Carrie Arnold in Nature: In her job as a physician at the Boston Medical Center in Massachusetts, Sondra Crosby treated some of the first people in her region to get COVID-19. So when she began feeling sick in April, Crosby wasn’t surprised to learn that she, too, had been infect … | Continue reading
Woman Unborn I am not born as yet, five minutes before my birth. I can still go back into my unbirth. Now it’s ten minutes before, now, it’s one hour before birth. I go back, I run into my minus life. I walk through my unbirth as in a tunnel with bizarre perspectives. Ten years… | 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. 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 Leanne Ogasawara 1. The year is 2025. Frank, who is an American aid worker living in northern India, is alarmed to wake up one morning to an outside temperature of 103° F with 35% humidity. Things go from bad to worse, when the power grid goes down, and there is no air conditi … | Continue reading
Until I’ve not roamed the four corners of the earth but I have roamed the four corners of the earth I contain as much love and callousness as any human does I love and harm as sure as the passionate sun does, which inflames dawn clouds in iconic peace and beauty which inflames su … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman All my life I’ve been fascinated by the systems of mutual connections and influences of which we are generally unaware, but which we discover by chance, as surprising coincidences or convergences of fate, all those bridges, nuts, bolts, welded joints and connecto … | Continue reading
by R. Passov This will be one of the most important compounds of our generation. —Jeff Kindler, former CEO, Pfizer, commenting on Torcetrapib Failure of a drug in development, especially in a late stage clinical trial, is shocking. Torcetrapib, for example, failed at the very end … | Continue reading
Salman Toor. Three Friends. 2018. Oil on panel. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Usha Alexander [This is the sixth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. The previous part is here.] “The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” —George HW … | Continue reading
by Eric J. Weiner Ours, like the moments after the Civil War and Reconstruction and after the civil rights movement, requires a different kind of thinking, a different kind of resiliency, or else we succumb to madness or resignation. —Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Those convictions and mot … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss November 6, 1860. Perhaps the worst day in James Buchanan’s political life. His fears, his sympathies and antipathies, the judgment of the public upon an entire career, all converge into a horrible realty. Abraham Lincoln, of the “Black Republican Party,” has been … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray This column is about travel to less understood parts of the world. In yet another travel constrained month, how about a little political tourism here in Georgia, where none of us really understands the sordid late-Trump morality play swirling around our dual Senate … | Continue reading
The leaves have all fallen off this wild tree but some apples still cling to it for dear life, in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in December of 2020. | Continue reading
by Philip Graham Back in 1971, I couldn’t have predicted that the release of Joni Mitchell’s fourth album, Blue, would mark the beginning of the end of a friendship. During my college years, Donald and I had bonded over a love of literature and a shared ambition to become, some d … | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon A little over a week ago Jacob Collier’s version of Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”) came up on YouTube. I know the song well, and love it. As I’d seen a video or three by this Collier fellow, I decided to give it a listen. Wo … | Continue reading
by Dave Maier 2020 has been a wild ride, but it’s almost over, and I’m here to tell you it wasn’t all bad, as some great music came out this year – so much, in fact, that we’ll have to have two or even three podcasts this time even for the small taste which is… | Continue reading
Agnes Callard in The Point: Beth, the protagonist of the TV show The Queen’s Gambit, is not someone you’d want as a friend. She takes money from her childhood mentor—the old janitor who taught her chess—and never pays him back, visits him or thanks him for launching her career. S … | Continue reading
W Ford Doolittle in Aeon: The idea that the Earth itself is like a single evolving ‘organism’ was developed in the mid-1970s by the independent English scientist and inventor James Lovelock and the American biologist Lynn Margulis. They dubbed it the ‘Gaia hypothesis’, asserting … | Continue reading
Taimur Khan in Foreign Policy: A decade before the arrival of New York Times correspondent Declan Walsh’s The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State—which was released in the United States on Nov. 23—another major book of long-form reportage about the country’ … | Continue reading
Sydney Ladensohn Stern in Literary Hub: On December 4, Netflix subscribers will start streaming Mank, David Fincher’s biopic about Herman Mankiewicz, the Hollywood screenwriter who wrote the original script for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Mank is a cinematic feast that requires … | Continue reading
Nick Spencer in Prospect Magazine: Two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson, aged nearly 80 and living in comfortable retirement at Monticello, took a scalpel to his Bible. Jefferson had endured a bruising presidential campaign in 1800 in which it was alleged he was an atheist who … | Continue reading
Richard Brody in The New Yorker: The best thing about David Fincher’s new film, “Mank,” is that it isn’t about what one expects it to be about. More specifically, the movie (which is streaming on Netflix) is not about the assertion, made most strenuously by Pauline Kael in her co … | Continue reading
Think of Those Great Watchers Think of those great watchers of the sky, shepherds, magi, how they looked for a thousand years and saw there was order, who learned not only Light would return, but the moment she’d start her journey. No writing then. The see-ers gave what they knew … | Continue reading
Nan Z. Da in n + 1: IN HER MEMOIR Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life, the contemporary Chinese American writer Yiyun Li recounts something that Marianne Moore’s mother had done, which recalled something that Li’s own mother had done. The young Marianne Moore ha … | Continue reading
Over at his Chartbook newsletter, Adam Tooze explores how stable is the financial system? At least twice a year, the world’s central banks and international financial institutions like the IMF and the Financial Stability Board set themselves to answering this question. A typical … | Continue reading
A panel discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Ministry for the Future with Naomi Klein, Cymie Payne, and Jorge Marcone, moderated by climate scientist Robert Kopp: | Continue reading
Maya Adereth interviews Amit Bhaduri in Phenomenal World: Maya Adereth: The occasion for this interview was a reflection on the breakdown of social democracy. Why don’t we start there? Amit Bhaduri: In order to understand the breakdown of social democracy, we need to start with i … | Continue reading
Andrew L. Shea at The New Criterion: In one of his only published comments on art, a 1905 treatise titled “Paragraphs from the Studio of a Recluse,” the American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847–1917) wrote that “the artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and … | Continue reading
Michael Ignatieff at Literary Review: There’s plenty wrong with rights, Nigel Biggar tells us, as some very powerful thinkers have been saying since the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ first entered the lexicon of mass democratic politics during the French Revolution. This sce … | Continue reading
Daniel Mahoney in The New Criterion: The distinguished contemporary French political philosopher Pierre Manent has spent four decades chronicling the development of modern self-consciousness, including the flight from human nature and “the moral contents of life” that define mode … | Continue reading
Thank Heavens for Shakespeare I am always in and out of love with my husband. Tonight—out. Out of love and instead, in a cranky mood: That sweatshirt he’s wearing, and his hair! Maybe Titania and Oberon were out of love and needed an excellent fight. Of course, here I am in my ow … | Continue reading
Ferris Jabr in The New York Times: As a child, Suzanne Simard often roamed Canada’s old-growth forests with her siblings, building forts from fallen branches, foraging mushrooms and huckleberries and occasionally eating handfuls of dirt (she liked the taste). Her grandfather and … | Continue reading
From Literary Hub: Tumbuktu, Tehran, London, Freetown, Honolulu, New Orleans. These are but a few of the compass points visited in The Window Seat, Aminatta Forna’s debut collection of essays, which Grove/Atlantic publishes in May next year. As a reporter and traveler, Forna has … | Continue reading
Daniel Garisto in Scientific American: For the first time, a quantum computer made from photons—particles of light—has outperformed even the fastest classical supercomputers. Physicists led by Chao-Yang Lu and Jian-Wei Pan of the University of Science and Technology of China (UST … | Continue reading
Ryan P. Hanley in the National Review: Adam Smith is today known as the founding father of economics. But by profession he was a university professor, holding a chair in moral philosophy. It was in this capacity that in 1759 he published the first of his two books. Neither can be … | Continue reading
Black Sun: Amorphous Flocks of Starlings Swell Above the Danish Marshlands from Colossal on Vimeo. | Continue reading
Things That Happen in an Eclipse I’m lying on my back on a blanket in the front yard, and I have my glasses and my dog. My next-door neighbor is out front, too, on his porch, talking to some other neighbors who have walked over, but I can’t hear what they’re saying. He is an… | Continue reading
From The Paris Review: Shahzia Sikander’s first New York solo exhibition in more than a decade showcases an astonishing range of work: paintings, mosaics, animations, and her inaugural foray into freestanding sculpture, Promiscuous Intimacies, a stunning monument to desire that d … | Continue reading
Heidi Ledford in Nature: Ageing affects the body in myriad ways — among them, adding, removing or altering chemical groups such as methyls on DNA. These ‘epigenetic’ changes accumulate as a person ages, and some researchers have proposed tracking the changes as a way of calibrati … | Continue reading
Eric Been at JSTOR Daily: Southern contained multitudes: He was a first-rate screenwriter, novelist, essayist, cultural tastemaker, critic, craftsman of the weird short-story, and a devotee of letter-writing (a mode he once called “the purest form of writing there is… because it’ … | Continue reading
Jae Kim at the LARB: When asked in an interview with Words Without Borders to give an example of an untranslatable word in Korean, Choi answers that duplicatives, “adverbs or adjectives that are repeated to form a pair,” poses a challenge. “Such doubling is the norm in Korean, an … | Continue reading