Shaun Walker at Lit Hub: The fundamental role of intelligence agencies is to obtain information about other countries not available through open channels. Much of this work is done in the shadows, and most intelligence agencies use undercover operatives. The simplest way to do so … | Continue reading
Adam Broomberg and Rafael Gonzalez at Cabinet Magazine: Precisely for this strong physical, cultural, symbolic, and economic relationship with the Palestinians, olive trees have become targets for violence by the state of Israel and by Israeli settlers. A study published in 2012 … | Continue reading
Max Krupnick in Harvard Magazine: Throughout the past month, several groups of Harvard alumni and faculty members have written and signed open letters encouraging President Alan M. Garber and the Corporation to stand up to the Trump administration. The ways in which the letters b … | Continue reading
Joel Achenbach in The Washington Post: A distant planet’s atmosphere shows signs of molecules that on Earth are associated only with biological activity, a possible signal of life on what is suspected to be a watery world, according to a report published Wednesday that analyzed o … | Continue reading
I don’t Want Eternity I don’t want eternity it overwhelms me I want to be alive while I live without thinking about why I live I want to be lightning in the air an iridescent butterfly a soap bubble about to burst. by Claribel Alegría Translation, Carolyn Forché from: Sorrow Curb … | Continue reading
by Priya Malhotra “How are you?” asked my aunt about a year ago in my living room in New Delhi, her tone languorous and inquisitive, her gaze perched on my face. Having recently moved back to India after about 28 years in the U.S., this deceptively simple question both thrilled a … | Continue reading
by Lei Wang “In bardo again,” I text a friend, meaning I’m at the Dallas airport, en route to JFK. I can’t remember now who came up with it first, but it fits. Neither of us are even Buddhist, yet we are Buddhist-adjacent, that in-between place. Though purgatories are not just in … | Continue reading
I was startled for a moment before realizing that our neighbors had taken their child out of this suit before hanging it out to dry. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Georgia Sparling at the website of Brown University: As the global response to tariffs and concerns about inflation reach a fever pitch, Brown University political economist Mark Blyth is rethinking conventional economic wisdom on why prices go up and how policymakers can wrestle … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in the New York Times: The human brain is so complex that scientific brains have a hard time making sense of it. A piece of neural tissue the size of a grain of sand might be packed with hundreds of thousands of cells linked together by miles of wiring. In 1979, Franc … | Continue reading
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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader: Last week, even a Martian could have heard the buzz of anticipation in WashU’s Graham Chapel. Its pews were smooshed with an overflow audience eager to hear Tim Alberta, staff writer for The Atlantic, make sense of something we have strug … | Continue reading
Dennis Cooper interviewed at 3:AM Magazine: It’s a bit of a long story. In brief, I had always wanted to make a porn film. I thought it was a genre that had never been treated with much artfulness or experimentation. I mentioned this interest of mine online, and someone in the po … | Continue reading
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Seamus Perry at Literary Review: A lot of what comes in William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is about fellow enthusiasts rather than about Blake himself. It opens with Derek Jarman at the Avebury stone circle, treading in the footsteps of Paul Nash; then, by what Coleridge … | Continue reading
Marvellous Error Last night as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelous error!— that a spring was breaking out in my heart. I said: along which secret aqueduct, Oh water, are you coming to me, water of a new life that I have never drunk? Last night, as I was sleeping, I dreamt—marvelou … | Continue reading
Ron Charles in The Washington Post: It sounds like a strategy meeting with the campaign team: “Whom do men say that I am?” Staff members start tossing out responses from the latest polling: “Some say that thou art John the Baptist: some, Elias; and others, Jeremias, or one of the … | Continue reading
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by Ken MacVey Do corporations have free will? Do they have legal and moral responsibility for their actions? Many argue that legal and moral responsibility must rest on free will. If there is no free will there cannot be such a thing as legal or moral responsibility. But consider … | Continue reading
by Azadeh Amirsadri I am in Del Mar having breakfast with two of my adult children who are telling me what sort of man I should date, and I wonder when did we switch roles. When did I stop being the one they were a little apprehensive about introducing a new person to and I … | Continue reading
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Henry Oliverin The Guardian: The words we use feel inevitable. We take them for granted. But they began life about 6,000 years ago, when copper was being smithed in the lands to the west of the Black Sea. Spinney says “an aura of magic must have hovered around the early smiths, w … | Continue reading
Heidi J. Larson & David M. Bersoff in Nature: Science has a trust problem — at least, that is the common perception. If only, the argument goes, we could get people to ‘trust’ or ‘follow’ the science, we, as a society, would be doing more about climate change, childhood vaccinati … | Continue reading
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Rebecca Ruth Gould at JSTOR Daily: “What if we view street activities not as organic, evolving phenomena but as calculated efforts to challenge and subvert the state rules governing street dynamics?” Pamela Karimi asks in Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran, … | Continue reading
Maggie Doherty in Harper’s Magazine: On the morning of February 2, 2023, I exited the subway at 57th Street to find the air growing colder. It had been a warm winter. But the first proper cold front was moving in, and I already felt underdressed. I propelled myself toward the war … | Continue reading
Laura Tran in The Scientist: Atrip to the grocery store is a sensory adventure, with aisles brimming with eye-catching packages designed to tempt shoppers. Each display promises a delicious and memorable food adventure. “We’ve all experienced this moment where we crave a specific … | Continue reading
THE HAPPINESS OF ATOMS 1. According to Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “the father of modern rocket science,” in order for the earth to thrive every atom must be happy. “It is the organic need and right of all atoms not to feel torment but to exist in peace and happiness,” he wrote in 19 … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for the people of a nation to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with their Executive, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa The humble 2. It’s not big, like the Brobdingnagian numbers. It’s not nothing, like zero. It’s not the first something, like one. It’s hard to imagine much can be said about the unremarkable two. Of course, Covid gave us a newfound appreciation for the power of … | Continue reading
Stephanie Morisette. Hybrid Drone/Bird, 2024. More here, here, and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek and Peter Singer in the New York Times: On March 19, 2024, we emailed the psychologist and Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, inviting him to appear on our podcast, “Lives Well Lived,” and suggesting a date in May. He replied promptly, saying that he would … | Continue reading
Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Toward Global Goal Alignment: Today’s AI technologies are based on deep learning, yet “AI” is commonly equated with large language models, and the fundamental nature of deep learning and LLMs is obscured by talk of using “statistical patterns” to “pr … | Continue reading
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Nicholas Smyth in The Hedgehog Review: In recent decades, a paradox has haunted American political life. Given that political progressives wielded considerable political, economic, and cultural influence, how is it possible that our actual social order was so resistant to real ch … | Continue reading
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Charlie English in The Guardian: Mishra is a relative latecomer to the Palestinian cause. It was Israeli heroes, not Arabs, with whom he was infatuated as a boy growing up in India: he even had a picture on his wall of Moshe Dayan, Israel’s defence minister during the Six Day War … | Continue reading
Blake Morrison at The Guardian: You’d think a sleep room would be cosy, but the one on Ward 5 of the Royal Waterloo hospital in London, back in the 1960s, was dark and airless, a twilight zone where up to six patients – almost always young women – would lie comatose on grey mattr … | Continue reading
Dwight Garner at the NYT: Once upon a time, during the last quarter of the 20th century, it was possible to argue that one person was America’s best novelist and best literary critic. I am talking about John Updike, whose long and elegant reviews in The New Yorker set reading age … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Or, rather, the very real threat to Physicalism posed by Philosophical Zombies. On the one hand, there are the Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, Walking Dead, zombies, which are rotting, but animated, corpses that devour human flesh and … | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles. There was a meme that circulated a few years back amongst the tweedier of the interwebs which roughly claimed t … | Continue reading
Tell me Something I don’t Know Don’t tell me the earth’s a sphere and the sun’s kiss amounts to half-day terminal bliss with a dark end, or that seasons have to do with angles, mystics have to do with angels, and lovers are about orbiting passions, that pulse like binary stars ac … | Continue reading
Huang Yiping in Project Syndicate: US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement of sweeping new tariffs on imports from more than 180 countries will be remembered as a man-made economic tsunami. Many are already comparing it to President Herbert Hoover’s 1930 Smoot-H … | Continue reading
Quinn Slobodian in Boston Review: In 2013 Charles Murray traveled to the Galápagos Islands to deliver an address to the Mont Pelerin Society—that font of neoliberalism, founded in 1947 by Friedrich Hayek. But Murray’s talk didn’t run through the usual neoliberal script: economic … | Continue reading
Kyle Chan over at his Substack High Capacity: The ”China Shock” paper (actually a set of papers)1 sent shockwaves through the US political world when it was first released by a team of high-profile economists in January 2016. It estimated the US lost nearly 1 million manufacturin … | Continue reading
Corey Robin in Sidecar: Tariff, Donald Trump has said, ‘is the most beautiful word in the dictionary’. He won’t be pleased to learn that it comes from Arabic. Ta‘rīf is a notification; ‘arrafa means to make known. Despite his many notifications, Trump hasn’t really made known why … | Continue reading
Liam Shaw in LRB: The pain of toothache arrives long after the damage has been done. The process begins when bacteria in the mouth turn sugars from our food into acid, which etches the tooth’s enamel, allowing the bacteria to penetrate further. Only when they hit the nerve bundle … | Continue reading
Rafia Zakaria in Dawn: THE world is angry — and in most places, women bear the brunt of this anger. This International Women’s Day, the latest report by UN Women states that one in four countries in the world reported a backlash on gender rights in 2024. Over the past decade, the … | Continue reading