Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.” Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfie … | Continue reading
Andre Popovitch at Asterisk: Consider this straightforward calculation: (10100) + 1 – (10100) The answer, of course, is 1. But if you were to input it right now on your iPhone calculator, the answer you would get is 0. Android, however, gets it right. Why is there a difference? T … | Continue reading
Customhouse Quay She’s out of sight behind the black Brasilia, Slav, I think, Ukranian, her soulful English, dark eyebrows, bewilderment. We migrate or drift to the antipodes from God knows where, clouds resembling barbed wire, or a Balinese shadow puppet play. We are proverbial … | Continue reading
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Karla Adam in The Washington Post: In a city well-known for political theater, the show at Stone Nest, a performance venue in the heart of London’s West End, took the concept to a new level. For the last month, audiences have been reenacting the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro … | Continue reading
Dunja Mijatovic and Ken Roth in the New York Times: Friday is the 30th anniversary of the deadliest massacre in Europe since World War II, when Bosnian Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladic overran an area meant to be protected by the United Nations. Soon after, they proceeded to e … | Continue reading
Paul Grimstad at The Current: In a 1989 interview with the Detroit Free Press, director Charlotte Zwerin worried that her documentary Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser, then newly out in general release after premiering the year before, would be labeled a “jazz film.” Zwerin ha … | Continue reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o59Nsw7wxU&list=RD5o59Nsw7wxU&start_radio=1&ab_channel=colibricrazy%28%C3%8DndigosAmino%C3%A1cidos%29 | Continue reading
Adele Gleason in Lapham’s Quarterly: 1910: Lahore As I knew him in the many summers he lived on estates joining ours in Elmira, N.Y., U.S.A., his wife’s birth place; the wonder of Mark Twain’s real personality increased. He reminded one of one of the many definitions of genius, a … | Continue reading
Mehr Farooqi in The Indian Express: Last night, a friend called to give me the sad news of Naim sahib’s passing. He had not been too well since suffering a stroke a couple of years ago but after returning from rehab his spirit was as indomitable as ever. He relished writing and w … | Continue reading
Matthew Sims at Aeon Magazine: During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people took up baking, others decided to get a dog; I chose to grow and observe slime mould. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became home to two cultures of Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime moul … | Continue reading
by Ken MacVey Since 1914, the Federal Trade Commission ‘s mission has been to enforce civil antitrust and unfair competition/consumer protection laws. The question is whether this mission has been supplanted—whether the FTC under Trump 2 .0 is becoming the Federal Political Truth … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley RIP Pocket (aka Read It Later) 2007-July 8, 2025 The recent announcement of Mozilla’s shutdown of the Pocket app caught me by surprise. It felt as if the rug was being pulled out from under me—the rug being a motley weave of all the online articles and stories I’v … | Continue reading
by Priya Malhotra Virtue wasn’t always gentle. In ancient Rome, virtus was a word of force and visibility. It came from the Latin word vir, meaning “man,” and encompassed ideals of military bravery, civic leadership, and public excellence. A virtuous man was someone who acted dec … | Continue reading
Andrew Bustamante at Big Think: When you accept that other people have secrets, and they will always have secrets, you are preparing yourself for a much more predictable, much more successful future. Because once you accept that reality, you can start applying behaviors, practice … | Continue reading
Jeremy Shapiro at Persuasion: The Thinker just discovered, with a mix of awe and quiet dread, that ChatGPT—a machine—could write his latest policy memo better and faster than he could. He had asked it, on a whim, to summarize the security implications of EU strategic autonomy. In … | Continue reading
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Megan C. Reynolds at Literary Hub: I was born in the United States and therefore speak American English, because, aside from a brief few years in my childhood when my father assured me that my first language was Mandarin Chinese (my mother’s native tongue), I was raised in an Eng … | Continue reading
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The Where in my Belly Scientists say my brain and heart are 73 percent water— they underestimate me. A small island—minis, I emerged among Minnesota’s northern lakes, the where of maanomin—wild rice in my belly. I am from boats and canoes and kayaks, from tribal ghosts who rise a … | Continue reading
Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily: How far back must we go to understand the roots of the long enmity between Iran and the United States? A good place to start is the Iran Hostage Crisis, sparked forty-six years ago after the US ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sought protection and … | Continue reading
Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker: This past August, in a windowless room of the British Library, in London, Tasha Marks was enacting her own form of time travel. Marks is a scent designer who works with museums, heritage sites, and other cultural spaces to create odors that can … | Continue reading
by David Greer Standing face to face with an Anna’s hummingbird hovering a foot or two from my nose, I felt a little mesmerized. Anna’s hummingbirds tend to have that effect on me. They’re otherworldly creatures, with a world of mystery packed into a body that weighs not much mor … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom! 1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do … | Continue reading
Storm clouds rolled in just as the sun was setting in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Mark O’Connell in The Guardian: Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensi … | Continue reading
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: I increasingly find people asking me “does AI damage your brain?” It’s a revealing question. Not because AI causes literal brain damage (it doesn’t) but because the question itself shows how deeply we fear what AI might do to our ability to thin … | Continue reading
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Elisa New in the New York Times: In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked: O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial-house of him I love? I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lila … | Continue reading
Andrew Kay in Harper’s Magazine: “I want y’all to walk to the sign that represents the kind of OCD you most identify with,” announces the moderator, a young woman named Angie Bello who sits cross-legged on the carpet and whose service doodle, Sully, has docked his submarine snout … | Continue reading
Lynne Peeples in Nature: George Slavich recalls the final hours he spent with his father. It was a laughter-packed day. His father even broke into the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over dinner. “His deep, booming, joyful voice filled the entire restaurant,” says Slavich. “I was semi … | Continue reading
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Gaza the Immortal City I walk through the city of the immortals, Burnt bodies, broken limbs and shreds of flesh hung down from their white bones, Like mummies they lie marinated in Pyramids amid pots and utensils, Sometimes I hear eerie sounds coming out of their hollow skeletons … | Continue reading
Gary Shteyngart and Jane Ciabattari at Lit Hub: Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties a … | Continue reading
by Christopher Hall It is now close to 20 years since I completed my Ph.D. in English, and, truth be told, I’m still not exactly sure what I accomplished in doing so. There was, of course, the mundane concern about what I was thinking in spending so many of what ought to have bee … | Continue reading
Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine: Does anyone write love letters anymore? We send emails. Or worse, texts, emoji. Fast, short, disposable. Once, love letters were slow to make and slower to arrive. They were keepsakes, confessions, feelings made physical. They had form. They were … | Continue reading
by Lei Wang I solemnly swear this is not a column complaining about my parents. But the first time I listened to this ten-minute meditation on Imagining Ideal Parents by the clinical psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dan Brown, I cried the entire way through. Also the sec … | Continue reading
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Marlene Laruelle in the Politics and Rights Review: Scholarship on populism has dominated the last two decades but is now retreating in the face of a new concept that seems better equipped to capture the current transformations in our society: that of illiberalism. Illiberalism e … | Continue reading
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: Nature writer Robert Macfarlane will need little introduction, having authored a string of successful books on people, landscape, and language. I was impressed by his 2019 book Underland, so when Is a River Alive? was announced, I decide … | Continue reading
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Desmond Lachman at Project Syndicate: When he was France’s finance minister in the 1960s, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously complained about the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar’s position as the world’s leading reserve currency conferred on the Unit … | Continue reading
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How Things Happen Rain comes when it will. It doesn’t care for us. It’s hitchhiking its way to the sea on a cloud. The sun is interested in its own fires. If light comes, so be it. Bees feel an itch on their legs only nectar can sooth. So many gifts from indifferent givers. We… | Continue reading
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Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist: Moss is an often-overlooked, ancient plant that is far from insignificant. Among the first to colonize land, mosses greened the planet and transformed Earth’s climate, providing an oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed animals to evolve.1 These har … | Continue reading
Olga Litvak at The Hedgehog Review: From the Christian perspective, the hyphen is a sign of Jewish translatability; but the same sign, read, we might say, from right to left, also points to a more confrontational reality, that of Jewish resistance to being translated (elevated) i … | Continue reading
Harmony Holiday at Bookforum: Fish Tales, released this spring in a new edition and still pioneering decades after its first run, slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas with events and characters who loom so large they leave no room for indulgent ideological abstractions; th … | Continue reading