David Frum in The Atlantic: In 2016, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was a fool who could be baited with a tweet. This past Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Joe Biden upped the ante by asking, in effect: What idiot thing might the former president do if baited with a who … | Continue reading
Tim Hornyak in Nature: By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more … | Continue reading
Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More … | Continue reading
Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar It wasn’t very long ago that I was rather enamored with the New Atheist movement, of which the most prominent proponent was Richard Dawkins. I remember having marathon debates with a religious roommate of mine in graduate school about religion as the “root o … | Continue reading
Ambedo— n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details . . . which lead to a dawning awareness of the fragility of life . . . —The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Ambedo I am a boy, my brain’s transfixed, not seized like a spent eng … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers When I ask students what they were most interested in, or at least what they remember most, from their “Introduction to Ethics” or “Intro to Philosophy” class, it’s remarkable how many offer the same answer. It seems they all remember Robert Nozick’s “Experience Ma … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa In May of 2020 we lost John Conway [0]. We discussed some of his mathematical accomplishments here at 3QD. He was a true original. At the time, I deliberately avoided discussing Conway’s most famous work: the Game of Life. Like a 60s rock band, Conway had mixed … | Continue reading
Kon Trubkovich. The Antepenultimate End, 2019. Oil on canvas. More here and here. Thanks to Alia Raza for the introduction. | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley ‘Every situation in life, indeed every moment, is of infinite value, because it represents an entire eternity.’ –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe It seems we’re always tinkering with those eternities, not just to cherish their value or find their meaning, but to transf … | Continue reading
by David Oates I was trying to get at something about living in the Pacific Northwest, something about the past and the future merging, blending. The way a forest can be that and can stand for that, both reality and symbol. A walk in deep woods, its distant past present as soil u … | Continue reading
by Ethan Seavey My last night in the house on Euclid Avenue will go one of two ways: A. When I climb through a window in my bedroom (which will no longer be my bedroom tomorrow) and onto the flat roof outside in order to smoke the very last bowl of cannabis in my home… | Continue reading
by Eric Bies Jean-François Millet, a Frenchman, frowned beneath his full beard as he lay dying in Barbizon. It was 1875, and he was not to be confused with Claude Monet—not yet—who would later paint water lilies and haystacks but wasn’t, in 1875, rich and famous; on the contrary— … | Continue reading
Moonrise from my office window some days ago. | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth –Philip Larkin Wordsworth as the poet of loss and lack William Wordsworth’s poetry can seem all too familiar, what with all that wandering lonely as a cloud. But he is stranger than we often remember him. Ta … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. As with game theory, I also attended some courses in Berkeley in another relatively new subject for me, Psychology and Economics (later called Behavioral Economics). In particular I liked the course jointly t … | Continue reading
Charles Blattberg in The Hedgehog Review: Imagine someone told you that politics is a “great game,” that when citizens respect just principles, they do so “in much the same way that players have the shared end to execute a good and fair play of the game.” You would probably wonde … | Continue reading
Steven Strogatz in Quanta: Isaac Newton was not known for his generosity of spirit, and his disdain for his rivals was legendary. But in one letter to his competitor Gottfried Leibniz, now known as the Epistola Posterior, Newton comes off as nostalgic and almost friendly. In it, … | Continue reading
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Jaeyeon Yoo at Words Without Borders: JY: Right—I think we tend to assume that the best translation is the most understandable, but I found your postscript to delightfully complicate that assumption. You also wrote that there was a lot of English in the German original; I wondere … | Continue reading
Sleeping in the Forest I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they … | Continue reading
Lisa Allardice in The Guardian: Ian McEwan was on holiday on the remote coast of north-west Scotland when he heard the news that his great friend Salman Rushdie had been attacked in New York. His wife, the writer Annalena McAfee, let out a cry from the next door room in the small … | Continue reading
Yasmin Tayag in The New Yorker: In 2010, Brad St. Pierre and his wife, Christine, moved from California to Fairbanks, Alaska, to work as farmers. “People thought we were crazy,” Brad said. “They were, like, ‘You can grow things in Alaska?’ ” Their new home, not far from where Chr … | Continue reading
Pranab Bardhan in New Left Review: The preamble to the Constitution of India affirms the solemn resolve of its people to found a ‘socialist, secular, democratic republic’. Today, on the 75th anniversary of the country’s Independence, it is plainly neither socialist nor secular—no … | Continue reading
Masha Gessen in The New Yorker: Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, died in Moscow, on Tuesday, at the age of ninety-one. In the last two decades of his life, he rarely granted interviews. So, in 2010, when he agreed to speak to someone from a Moscow magazine … | Continue reading
Nell Minnow in response to 19 Republican state attorneys general’s letter to Blackrock: I’m sure BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s response to the obnoxious, accusatory, misleading, letter he received from 19 Republican state attorneys general will be measured, diplomatic, and thoroughl … | Continue reading
Dag Herbjørnsrud in Aeon: The ideals of the Enlightenment are the basis of our democracies and universities in the 21st century: belief in reason, science, skepticism, secularism, and equality. In fact, no other era compares with the Age of Enlightenment. Classical Antiquity is i … | Continue reading
Marna Clarke in Lens Culture: I am 81 years old, my partner 92. On my 70th birthday, I woke from a dream in which I had rounded a corner and seen the end. This disturbing dream moved me to begin photographing the two of us, chronicling our time together, growing old. Now, 11 year … | Continue reading
George Will in The Washington Post: During the 2012 presidential election, there occurred one of those remarkably rare moments when campaign rhetoric actually clarified a large issue. It happened when Barack Obama, speaking without a written text, spoke from his heart and reveale … | Continue reading
Anna Fleming at The Guardian: A magnet for explorers, climbers and seekers of enlightenment, the Himalayas have drawn swathes of travellers over the years. The resulting outpouring of stories can leave one wondering quite what more there is to say. But at the outset of this exten … | Continue reading
Tim Blanning at Literary Review: In 1793 Caroline Böhmer paid for her support for the French Revolution with arrest by the Prussians and three months of incarceration in a damp, dark, overcrowded, vermin-infested cell in the fortress of Königstein. It was made doubly painful by h … | Continue reading
Summation I am glad of the great obligations I imposed on myself. In my life many strange and material things have crowded together— fragile wraiths that entangled me, categorical mineral hands, an irrational wind that dismayed me, barbed kisses that scarred me, the hard reality … | Continue reading
Editor’s Note: This is six years old but still very much worth reading. Albert Burneko in Deadspin: A joke has structure. It has a central rule. Setup, punchline. The setup produces a tensed, expectant state; the punchline resolves the tension with a surprise. If the elements of … | Continue reading
Ronald Suny in The Conversation: Mikhail Gorbachev was a contradictory figure; his legacy, complex. Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people – which he genuinely was – he increasingly became despised by many within Russia for destroying the Soviet Union and di … | Continue reading
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Marie Vodicka in Science: Through a series of vignettes peppered with illustrative analogies and vibrant characters, Siddhartha Mukherjee invites readers of his new book, The Song of the Cell, on a tour of cell biology from its early origins to its present and future applications … | Continue reading
Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic: If you are a parent, your greatest fear in life is likely something happening to one of your kids. According to one 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this), parents spe … | Continue reading
DJ Taylor at The New Statesman: Inez Holden’s diary – a mammoth undertaking, only fragments of which have ever escaped into print – carries a rueful little entry from August 1948. “I read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh,” the diarist writes. But the tale of Charles Ryder’s d … | Continue reading
Agnes Callard at The Point: There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedi … | Continue reading
Says The Reason Says the reason: let’s look for the truth. And the heart: vanity, we already have the truth. The reason: oh, who can reach the truth! The heart: vanity; the truth is hope. The reason says: you lie. And the heart answers: who lies it’s you, reason, ‘cause you say w … | Continue reading
Suzanne Kahn at the Roosevelt Institute: In the first 18 months of the Biden presidency, while the administration executed one of the fastest economic recoveries in memory following the COVID-induced recession, rising prices nevertheless helped stall the progressive agenda. For p … | Continue reading