came to feel that English academic medicine w … | Continue reading
Smriti Mallapaty in Nature: Ever since the first blood-forming stem cells were successfully transplanted into people with blood cancers more than 50 years ago, researchers have wondered whether they developed cancer-causing mutations. A unique study1 on the longest-lived transpla … | Continue reading
Peter B. Kaufman at the LARB: THE YEAR IS 1906. Theodore Roosevelt is in the White House. In New York, the newspapers are reporting on the political aspirations of William Randolph Hearst, unrest in Russia, and the latest dividends from US Steel. Scientific American is running ar … | Continue reading
Leo Robson at The New Statesman: In various ways, Pedro Almodóvar’s terrific new film represents a culmination or point of arrival. The Room Next Door, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, marks the director’s first time working in English and telling a story se … | Continue reading
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by Mary Hrovat When I was growing up, my mother and I would sometimes read or recite poetry to each other. Ours was not a poetic household, and my father would occasionally complain: “If poets have something to say, why don’t they just say it?” But we thought they did say it, alb … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at Marginal Revolution. Patrick Collison is the billionaire founder of the online payments company Stripe. In 2019, they wrote an article calling for a discipline of Progress Studies, which wou … | Continue reading
Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings: Answer and more here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
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Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Twenty-three Nobel-winning economists just signed a letter saying that Trump’s economic policies would be bad for the country. Some excerpts: While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, … | Continue reading
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Susana Monso in Time Magazine: In 2018, field researchers in Uganda came across an unusual sight: a female chimpanzee carried an infant that she had recently given birth to, and which was affected by albinism, an extremely uncommon condition in this species that gives their fur a … | Continue reading
Adam Frank at Noema: Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orbiting distant suns? If so, have any of these other worlds also birthed li … | Continue reading
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Traffic Stop The officer asked, Do you know why I pulled you over? So I tried to explain about the correlation between an unhappy childhood and the need to pull, about how Elon Musk invented Teslas because we’re all characters in Grand Theft Auto, about needing to outrun my futur … | Continue reading
Kevin Richardson at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: It is incredibly difficult to say something new about social norms. The question “What is a social norm?” has been given many detailed answers by philosophers and social scientists. Social norms are often theorized as rules of … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey Most people don’t want to hear your sob stories, even if they pretend to be caring listeners. Even a good friend listening to your personal version of Orpheus and Eurydice—and making all the right noises—is probably focused on whether to put snow tires on their car … | Continue reading
by Steve Szilagyi My friend Ian worked hard all his life. In his seventies, he bought a big house and moved his son’s family in with him. It’s the classic multigenerational setup, and it seems to be working out. Only one thing bothers him—the zombies. “My son and his kids love th … | Continue reading
The sun seen through wispy clouds, from my window. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
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Jennie Lightweis-Goff at The Point: College towns are a little like Vegas. They’re fallen capitals, scourged by development and game-day apartments. The boomer professors got there and built the Museum of the American Rebel; soon after, they withered into Cadaver Bohemias. The Go … | Continue reading
Samantha Laine Perfas interviews Leonard Cassuto in The Harvard Gazette: You start your book by pointing out that all academic writers begin their careers writing for one person: their teacher. Why does that create problems? This is the primal scene of academic writing: some stud … | Continue reading
Mitchell Morgan Johnson at The Paris Review: Went back to the gym after ten days out of town. On vacation in Oregon, with my family, I didn’t work out a single time. On the plane home, I watched an episode of Succession with Alexander Skarsgård in it and thought, I’d like to look … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: A large economy is one of the best examples we have of complex dynamics. There are multiple components arranged in complicated overlapping hierarchies, out-of-equilibrium dynamics, nonlinear coupling and feedback between different levels, an … | Continue reading
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From Literary Hub: For the next few weeks, Literary Hub will be going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls on November 5th. Each week at Lit Hub we’ll be featuring reading lists, essays, and interviews on impor … | Continue reading
Robert McCrum in The Independent: Dear Hanif, You and I have been friends and sparring partners in the beaten way of the London book, theatre and media world for about half a lifetime – more than 40 years. At Faber’s in the 1980s, I published quite a bit of your early work (notab … | Continue reading
From Nature: Science in the United States has never been stronger by most measures. Over the past five years, the nation has won more scientific Nobel prizes than the rest of the world combined — in line with its domination of the prizes since the middle of the twentieth century. … | Continue reading
The Keeper of Sheep —excerpt I don’t believe in God because I’ve never seen him. If he wanted me to believe in him, He would doubtless come and talk to me and walk in through my front door Saying, Here I am! (This may sound ridiculous to the ears Of someone who, because he doesn’ … | Continue reading
by David J. Lobina Firstly: fascism is dead and it is not coming back. By fascism it is meant the historical fascism of the 1920-40s, in particular the primus inter (more-or-less) pares fascism of 1920s Italy – id est, Fascism – and to a lesser extent that of Nazi Germany, notwit … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela The words are fine, and some of the concepts they represent rather appealing, actually. It’s the usages to which they are put that bug me, usages that are by turns deceiving, dishonest, obfuscating, bogus, hokey, and euphemistic. There is a theme binding them all … | Continue reading
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Yung In Chae at The Yale Review: On October 10, 2024—the day after Hangeul Day, which celebrates the invention of the Korean alphabet—I and millions of other Koreans were able to do something we had never been able to do before: read a novel by a Nobel Prize laureate in our nativ … | Continue reading
Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta: One afternoon in January 2011, Hussein Mourtada(opens a new tab) leapt onto his desk and started dancing. He wasn’t alone: Some of the graduate students who shared his Paris office were there, too. But he didn’t care. The mathematician realized that … | Continue reading
Noam Chomsky at Literary Hub: The basic principles of contemporary American strategy were laid out during World War II. As the war came to its end, American planners were well aware that the United States would emerge as the dominant power in the world, holding a hegemonic positi … | Continue reading
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