by Thomas R. Wells Why do you love me? Tell me the reasons. I love you because you are you. If I loved you for reasons then I wouldn’t love you, but the reasons. I would have to leave you if someone better came along. Movies, music and novels portray a particular ideal of romanti … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber If you’re like me, when you read something on 3QD you often have a cup of coffee ready to hand. Perhaps you’re at your desk at work on your computer, with a mug near your mousepad. Or you’re in a coffee shop reading on your cell phone. Or at home reading on… | Continue reading
Reflections on visting Britain in the early Spring, on the beauty of the countryside and the problem of litter. | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford Like most Kafka stories, “A Hunger Artist” inserts you into a bewildering situation, appears to offer you some solace and meaning, and then bewilders you all over again. The Hunger Artist is just that: a man that starves himself for a living. But unlike Gregor S … | Continue reading
Long exposure of evening scene from my balcony after a rare snowfall this late in winter in March of 2016. The white streaks on the street are from the headlights of a car driving by; the blue ones from a speeding police car. | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow The wine world thrives on variation. Wine grapes are notoriously sensitive to differences in climate, weather and soil. If care is taken to plant grapes in the right locations and preserve those differences, each region, each vintage, and indeed each vineyard can … | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf In May 2014, a young man beat his twenty-year-old sister, Farzana, to death by hitting her head with a brick. He did this in broad daylight just outside the High Court building in Lahore, the cultural, artistic and academic capital of Pakistan. He did it as local p … | Continue reading
Peter Godfrey-Smith in Aeon: Australia has had an outsized influence on philosophy, especially in the middle and late-20th century. The field still shows a broad Australian footprint. For many years, Princeton University in New Jersey, perennially one of the highest-ranked philos … | Continue reading
Cynthia Haven in Music & Literature: Cynthia Haven: Violence has been a theme of this conference: Juan Gabriel Vásquez on the Colombian drug wars, three sessions for the Nigerian journalist and author Helon Habila, who spoke about the kidnapped Boko Haram girls and the ongoing te … | Continue reading
Joshua S. Goldstein, Staffan A. Qvist and Steven Pinker in the New York Times: As young people rightly demand real solutions to climate change, the question is not what to do — eliminate fossil fuels by 2050 — but how. Beyond decarbonizing today’s electric grid, we must use clean … | Continue reading
Leon Craig in The White Review: The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and the walls are decorated with twining sunflowers, exuberant passionflowers and several canvases of blousy green carnations monogrammed with Osca … | Continue reading
Robin Douglass in iai: In 1651, Thomas Hobbes famously wrote that life in the state of nature – that is, our natural condition outside the authority of a political state – is ‘solitary, poore, nasty brutish, and short.’ Just over a century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau countered t … | Continue reading
Sarah Weinman in Crime Reads: Sandy Fawkes landed in Atlanta on the night of November 7, 1974. She’d spent the day in Washington on a fruitless quest to interview former Vice President Spiro Agnew, part of a one-month tryout with an American weekly newspaper that paid her extraor … | Continue reading
Bo Winegard and Ben Winegard in Quillette: In science, the jury is always out. This is because science is a methodological approach to the world, not a set of inflexible principles or a catalog of indisputable facts. Truth is always provisional. Science does not hold something to … | Continue reading
Nicholas Wright in Foreign Affairs: The debate over the effects of artificial intelligence has been dominated by two themes. One is the fear of a singularity, an event in which an AI exceeds human intelligence and escapes human control, with possibly disastrous consequences. The … | Continue reading
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Stephanie Merritt at The Guardian: At 13, Sinéad Gleeson began to experience pain in her hip joints: “The bones ground together, literally turning to dust.” Hospital stays became frequent, then rounds of traction, surgery, biopsies, before an eventual diagnosis of monoarticular a … | Continue reading
Sam Carter at The Quarterly Conversation: María Sonia Cristoff has often recounted one of her formative reading experiences. Hired to translate the diaries of Thomas Bridges—a nineteenth-century Anglican missionary in Argentina—she traveled from Buenos Aires to his family’s farm … | Continue reading
Cynthia Haven and Dubravka Ugrešić at Music and Literature: I’ve chosen the fox as a symbolic representation of a writer. The fox is rich with meaning. In the Western cultural tradition, the fox is mainly a male creature. In Eastern cultures, the fox is mostly a female creature. … | Continue reading
Arman D’Angour in Aeon: Sources from late antiquity, such as the 5th-century CE Christian writers Theodoret of Cyrrhus and Cyril of Alexandria, state that Socrates was, at least as a younger man, a lover of both sexes. They corroborate occasional glimpses of an earthy Socrates in … | Continue reading
Louisa Hall in The New York Times: “Lost and Wanted” is a novel of female friendship without the furious intimacy of, say, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. It’s a novel about female friendship begun in America in the 1990s, when women didn’t talk about sexual harassment and fr … | Continue reading
Post Impressions (VI) into the strenuous briefness Life: handorgans and April darkness,friends i charge laughing. Into the hair-thin tints of yellow dawn, into the women-coloured twilight i smilingly glide. I into the big vermilion departure swim,sayingly; (Do you think?)the … | Continue reading
Zachary Fine in The Paris Review: In some late month of 1995, William H. Gass attempted a flight from New York to Saint Louis but was stalled by fog at the flight boards. He repaired to a small table at an airport bar, his socks pulped and moaning, and spent the night with a gall … | Continue reading
Michael Brooks in the Times Literary Supplement: Despite devising both the defining equation and the defining thought experiment of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger was never comfortable with what he helped to create. His “Schrödinger’s Cat” paradox, published in 1935, was an a … | Continue reading
Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica: Visit the African savannas in Zimbabwe or Namibia, and you might notice large, towering termite mounds dotted about the landscape—nature’s skyscrapers, if you will. And nature is quite the engineer: those mounds are self-cooling, self-ventilati … | Continue reading
Josh Jones in Open Culture: In the past few years, when far-right nationalists are banned from social media, violent extremists face boycotts, or institutions refuse to give a platform to racists, a faux-outraged moan has gone up: “So much for the tolerant left!” “So much for lib … | Continue reading
Geoff Ward at The Dublin Review of Books: So what was it that made Robinson Crusoe different from previous English fiction? First, Defoe was the first major writer in English literature who did not take a plot from mythology, history, legend or prior literature. The next was to b … | Continue reading
Moeko Fujii at The New Yorker: Before I knew who Claire Denis was, she taught me how to dance. When I was eighteen, it was easier to stay in with a movie than to go to a party and be surrounded by strangers. One night, I watched Denis’s film “Beau Travail,” from 1999. Afterward, … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian: As Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night Over the Rhône goes on show at Tate Britain, it is, in one sense, coming home. This might sound like wishful thinking. For the past half century the painting has hung in Paris, and its singing Mediterranean colour … | Continue reading
Matt Richtel in The New York Times: Cancer immunotherapy drugs, which spur the body’s own immune system to attack tumors, hold great promise but still fail many patients. New research may help explain why some cancers elude the new class of therapies, and offer some clues to a so … | Continue reading
The Bed After he’d lain again with Penelope, Odysseus, awake, listened to her gentle snore and smiled. He’d forgotten it, or maybe it had come while he was away. Restless, he found himself restless, and wondering – at home, in the bed he’d made, yet restless, restless. How many n … | Continue reading
Liesl Schillinger in the New York Review of Books: If you leaf through the pages of one of the tall, puffy black leatherette volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Macropædia (a portmanteau made from the Greek words for “big” and “education), you will find Arthur Koestler’s lon … | Continue reading
Leonard Sax in Psychology Today: If there are superstar scholars, Berkeley professor Judith Butler is a superstar. She is best known for pioneering the idea that “male” and “female” are merely social constructs. She writes that “because gender is not a fact, the various acts of g … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: The modern world is full of technology, and also with anxiety about technology. We worry about robot uprisings and artificial intelligence taking over, and we contemplate what it would mean for a computer to be conscious or truly human. It s … | Continue reading
Stuart Schrader in the Boston Review: I recently stumbled across a statue in Baltimore that celebrates the young men of the city who fought in the “Spanish War.” On a narrow triangle in a residential neighborhood, this lone soldier stands at ease, holding a rifle across his body … | Continue reading
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Barry Schwabsky at The Nation: Last year saw the publication of a book that could well turn out to be a future classic of art writing. Jack Whitten’s Notes From the Woodshed was released just a few months after the painter’s death in New York at the age of 78. More than 500 pages … | Continue reading
Lucy Wasensteiner at the TLS: The subsequent outpouring of creativity at the Bauhaus has since become the stuff of legend. Yet despite its popularity among teachers and students, the school and its methods were consistently controversial. As the clouds of nationalism gathered ove … | Continue reading
Daniel Mendelsohn at the NYRB: This familiar Strindbergian theme is underscored in The Best Intentions by an ingenious device to which the author turns more than once: the juxtaposition of some ostensibly documentary evidence from the “real life” that he’s fictionalizing—a photog … | Continue reading
Lois Beckett in The Guardian: Romance readers compound the sin of liking happy, sexy stories with the sin of not caring much about the opinions of serious people, which is to say, men. They are openly scornful of the outsiders who occasionally parachute in to report on them. In l … | Continue reading
Chelsea Wald in Nautilus: Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, thinking, … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market is a bland name for a dreadful piece of law likely to reshape our use of the internet. “The transformation of the internet from an open platform for sharing and innovation into a tool for the aut … | Continue reading
Stan Carey in Sentence First: Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs and Steel has an engrossing chapter on the evolution of writing as a communication technology. It includes a brief account of the development of a syllabary – a set of written characters that represent syllables – for … | Continue reading