Ryan Nourai in Esquire: I was sitting in a funeral home in San Pedro, California, surrounded by carpeted floors, inaudible footsteps, and clasped hands. And then—I couldn’t help it—I imagined her body ripped apart. Would the powder in the bullet explode in the flames? My body tri … | Continue reading
Michael Le Page in New Scientist: Drinking even small amounts of alcohol reduces your life expectancy, rigorous studies show. Only those with serious flaws suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies looking at how drinking alcoh … | Continue reading
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Musa al-Gharbi at Symbolic Capital(ism): Symbolic capitalists are strange people. Actually, it might be more apt to say we are particularly WEIRD. In decades-worth of empirical studies carried out across the globe, anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his collaborators have document … | Continue reading
Stephen Smith at The Guardian: What do TS Eliot, the Coen brothers, Dorothy Parker, Mel Brooks, Clive James and Woody Allen have in common? The answer is that they all admired SJ Perelman, the droll New York prose stylist and Oscar-winning screenwriter. There’s a crowded field in … | Continue reading
Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian: The man who may very well become the vice-president of the US once told Fox News that the country is governed by a dastardly deep state comprised of cat lovers. His exact words from the 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson: We are ef … | Continue reading
Albert Li in Science: It sounded like the right thing to do. I was a first-year Ph.D. student in educational psychology, and my research adviser told me I should consider practicing open science—“being open and above board,” as he put it. He suggested I make my first-year researc … | Continue reading
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Alec Wilkinson at the NYT: In “The Secret Lives of Numbers,” Kate Kitagawa, a mathematics historian, and Timothy Revell, a science writer, intend by reasoned and scholarly means to overthrow the “assumption that the European way of doing things is superior.” Their book begins wit … | Continue reading
Temples of Smoke Fire shimmied and reached up From the iron furnace and grabbed Sawdust from the pitchfork Before I could make it across The floor or take a half step Back, as the boiler room sung About what trees were before Men & money. Those nights Smelled of greenness & sweat … | Continue reading
by John Hartley “To err is human,” observed the poet, Alexander Pope. Yet, why do we consciously choose to err from right action against our better judgement? Anyone who has tried to follow a diet or maintain a strict exercise regime will understand what can sometimes feel like a … | Continue reading
John Simpson in The Guardian: Anne Applebaum, as anyone familiar with her writing will know, is well-positioned to catalogue this new age of autocracy. Like her, Autocracy, Inc. is clear-sighted and fearless. I remember disagreeing with her genteelly at editorial meetings in the … | Continue reading
Grace Wade in New Scientist: A newly identified brain pathway in mice could explain why placebos, or interventions designed to have no therapeutic effect, still relieve pain. Developing drugs that target this pathway may lead to safer alternatives to pain medications like opioids … | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Once upon a time, Henderson argues, the upper classes used to signal their status by purchasing expensive material goods. But as the kinds of goods that used to be reserved for members of the upper classes have become available to a much wider st … | Continue reading
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Ed Simon at Lit Hub: My desire to write a cultural history of the Faust legend goes back a few years earlier than my pilgrimage to the Deptford churchyard, around the time that I attended an adaptation of the play entitled faustUS staged by the theater collective 404 Strand in my … | Continue reading
H. Alan Scott in Newsweek: If you ask Bette Midler how she got her part in the new film The Fabulous Four, it wouldn’t have anything to do with her legendary status as a performer, or that she’s an Oscar-nominated actor. “I think they needed a ham, a big ole ham. So, I got that p … | Continue reading
Jeff Tollefson in Nature: A climate scientist who was demoted for speaking out by the administration of former US president Donald Trump is seeking an investigation into her case and demanding changes to personnel policies to prevent similar retaliation against others in future. … | Continue reading
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A.W. Moore at the LRB: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book he published during his lifetime, is one of the greatest philosophical works of the 20th century. It might have been expected, when it first appeared in 1921, to have limited appeal. It is … | Continue reading
On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, in New England It is what he does not know, Crossing the road under the elm trees, About the mechanism of my car, About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, About Mozart, India, Arcturus, That wins my praise. I engage At once in whirling s … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene In Discourse on the Method, philosopher René Descartes reflects on the nature of mind. He identifies what he takes to be a unique feature of human beings— in each case, the presence of a rational soul in union with a material body. In particular, he point … | Continue reading
Vineyard in Neustift, South Tyrol. Apparently they put these rose bushes at the ends of the rows of grape vines because they are more susceptible to certain diseases and insects and act a bit like canaries in coal mines. From Le Blog IdealWine: Despite their different appearances … | Continue reading
Tracy Fessenden in The Conversation: Sixty-five years ago, on July 17, 1959, Billie Holiday died at Metropolitan Hospital in New York. The 44-year-old singer arrived after being turned away from a nearby charity hospital on evidence of drug use, then lay for hours on a stretcher … | Continue reading
Ethan Siegel at Big Think: Perhaps the greatest quest in particle physics, for perhaps half a century now, has been to find a discrepancy between theory and experiment when it comes to the Standard Model. One fascinating place to look is at the magnetic moment of the muon: a heav … | Continue reading
Guido Núñez-Mujica at Persuasion: Last Tuesday, President Biden signed into law America’s first comprehensive nuclear energy bill since 2005. The landmark ADVANCE Act provides incentives for new nuclear technologies, reduces licensing fees, offers prizes for deploying improved nu … | Continue reading
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Jessie Kindig at The Point: Here is Transcendentalism at its best, my favorite part, running wild with the imitative impulse. Like the German Romantic thinkers of whom they were quite fond, New England’s transcendentalists sought a kinship between body and mind, between the ratio … | Continue reading
Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist: The gut’s sensory system is a touchy subject thanks to specialized epithelial cells that line the gut and behave like touch sensors in the skin.1 These cells are sensitive to mechanical stimuli and communicate information about “gut feelings” to n … | Continue reading
Dante Stewart in Time Magazine: America currently finds itself in a storm. A dreadful, at times unbelievable storm. A storm so dire and visceral that it seems to be the stuff of fiction and fantasy. From the assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13 … | Continue reading
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Deepa Bhasthi at The Paris Review: Anthe (ಅಂತೆ) is one of my favorite words in the Kannada language. Somewhat meaningless by itself, it adds so much nuance and emotion when appended to a sentence that we Kannadigas cannot carry on a conversation without using it. Depending on the … | Continue reading
Dream Variations To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the… | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien First, some good news: I finally understand the Monty Hall problem. Or, at least, I feel like I do, which is still a triumph of sorts, given that this riddle’s empirically incontestable answer tends to evoke visceral, intuitive rejections, even among people who un … | Continue reading
by Eric Schenck I’ve been surfing for about three years. Not enough to be a guide of any sort, but certainly enough to realize what a miracle the sport really is. What follows are nine life lessons surfing has taught me. The more you do anything, the more you realize it can teach … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. After The Rain. Vermont, July 2024. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Yascha Mounk: What I’ve learned all of my life is that it’s good for people to be politically engaged. We want a politically active citizenry. We want people to care about politics. You don’t completely disagree with that, but you worry that too … | Continue reading
Daniel Kehlmann in The Guardian: The great discoveries of humanity have always taught us that we are not masters in our own house: Copernicus removed the Earth from the centre of the cosmos, Darwin spoiled our species’ idea of divine creation, Freud showed that we neither know no … | Continue reading
From Project Syndicate: Project Syndicate: A year and a half ago, you criticized the US Federal Reserve’s response to inflation in the United States, arguing that, if anything, “disinflation has happened despite central banks’ actions, not because of them.” Now, many observers ar … | Continue reading
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Derek King in The Hedgehig Review: College campuses have a literacy problem. According to many humanities professors, the current crop of students demonstrates significantly less interest in reading books, and they are generally unprepared to meet the reading expectations that we … | Continue reading
From Medical News Today: Unlike previously proposed life-extending drugs and treatments, which often have poor side-effect profiles, work in only one sex, or extend life without improving health, IL-11 does not seem to have these limitations. Although these findings are currently … | Continue reading
Joel Sandelson at Aeon Magazine: We habitually associate literary realism with things like down-to-earth subject matter, plausible detail and convincing chronology. For the ancients, though, realism had just the opposite meaning. Aristotle argued that art should transcend the mas … | Continue reading
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Jonathan Romney at Literary Review: Twisters, with a budget estimated at $200 million, is that enduring Hollywood paradox: the blockbuster that uses capitalism as shorthand for moral corruption. We know from the start that Javi’s business is compromised just by seeing its natty c … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman Imagine a hunter, a tree, and a squirrel. The hunter is on the ground, the squirrel is clinging to the tree, and the tree is between two of them. As the hunter moves, the squirrel moves, always keeping the tree between them. The hunter goes around the tree. Does … | Continue reading
by Eleni Petrakou It’s late 2022. Scientists announce the creation of a spacetime wormhole. A flurry of articles and press releases of the highest caliber spread the news. Involved researchers call the achievement as exciting as the Higgs boson discovery. Pulitzer-winning journal … | Continue reading
Drinking It All In A long way up Bray Road past the point where the first of two small brooks cross beneath it came to me in a new way that you and I are still breathing four decades after we met at the threshold of the unknown, the part that comes after now and here… | Continue reading