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From Five Books: The books shortlisted for the 2026 Orwell Prizes, the UK’s most prestigious awards for writing about politics, have been announced. “As judges, we returned again and again to what George Orwell means to us: clarity of prose and unflinching intellectual bravery,” … | Continue reading
Moira Doinegan in Book Forum: SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Crew members and other actors would wait around for hours, wondering when—or if—Marilyn Monroe would show up. Some days, especially toward the end of her life, she never made it to set at all. Monroe is famous for her mix of irre … | Continue reading
Asher Mullard in Nature: Photosynthetic machinery can be harvested from spinach and transplanted into the eyes of mice, where it transforms light into molecules that carry energy and can tame inflammation1. “We are stealing the entire technology that has evolved over millions of … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss Eight years ago, in May of 2018, motivated by a series of discussions with my then-graduating son, I wrote a piece for 3 Quarks Daily titled “The Graduate Schools His Father.” Then, chaos descended upon the land. Trump, Biden, Trump. Wars, pestilence, theological … | Continue reading
by Herbert Harris What gives art its power? There are as many answers as there are powerful works of art, but most seem to fall into a few broad categories. A great deal of art is representational. It is intended to depict or show us something, whether natural or abstract. It suc … | Continue reading
…. Ménage à trois Isn’t it a miracle that three atoms have combined in electric love to become that fluid substance that bears boats and wrecks ships, that fills bays that breed and protect life, that sustains it, the essential stuff of bodies and minds, the billows of overhead m … | Continue reading
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From The Guardian: This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank t … | Continue reading
Angela Haupt in Time Magazine: When your best friend or partner or kid snaps at you, it’s easy to frame them as difficult. Anna Elton, a marriage and family therapist in Palm Beach, Fla., would like you to consider a different story. “When you see anger, it’s just the tip of the … | Continue reading
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The Poet The poet sits and dreams and dreams; He scans his verse; he probes his themes. Then turns to stretch or stir about, unless in thoughts, his strength gives out. Then off to bed, for he must rise and cord some wood, or tamp some ties, Or break a field of fertile soil, Or… | Continue reading
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by Robert Jensen Caitlin Taylor believes that a sustainable food system needs “legible” infrastructure, which is why she proposes—not entirely in jest—building slaughterhouses next to farmers markets. Architects and engineers usually strive to make infrastructure invisible—so fun … | Continue reading
by Lei Wang Stephen Colbert in conversation with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: COLBERT Which is better, to know or not to know? TYSON To know. Of course. COLBERT But why? Why is it always better to know? TYSON Well, you asked for my opinion. COLBERT Yes, that’s what Oed … | Continue reading
Henry Reichman at The Hedgehog Review: “It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be,” sobs a young bride in the final line of Joan Didion’s piece “Marrying Absurd.” Just a few pages and slotted neatly in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection before more renowned e … | Continue reading
Gennaro Tomma in Smithsonian Magazine: Between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, a now-extinct population of wolves evolved into dogs, with a little help from humans. Today—at least in Italy, which hosts one of Europe’s largest wolf populations—genes are flowing in the opposite direct … | Continue reading
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From Noema: Nathan Gardels: It is remarkable in today’s context to remember that 40 years ago, you and I sat here in Cambridge at the dining room table of the famous sociologist Daniel Bell to discuss what we called “the American Cultural Civil War.” The discussion was about the … | Continue reading
Aimee Cunningham in Science News: Around one in 500 women don’t have a functioning womb, needed to carry a pregnancy. This condition, called absolute uterine factor infertility, occurs when a woman is born without a uterus, has had to have it removed or has a defective organ. For … | Continue reading
Laura Tran in The Scientist: Wearable devices and electronics have advanced rapidly, establishing their place as a versatile platform for health monitoring and interventions. Among these technologies, smart contact lenses have been developed to monitor eye pressure or glucose lev … | Continue reading
by Jim Hanas A wag on Substack recently noted that there are apparently only four ideas: the angel of history, the eternal return, will to power, and one I can’t remember, the idea being that all philosophical conversations on the Internet terminate in four commonplaces. (The fou … | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Why be happy when you could be interesting? —Zizek What follows is what I know about the Good Life. Some of it, anyway. It’s what I have gleaned and which may be useful to you. There are obvious limitations: it is one person’s perspective, a white heterosexual mal … | Continue reading
Sarah Lyall in the New York Times: Sometime in the 2000s, the producer Lindsay Doran asked her doctor for a book recommendation. “I’m reading that book everybody’s reading,” the doctor replied. “You know, the one about the shepherd who’s murdered and the sheep solve the crime.” D … | Continue reading
Anton Leicht at Threading the Needle: There’s a common mantra in the outskirts of AI policy thought: driven by market pressures and overheated capital markets, AI tokens will soon be abundant—and the future belongs to those who can use them best. The further you get away from San … | Continue reading
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Christian Waugh at The Conversation: Picture Gigi, having a chat with her boss, when the meeting takes a sharp turn. Gigi’s boss tells her that her work has been lacking recently and that maybe she needs to stay late a couple of evenings to make it up. Surprised by her boss’s rem … | Continue reading
Phillip Wang in Time Magazine: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday unveiled a $124.7 billion budget that he said would close a projected $12 billion deficit over the next two years without drawing from the city’s rainy day reserves, raising property taxes, or making maj … | Continue reading
Heidi Ledford in Nature: A sweeping analysis of sleep duration and signs of ageing in half a million adults has pinpointed a sweet spot — about six to eight hours of sleep each day — that is linked to a lower risk of early death and disease. Getting either more or less sleep than … | Continue reading
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Julian Bell at nonsite: “The museums are full of uprooted pictures,” Pierre Bonnard once said. The artist was anxious for his pictorial seedlings. They might be thrust out into galleries in which they would struggle for survival among alien life forms and in which the climate mig … | Continue reading
Shoulders A man crosses the street in rain, stepping gently, looking two times north and south, because his son is asleep on his shoulder. No car must splash him. No car drive too near to his shadow. This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo but he’s not marked. Nowhere d … | Continue reading
David Malouf (1934 – 2026) at Sydney Review of Books: Each lover of Lawrence’s poems will have his own story of first contact with a new and unique consciousness. Lawrence was the first entirely modern poet I was presented with and, except for what I had picked up from films – th … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa Human intuition is a marvelous thing. With scant evidence, we can make assessments, judgments, and predictions that are often surprisingly close to correct. But our intuition can also lead us astray. Worse, an intuitive idea can be virtually impossible to give … | Continue reading
Seven cyclists passing from Brixen into Vahrn, on a bike path behind a vineyard in South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Jon Greenaway at Current Affairs: There is a distinctive, deeply uncanny horror to the way Jimmy Fallon laughs. Look it up—there are literally hundreds of videos showing him breaking out into laughter at the slightest provocation. It is not a reaction (he sometimes won’t even wai … | Continue reading
Gina Kolata and Rebecca Robbins at the New York Times: Pancreatic cancer is one of the most dire diagnoses in medicine. There are few available treatments, and they do little to help. For decades, experimental drugs flopped in trials. Many researchers believed the biological obst … | Continue reading
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Emma Wager, Shameek Rakshit, and Cynthia Cox at the website of The Peterson Center on Healthcare and KFF: This brief examines the drivers of health spending and differences between the U.S. and its peers – other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) nation … | Continue reading
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Ewan Callaway in Nature: It’s hard to imagine that a snail could kill a person, but a particularly venomous group of marine molluscs called cone snails can. Their stings contain a cocktail of small proteins called conotoxins, some of which can block ion channels in the nervous sy … | Continue reading
Blue Heron The startled blue heron erupts out of its long-legged inwardness and flies low to the pond over its shadow. My eye flickers between its great sweep of wind and its blurred mirror motion almost white in the pond’s sky-shine. At the end of each wing-beat, the long body d … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers (1) Aristophanes. This is my favorite theory about the origin and nature of romantic love. Humans were once spherical, four-armed, four-legged, two-headed beings that rolled around everywhere confidently. They were cut in half by Zeus for trying to scale Olympus an … | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien Read below or listen here: In this interview, Angie Pepper and Richard Healey discuss their arguments for adopting an abolitionist approach to animal rights, focusing on a recent article in which they argue that the political and social power we wield over animals … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
“Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of ‘viewpoint diversity,’ according to two people familiar with the initiative.” — The Harvard Crimson Richard Amesbury at McS … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Economic markets are efficient ways of deciding fair prices, at least in ideal circumstances of perfect competition, information, and choice. But there is more to life than fair prices. Two people might decide on a fair price to carry out a … | Continue reading