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. In this difficult time, we continue to scour the web daily to bring you the best analysis and information we can find. And, … | Continue reading
by Ali Minai One of the most interesting and memorable characters in sci-fi films is the T-1000, the shape-shifting, nearly indestructible robot from the classic film Terminator 2: Judgment Day, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are other, less prominent examples of shape-shi … | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien There’s a concept in education, particularly science education, called “lies-to-children”. It roughly means this: some matters are so complicated that they cannot be clearly understood when accurately presented. So, if you want a naive audience (“children”) to eve … | Continue reading
Prayer I thank Thee for this couch and the room it inhabits and the chair which, being its partner in undeserved comfort, leaves itself available to any weary stander who might take advantage of its open invitation to sit, and for those two aptly-named bolsters plumped at one of … | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey In my first column for 3 Quarks Daily I wrote that we are still fighting both the Civil War and WWII. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it: “two hideous demons slumber under the floorboards of Western culture: anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism.” We have learned that … | Continue reading
by N. Gabriel Martin In 2017, the Nobel prize in economics attracted more attention than it usually does, when it was awarded to Richard Thaler. Articles in leading newspapers everywhere explained Thaler’s revolutionary insight: whereas economic orthodoxy was premised on the beli … | Continue reading
Bisa Butler. The Safety Patrol. 2018. Quilted and appliquéd cotton, wool, and chiffon. 90 x 82 in. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Liam Heneghan In Memoriam Tim Robinson (1935 – 2020) and Máiréad Robinson (1934 – 2020) In Connemara: Listening to the Wind (2006), the first volume of cartographer and writer Tim Robinson’s trilogy of books about that rugged part of Co. Galway, Robinson records an illuminatin … | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer On 9 October 1990, President George H.W. Bush held a news conference about Iraqi-occupied Kuwait as the US was building an international coalition to liberate the emirate. He said: “I am very much concerned, not just about the physical dismantling but about some … | Continue reading
by Charlie Huenemann I routinely remind my students that human minds have always been as complicated as they are now, from when we dropped out of the trees to when we step upon the escalator. When we are reading in the history of ideas there is always the temptation to turn intel … | Continue reading
by Fabio Tollon “How do you get a philosophy major away from your front door? You pay them for the pizza.” As a doctoral candidate in philosophy people often ask me what I am going to “do” with my degree. That is, how will I get a job and be a good, productive little bourgeoisie… | Continue reading
She Drives as I Scribble on London I wear my French bodice and you don’t even notice I dread turning into a submissive housewife Will you still hug me after we are married? I understand the off-side rule in football better than many men I know When I’m premenstrual, I want to sma … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat Escape. When I was a child, I read at every opportunity. If I could, I’d read on the playground; at one point, I was allowed to spend recess in the library and read there. Overall, teachers seemed unenthusiastic about the idea of a kid reading during recess. My mot … | Continue reading
What sort of feast is it that by its mere existence manages to exacerbate all sorrows? ... Like Covid 19, Christmas targets the poor, the sick, the lonely, the aged, and the obese. | Continue reading
I visited this old friend who lives in a park in Brixen, South Tyrol, last week. | Continue reading
by Mindy Clegg Actor Ryan Reynolds recently directed two commercials for the dating website Match.com that summed up this year for many. A bored Satan in Hell gets an alert on his phone. His eyes widen and soon he’s meeting a young woman under a park bridge—who insists he calls h … | Continue reading
by Callum Watts Christmas gets me thinking about magic. Remembering the way I enjoyed Christmas as a child brings me back to a time when I believed in the power of supernatural phenomena. The most exciting piece of magic I performed was writing a message on a piece of paper, addr … | Continue reading
Joel Whitney in Jacobin: In May 1963, in a Kennedy family living room on Central Park South, Lorraine Hansberry tried to defend civil rights activists’ safety. The Raisin in the Sun playwright had come along with actor Harry Belafonte, author James Baldwin, and other luminaries a … | Continue reading
Rafi Letzter in Live Science: Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already. That’s the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the emer … | Continue reading
Lindsay Beyerstein in Vice: There’s a converted three-story hotel on the industrial south side of Billings, Montana. It’s next to a large funeral home and down the street from the Montana Women’s Prison. From the outside, it looks like a nursing home, painted pink and beige, with … | Continue reading
Jesse McCarthy and Jon Baskin in The Point: This summer, amid the ongoing protests for racial justice, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility once again shot up the best-seller lists. The book, which had already been a huge success on the diversity-training circuit and had received mix … | Continue reading
Peter Gordon in The Nation: n April 6, 1967, Theodor W. Adorno accepted an invitation from the Association of Socialist Students at the University of Vienna to deliver a lecture on “aspects of the new right-wing extremism.” The topic held a special urgency: The National Democrati … | Continue reading
Charisse Burden-Stelly in Boston Review: In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States, anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching and race riots. At this auspicious mom … | Continue reading
The New Left Review has introduced a blog, Sidecar. Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar: President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other … | Continue reading
Stefan Collini in The Guardian: New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of “celebration” smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an anniversa … | Continue reading
Sarah Hughes in The Guardian: Most people approaching their 90th birthday would be forgiven for deciding that, whatever their work, enough was enough and it was time to relax. Most people, however, are not Edna O’Brien. Ireland’s greatest living writer has over the past week deli … | Continue reading
Vijay Prashad in Counterpunch: Ten years ago, a hawker in Tunisia set himself on fire, which spurred on people along the entire Mediterranean Sea—from Morocco to Spain—to rise up in revolt. They took to their squares indignant at the terrible conditions in which they had to make … | Continue reading
I was never one of those matter- of-fact mothers who tell their children this is thus or what to do. Though I knew how to hold my babies as soon as they were handed to me, I could feel how tremendous a life was. This animal, cradled on my heart, mine for the naming, how… | Continue reading
H.M. Naqvi in Literary Hub: I was in Australia on the tail-end of my eastern book tour, the Last Book Tour perhaps, one that had taken me to Indonesia and Bangladesh earlier, when the plague, after circling for months, dove in for the kill. I left perhaps a week before Australia … | Continue reading
Matt Ridley in The Spectator: Almost 60 years ago, in February 1961, two teams of scientists stumbled on a discovery at the same time. Sydney Brenner in Cambridge and Jim Watson at Harvard independently spotted that genes send short-lived RNA copies of themselves to little machin … | Continue reading
Micah L. Sifry in The American Prospect: I’ve recently spent a good chunk of time engrossed in reading A Promised Land, the first volume of President Barack Obama’s memoirs. After four years of the most impulsive and unstable president of my lifetime, hearing Obama’s calm and jud … | Continue reading
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin at Dublin Review of Books: A poem from Paula Meehan’s second collection, Pillow Talk (1994), is called “Autobiography”. Well, in some ways a Selected Poems is like an autobiography; it expresses a sense that the life lived to date, and the work done, have s … | Continue reading
Joseph E. Davis and Paul Scherz at The New Atlantis: At other times and in other places, traditional ways of life, social classification, and metaphysical order gave shape and coherence to the course of life, providing a picture of aging well. Each period of life had its activiti … | Continue reading
Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker: Once, in another life, I was a tech founder. It was the late nineties, when the Web was young, and everyone was trying to cash in on the dot-com boom. In college, two of my dorm mates and I discovered that we’d each started an Internet company in … | Continue reading
Don Arturo Says: When I was young there was no difference between the way I danced and the way tomatoes converted themselves into sauce I did the waltz or a guaguancó which everyone your rhythm which every one your song The whole town was caressed to sleep with my two-tone shoes … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Gene drive organisms (GDOs), developed with select traits that are genetically engineered to spread through a population, have the power to dramatically alter the way society develops solutions to a range of daunting health and environmental challenges, from contro … | Continue reading
Adolph Reed Jr. in The New Republic: This year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of publication of Black Metropolis, St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton’s landmark study of Chicago. Black Metropolis appeared as World War II neared its end, with U.S. political leaders fiercely … | Continue reading
Richard Dawkins in The Spectator: For, whether we like it or not, it is a true fact that we are cousins of kangaroos, that we share an ancestor with starfish, and that we and the starfish and kangaroo share a more remote ancestor with jellyfish. The DNA code is a digital code, di … | Continue reading
Dave Lindorff in CounterPunch: As the US confronts both a political crisis of presidential succession and a worsening pandemic, it might be instructive, though perhaps not comforting, to learn that we’ve been here before. In the period between the 1773 Boston Tea Party up through … | Continue reading
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Bill McKibben in The New Yorker: We are necessarily occupied here each week with strategies for getting ourselves out of the climate crisis—it is the world’s true Klaxon-sounding emergency. But it is worth occasionally remembering that global warming is just one measure of the hu … | Continue reading
Letter to America pardon the lag in writing you we were left with few letters in your home we were cast as rugs sometimes on walls though we were almost always on floors we served you as a table a lamp a mirror a toy if anything we made you laugh in your kitchen we… | Continue reading
Carl Rollyson at The Hedgehog Review: This idea of Faulkner as fixated on the past has a long pedigree, perhaps beginning with “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,” a much-read 1939 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre. “In Faulkner’s work,” Sartre contends, “there is n … | Continue reading
David Kakauer in Nautilus: In 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, a young journalist in Tokyo, covered the battle between master Honinbo Shusai and apprentice Minoru Kitani for ultimate authority in the board game Go. It was one of the lengthiest matches in the history of competitive gaming … | Continue reading