Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review: Ten years after Monica Baldwin voluntarily entered an enclosed religious order of Augustinian nuns, she began to think she might have made a mistake. She had entered the order on October 26, 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the World War I, wh … | Continue reading
Stuart Richie in The Guardian: When was the last time you saw a scientific paper? A physical one, I mean. An older academic in my previous university department used to keep all his scientific journals in recycled cornflakes boxes. On entering his office, you’d be greeted by a wa … | Continue reading
Anthony King in Nature: Cancer drugs usually take a scattergun approach. Chemotherapies inevitably hit healthy bystander cells while blasting tumours, sparking a slew of side effects. It is also a big ask for an anticancer drug to find and destroy an entire tumour — some are diff … | Continue reading
Will you please consider becoming a supporter of 3QD by clicking here now? We wouldn’t ask for your support if we did not need it to keep the site running. And, of course, you will get the added benefit of no longer seeing any distracting ads on the site. Thank you! NEW POSTS BEL … | Continue reading
by David J. Lobina After sort-of dissing James Joyce last time around – 0 comments, though! I expected Colm Tóibín to demur or something – this month I was meant to outline what the language of thought is supposed to be like, thus bringing to an end this series on the relationshi … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey Out of the blue, between the sea and the sky, Landward blown on bright, untiring wings; Out of the South I fly –Maurice Thompson One of my sisters who is a wildlife biologist often leaves the cinema with an entirely different take on the virtues of any particular m … | Continue reading
I . Me .We so much depends upon the tale we tell ourselves, words have the force of love or death, they can raise or raze. In fact, the typhoon of a single letter, incessantly said, can ruin nations the simplest vertical stroke “I” or its Russian solo “Я” not to mention the tiny … | Continue reading
by Fabio Tollon Getting a handle on the various ways that technology influences us is as important as it is difficult. The media is awash with claims of how this or that technology will either save us or doom us. And in some cases, it does seem as though we have a concrete grasp … | Continue reading
Nikita Kadan. Hold The Thought, Where The Story Was Interrupted, 2014. Wood, metal, plaster, stuffed animals, print on paper, paint. “Three weeks after the Russian attacks on large parts of the country, the Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan remains in war-ravaged Kiev. Over the past … | Continue reading
by Charlie Huenemann “Out of love for mankind, and out of despair at my embarrassing situation, seeing that I had accomplished nothing and was unable to make anything easier than it had already been made, and moved by a genuine interest in those who make everything easy, I concei … | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima March 1, 2022 I left Florence exactly two years ago, a week after the first Corona lockdowns went into effect on February 22, 2020; I returned to the city for the first time yesterday, just as Russian attacks on Ukraine shifted into full gear. Back in Berlin, the … | Continue reading
Spring in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, three days ago. | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook I pulled my mask up, making sure to cover my nose and mouth as we walked into the supermarket. My husband looked at me quizzically. “Why are you putting on your mask?” I pulled off my mask and gave him a sheepish grin. I forgot that the mask mandate had been… | Continue reading
At My Mother’s Grave in the Putnam Valley — 7000 Miles from Where She Was Born by Rafiq Kathwari Mother, I thought I heard an echo of your rousing words — “My Life Is Ahead of Me”— Wrinkles mapped your face after you flew from the Kashmir Valley where— long as I remember— you rag … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In the Berkeley hills there is a campus bus but the nearest bus stop is about a one-mile walk from my home, if you take a short cut through a meadow, but it gets quite muddy in the rainy season. Still,… | Continue reading
Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet: I have been doing a great deal of publicity these past weeks for my new book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is. I have been compelled to train my speaking voice, to craft short-and-sweet sound-bites, and even t … | Continue reading
John Bistline, Inês Azevedo, Chris Bataille and Steven Davis in the New York Times: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which was released last week and which we co-authored with many colleagues, offers hope for limiting global warming. But there is no time to w … | Continue reading
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Bill Gates in his blog: Over the years, I’ve read quite a few books about the brain, most of them written by academic neuroscientists who view it through the lens of sophisticated lab experiments. Recently, I picked up a brain book that’s much more theoretical. It’s called A Thou … | Continue reading
Mankind is at least 90% slumber. The rest is history. ……………………………………………..—Roshi Bob The Inferno -excerpt —Canto 1 Midway upon the journey of our life ….. I found myself within a forest dark, ….. For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say … … | Continue reading
Misha Glenny in The Guardian: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has triggered a long-term shift in the tectonic plates of history that even three months ago appeared extremely unlikely. We are only six weeks in but even now, it is clear this one event will have multiple consequences a … | Continue reading
Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus: In 2017, Karen Kostroff, a renowned oncology surgeon at Northwell Health in the New York Metropolitan area added a new talking point to her standard conversation with breast cancer patients facing tumor removal surgery. These conversations are never ea … | Continue reading
Adam Tooze over at Chartbook: War and history are intertwined. Entire conceptions of history are defined by what status one accords to war in one’s theory of change. War is certainly not the only way to punctuate history, but it is clearly one of the pacemakers. Battles and campa … | Continue reading
Alex Kane in Jewish Currents: IN LATE 2019, Jason Isaac, an energy policy staffer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, began hearing of a new threat to fossil fuel companies. Pressure from climate activists had led some banks, pension funds, and unive … | Continue reading
Daniel J Herman in Aeon: In her recent book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) – currently, Amazon’s top seller in the political history category – the historian Heather Cox Richardson expands and modifie … | Continue reading
Over at Phenomenal World, Lily Hu interviews Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on climate crisis, reparations, and the use of history: LILY HU: …My first question is: do you see your lack of focus on questions that have been deemed important in philosophy as a case of refusing that “distraction” re … | Continue reading
Rachel Cooke at The Guardian: As its title somewhat suggests, the artist Celia Paul’s second book takes the form of a series of letters to Gwen John, whose life, she believes, was “stamped with a similar pattern” to her own, and a postcard of whose painting The Convalescent she k … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai at the NYT: “Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” is a strange and intriguing record — illuminating when it comes to Wittgenstein’s preoccupations, his sexual anguish, his continuous struggles with his “work” in philosophy, along with his intermittent comments about his … | Continue reading
Tony McKenna in Counterpunch: It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another ki … | Continue reading
Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian: A work of art has the power to transport its viewer to another time and place. Now, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain, is taking that idea one step further with a new exhibition that incorporates smell to enhance the experience of a 17th-cen … | Continue reading
Substitute Heart A single human life migrates through many lifetimes, according to the books she read to me. The word migrant is cousin to nomad which is what her ancestors were. When she turned refugee, she was told not to confuse herself with migrant. There is no uniform legal … | Continue reading
Bocar Ba, Jacob Kaplan, Dean Knox, Mayya Komisarchik, Rachel Mariman Jonathan Mummolo, Roman Rivera, and Michelle Torres write in a new paper available at the Princeton website: Policies to make police forces more representative of communities have centered on race. But race may … | Continue reading
Claudio Campagnari and Martijn Mulders in Science: Over the past 60 years, the standard model (SM) has established itself as the most successful theory of matter and fundamental interactions—to date. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson only added to the streak of triumphs for t … | Continue reading
Lucy Song in the Boston Review: One of the most revealing features of the reckoning prompted by the recent horrific attacks on Asians in the United States is the diversity of responses offered by Asian Americans themselves. Undermining the racialized presumption that “Asian Ameri … | Continue reading
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Amber Husain at The Believer: Does banishing convention from the schemas with which we formulate our manners and moods allow us, as DeWitt’s fictions seem to suggest, to transcend systemic bullshit? In recounting to Lorentzen the frustrations of her literary career, DeWitt compar … | Continue reading
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: Much of “Wet Leg” addresses the banality of adulthood, and particularly the discombobulating stretch between youth and middle age—from twenty-five to forty, say. (Teasdale is twenty-nine and Chambers is twenty-eight.) In the video for “Too Late … | Continue reading
Michelle Cottle in The New York Times: Top showboaters this time around included Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham — a master of the self-righteous hissy fit. These folks really went the extra mile to turn the proceedings into a circus. So muc … | Continue reading
From Nature: From its resting place outside Chicago, Illinois, a long-defunct experiment is threatening to throw the field of elementary particles off balance. Physicists have toiled for ten years to squeeze a crucial new measurement out of the experiment’s old data, and the resu … | Continue reading
The past is not dependent upon us for existence, but exists in its own right. — Henry Steel Commager The Past All along certainly it’s been there, waiting for us, waiting to receive ……….. us, not to waver, flickering shakily across the mind-screen, always in another shadow, ……….. … | Continue reading
Ana Quiring in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Upon the death of Joan Didion at age 87 at the close of 2021, her admirers shared a common adoration for one facet of her genius. “Her sentences — dear Lord, her sentences!” wrote The New York Times’s Frank Bruni in a tribute publis … | Continue reading