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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
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
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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Bob Hirshon in Discover Magazine: For thousands of years, people have been using fungi to bake bread and brew beer (yeasts), as nutritious foods (mushrooms and truffles), and, more recently, as a source of life-saving antibiotics (penicillin, neomycin and many more). And yet, an … | Continue reading
Max Krupnick in Harvard Magazine: With one minute left in Harvard’s last men’s basketball game of the 2023-2024 season, sophomore Chisom Okpara drove toward the basket, leaped, and released the ball. It clanked off the rim back into his hands. On the second attempt, he made the s … | Continue reading
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Ritchie Robertson at Literary Review: Unsuccessful in politics and war, Augustus turned to culture. He transformed Dresden into a city which, even after the notorious bombing raid of February 1945, is still handsome. The highlights include the Zwinger, a palace complex that serve … | Continue reading
Beer Bottle In the burned- out highway ditch the throw- away beer bottle lands standing up unbroken, like a cat thrown off of a roof to kill it, landing hard and dazzled in the sun, right side up; sort of a miracle by Ted Kooser from Strong Measures Harper Collins, 1986 Enjoying … | Continue reading
by Gus Mitchell The following piece is my own minor contribution to the “Surrealism Centenary.” I begin with a disavowal of the entire “2024 centenary” enterprise, which seems to have added little to our appreciation of the group, and because I would question allowing Andre Breto … | Continue reading
by Adele A. Wilby Renowned and respected for her scholarship, her history of authorship of many books on dictatorship and her political experience, is it any wonder that Anne Applebaum’s new book Autocracy, Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World has been so critically recei … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Along The Sidewalk On A Late Afternoon, October 2024. Composite, digital photographs. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Brooks Riley in Art at First Sight: A painting is not something we step into. We might crave a landscape, a room, a street, a scene or a background, but we can’t inhabit the painter’s vision of it. Our eyes inch closer as they focus on areas of the work, but the view stops there: … | Continue reading
Dario Amodei at his own website: I think and talk a lot about the risks of powerful AI. The company I’m the CEO of, Anthropic, does a lot of research on how to reduce these risks. Because of this, people sometimes draw the conclusion that I’m a pessimist or “doomer” who thinks AI … | Continue reading
Jennifer M Morton in Aeon: Alongside equality, freedom and opportunity, fear has long played a powerful role in political discourse. In ordinary life, fear is often a fitting response to danger. If you encounter a snake while out on a hike, fear will lead you to back away and exe … | Continue reading
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Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta Magazine: Around 2,500 years ago, Babylonian traders in Mesopotamia impressed two slanted wedges into clay tablets. The shapes represented a placeholder digit, squeezed between others, to distinguish numbers such as 50, 505 and 5,005. An elementary ve … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: For the first time, an off-the-shelf CAR T cell therapy has been used to treat potentially life-threatening autoimmune disorders in three people. With a single shot, the treatment rapidly reversed their debilitating symptoms for up to a year. The tr … | Continue reading
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by Richard Farr For several weeks I’ve had an article by the excellent Rick Perlstein squatting unread in my Ought-To-Read list. The title is Everything You Wanted to Know About World War III but Were Afraid to Ask. I am afraid to ask: although I ought to want to know, right now … | Continue reading
by John Allen Paulos Every time I read or watch anything about the election I hear some variant of the phrase “margin of error.” My mathematically attuned ears perk up, but usually it’s just a slightly pretentious way of saying the election is very close or else that it’s not ver … | Continue reading
I saw myself a ring of bone I saw myself in the clear stream of all of it and vowed, always to be open to it that all of it might flow through and then heard “ring of bone” where ring is what a bell does —Lew Welch Down to the Bone If I… | Continue reading
Seyla Benhabib in Boston Review: I first arrived in Frankfurt, in this city of immigrants and exiles, in the fall of 1980, as a foreign student and scholar whose life was forever changed by her encounter with it. In Frankfurt I met brilliant friends and scholars from all over the … | Continue reading
Camilo Ruiz Tassinari in Phenomenal World: Lopezobradorismo is without a doubt the most significant political movement to have emerged in Mexico over the past three decades. Since 2018, it has reconstituted the country’s post-authoritarian political system. The movement’s new lea … | Continue reading
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Sanjay G Reddy over at reddytoread: When I first encountered the ideas central to the winners of this year’s three Nobel Prize in Economics around two and a half decades ago I was startled. The excessive economy of their framework for understanding a complex global reality combin … | Continue reading