Jeff Sharlet in Bookforum: I REMEMBER BETTER THAN MOST where I was when I knew Donald Trump would win. Not just that he would win but that “the office” would not subdue him, that he was coming because he was the crest of a wave, a force made unstoppable by its mostly unseen mass. … | Continue reading
Blake Belden in Phys.Org: Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide, but many immunotherapies have had limited success in treating aggressive forms of the disease. “A deeper understanding of the immunobiology of breast cancer is critical to the success in harness … | 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
Amit Chaudhuri in n + 1: The title of this talk seems to suggest that I know the answer to the “why,” and that I’m about to share it with you. I began writing my first novel in 1986, in what I elected to be my gap year: so, if I’ve been trying my hand at… | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Many characteristics go into making human beings special — brain size, opposable thumbs, etc. Surely one of the most important is language, and in particular the ability to learn new sounds and use them for communication. Many other species … | Continue reading
David French in The French Press: This is a grievous and dangerous time for American Christianity. The frenzy and the fury of the post-election period has laid bare the sheer idolatry and fanaticism of Christian Trumpism. A significant segment of the Christian public has fallen f … | Continue reading
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Racists Vas en Afrique! Back to Africa! The butcher we used to patronize in the ….. Rue Cadet market, beside himself, shrieked at a black man in an argument the rest of the ….. import of which I missed but that made me anyway for three years walk an extra street to a shop …..… | Continue reading
Ted Scheinman in Smithsonian: In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he’d spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence. As the … | Continue reading
Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic: The doomsday machine was never supposed to exist. It was meant to be a thought experiment that went like this: Imagine a device built with the sole purpose of destroying all human life. Now suppose that machine is buried deep underground, but co … | Continue reading
Karthik Purushothaman at The Baffler: For much of his career, Metres has focused on American wars in the Arab world. In Shrapnel Maps, his new collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, he shifts his terrain to Palestine-Israel. Drawing on disparate sources, including 1948 mem … | Continue reading
Dustin Illingworth at The Point: William Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955), was initially famous for its inaccessibility. More talked about than read, the book perplexed critics with its seemingly endless allusions and erudite tangents. Despite this initial reception, … | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells Prime Minister Boris Johnson has exactly one strategy in his EU trade negotiations: threatening to drive Britain into a no-deal wall unless he gets what he wants. In other words, Johnson has been approaching this extraordinarily important matter of national int … | Continue reading
My ancestral temple was in a village..., and I use the term “village” loosely. | Continue reading
by Jackson Arn I: Bubbles Not knowing they’re impossible, they slip through geometry or fitting, go squarish where they must, kissing the rainbow mouths to right-left-up-down from here to death. Bathing in clones, each holds, with skin and neighbors, a secret breath. II: Ma … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber There is a spate of popularizations of neuroscience promoting the idea that “reality isn’t something you perceive, it’s something you create in your mind”, that “everything we perceive is a hallucination created by the brain”, or — as one Scientific American art … | Continue reading
by Jochen Szangolies In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. At least, that’s how the current state of knowledge is summarized by the great Terry Pratchett in Lords and Ladies. As far as cosmogony goes, it certainly has the virtue of succinctness. It also poses—by vir … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Tapestry. November, 2020. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
What explains the peculiar prose style of Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class? Is it just bad, pompous, academic writing? Or is it intended satirically? Or is it both? | Continue reading
Academic titles aren’t everything. But they signpost what might not otherwise be salient; I, and others like me, are present as members of the academy. | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima An anthology I’ve edited with David Winner, titled Writing the Virus, has just been published by Outpost19 Books (San Francisco). Its authors—among them Joan Juliet Buck, Rebecca Chace, Edie Meidav, Caille Millner, Uche Nduka, Mui Poopoksakul, Roxana Robinson, Jo … | Continue reading
Ducks on a pond in Brixen, South Tyrol, in December of 2020. | Continue reading
by Eric Miller To the mainland When we climb the stairwell out of the depth of the ferry, where our car rests parked amid grimy trucks, we find taut bands of yellow plastic tape setting off the tables and benches of the observation decks. We have to sit far from other people. Som … | Continue reading
by Alexander C. Kafka Can the moon strike twice? Sadly, no. The question hovers over John Patrick Shanley’s new film Wild Mountain Thyme because it aims for the same sort of bittersweet heartache seasoned with gritty and eccentric comedic beats that characterized his Oscar-winnin … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow Last month I argued that wine tasting notes don’t give us much information about how a wine tastes. Most tasting notes consist of a list of aromas that are typical for the kind of wine being described. But we can’t infer much about quality or distinctiveness from … | Continue reading
Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler: THE UNITED ARAB EMIRATES has worked long and hard at looking like the West—even better than the best. The world’s tallest building, with its glistening spire, looms over the shoreline of the gleaming city of Dubai, proof of the Emiratis’ technocratic … | Continue reading
Dan Falk in Undark: It is to biologist Sean B. Carroll’s credit that he’s found a way of taking a puzzle that could easily fill volumes (and probably has filled volumes), and presenting it to us in a slim, non-technical, and fun little book, “A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance … | Continue reading
Brian Morton in Dissent: I first heard the phrase “Stay in your lane” a few years ago, in a writing workshop I was teaching. We were talking about a story that a student in the group, an Asian-American man, had written about an African-American family. There was a lot to criticiz … | Continue reading
Santiago Zabala at Al Jazeera: Unlike the September 11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis – the first two supposedly global events of the 21st century – this pandemic has not spared anyone anywhere, and its consequences will continue to be felt for decades in every corner of t … | Continue reading
Ather Farouqui in IIC Quarterly: Hindi—the original name of the language now known as Urdu—and modern Hindi are two distinct languages. Despite being a fairly new language, notions regarding Urdu’s origins and history are as hotly debated amongst the public at large as among scho … | Continue reading
Pamela Sneed in The Paris Review: Uncle Vernon was cool, tall, hazel-eyed, and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the sixties. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly nonartist … | Continue reading
Perry Anderson in the LRB: By repute, literature on the European Union and its prehistory is notoriously intractable: dull, technical, infested with jargon – matter for specialists, not general readers. From the beginning, however, beneath an unattractive surface it developed co … | Continue reading
Thomas Geoghegan in The New Republic: Here’s a little thought experiment: What would happen if, by a snap of the fingers, white racism in America were to disappear? It might be that the black and Latino working class would be voting for Trump, too. Then we Democrats would have no … | Continue reading
Malcolm Keating in Psyche: In premodern India, debates were entertainment in courtly settings, a sport for profiteers and clever men who enjoyed a quick turn of phrase or put-down. Successful debaters gained followers, fame, even wealth. Those pragmatic aims intertwined with nobl … | Continue reading
A conversation between Molly Crabapple, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Greenberg, Hari Kunzru, and Jana Prikryl: | Continue reading
Rhodes Center · The Left, Divided Over the Extraction Economy | Continue reading
Robert Rubsam at Commonweal: In the summer of 1944, a camera was smuggled out of Auschwitz. Inside it was a roll of film with four images from the gas chambers at Birkenau, taken by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando. These photos were distributed worldwide by the Polish resist … | Continue reading
John Williams at the New York Times: Because there are many things to say about Susan Taubes’s remarkable 1969 novel “Divorcing,” and many of those things concern the grim side of both real life and life in the book, I’d like to start by saying that it’s funny. It’s not a comic n … | Continue reading
Ann Wroe in MIL: The day has been grey, dreary and drizzly, and evening is settling in – a typical covid evening, alone in my flat, with another radio concert playing from an empty hall. It seems a good moment for candles. Which means, even better, it’s time for matches. There’s … | Continue reading
The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs —for Dick It takes more than gasoline and gumption to get you to Zortman—more than whimsy or a wild inkling to rekindle history. It takes a primal prairie need, a kinship with Old Man Winter, with Napi hunkering in sunless gulches, a longi … | Continue reading
Michael Maar in the New Left Review: There is an ancient piece of classroom wisdom that is not entirely misguided when it states: steer clear of adjectives! Editors are unlikely to grumble about a missing adjective, but they will use up their pencils crossing out superfluous ones … | Continue reading
Andrew Jewett in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Back in 2013, another in a long line of tussles over scientism broke out. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, told humanities majors at a Brandeis University graduation ceremony that they represented “the resis … | Continue reading