All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
Maeve Adams on Rhetoric and Resistance
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War on Iran
Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis: The illegal war launched by the United States and Israel against Iran has triggered the mother of all commodity-supply shocks. In response to the unprov
Normcore
Thomas Meaney on Jurgen Habermas in Sidecar: The funeral cortège for Jürgen Habermas was carried out, appropriately enough, in what still passes for the German public sphere – the national newspapers
Cosma Shalizi Is Aware of All Internet Traditions
Ben Recht over at his substack, arg min: I’ve been wanting to write a summary of the Cultural AI conference I attended at NYU last week, but I’ve been struggling to succinctly capture my thoughts. Tha
Will the Miracle of Capitalism Destroy Us All?
Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: In 2003, the literary theorist Fredric Jameson wrote that it was “easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Trevor Jackson s
Classic Icons and Stunning Contemporary Works
From lensculture: The Photography Show presented by AIPAD will take place April 22-26, 2026 at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. This yearly gathering features a wide variety of historically si
Dash Crofts (1938 – 2026) Musician and Member of Seals & Crofts
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Alexander Kluge (1932 – 2026) Filmmaker and Author
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Sunday Poem
I Went Out To See All the Downed Trees Nothing was where it was supposed to be or even where it was twenty minutes ago, one of the only times I’ve understood what nature was trying to say to me. But t
Robert Trivers (1943 – 2026) Evolutionary Biologist
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Victory at Charlie’s Place: A Democracy More Like ‘High Noon’ than de Tocqueville
by Daniel Gauss This story goes back to a time when Williamsburg was just starting to become the hipster promised land and just before 9/11. It can be classified as an obscure but, hopefully, interest
Lessons From Singapore: The Virtues Of Vice
by Eric Feigenbaum In a city-state that fines spitting in public, requires stores to check identification and log purchasers of chewing gum, heavily taxes alcohol and tobacco and bans durian from publ
Chuck Norris once beat the sun in a staring contest
Sopan Deb at the New York Times: Chuck Norris once gave a horse an uppercut and now we have giraffes. Chuck Norris doesn’t sleep. He waits. Chuck Norris is so tough he can slam a revolving door. Chuck
Remembering Robert Trivers, arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin
Robert Lynch at The Laughing Ape: Robert Trivers, who died on March 12, 2026, was arguably the most important evolutionary theorist since Darwin. He had a rare gift for seeing through the messy clutte
Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, the world’s most valuable company and the engine powering the AI computing revolution, talks to Lex Fridman
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How development economics forgot the most important thing
Quico Toro at Persuasion: There used to be an academic discipline centered on a straightforward question: what helps poor countries get richer? It was called development economics, and it was the inte
Dinergothdom
Robert Mariani at The New Atlantis: You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see. You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the hea
A Third Way for the Humanities: A Declaration
Justin Smith-Ruiu at Wondercabinet: Higher education is no longer expanding; it is contracting, or transforming to the point of total discontinuity with what it had once been. It is only natural that
Adorno, Hegel, and Negative Dialectics: Professor Martin Saar
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The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore: Death and satire
Will Self in Harper’s Magazine: How could we satirize all sorts of different people, with different faiths, without implicitly arguing that they should abandon their ethical precepts in favor of our s
First atlas of brain organization shows development over a lifetime
Gemma Conroy in Nature: The brain is a noisy place. Sometimes two brain regions that are far apart are active at the same time, suggesting that they work together to support the same function. Such re
Friday Poem
The first notion of Spoon River poems came to its author upon reading a Greek Anthology. After reading he was determined to write his own anthology following a conversation with his mother of the old
The Uncommon Enemy
by Akim Reinhardt I was 12 years old when I walked down a street in my Bronx neighborhood and saw the poster in the window of Cappie’s. Cappie’s was a certain kind of corner store common in 20th centu
On Heroes and Role Models
by Marie Snyder A couple months ago I wrote that we should not feel blame-worthy if we can’t do all the most courageous things in order to protect our neighbours or help stop a war or try to undermine
Marjiana, the Pearl of Hormuz
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Having never left town, Marjiana is an oyster, a watchful oyster, though her name means “small pearl.” She has read countless books to Ali Baba, books about lands and seas, thei
Five stunning images from Wildlife Photographer of the Year People’s Choice Award
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Artemis II: Inside the Moon mission to fly humans further than ever
Rebecca Morelle, Alison Francis, Paul Sargeant and the Visual Journalism team at the BBC: Four astronauts will take a trip of more than half a million miles around our celestial neighbour and back hom
OpenAI researcher Jason Wolfe talks about the Model Spec, the public framework that defines the intended behavior of ChatGPT
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The Darién Gap: A Reporter’s Journey Through the Deadly Crossroads of the Americas
Blake Scott at H-Environment: Why is it that a tourist can visit Panama—or any “supposedly fun” vacation destination from Baja to Colombia—and be welcomed like the second coming of divine capitalism?
Motherhood reshaped how I see shame, art, and the female body
Megan O’Grady in The Yale Review: I had failed to grasp an obvious fact of parenthood: that I had bound myself irrevocably to the world and made myself freshly vulnerable to it. Nothing had prepared m
The Derivative Depravity of the Epstein Class
Arjun Appadurai in The Wire: The shocking West Asian war unleashed by the USA and Israel is a source of relief to Donald Trump because it has temporarily taken media attention away from his greatest d
Thursday Poem
No One Looked Back As if 360 days of sunshine would never end. As if the balance of rain to earth would remain even. As if valleys and terraced hills would produce vineyards and fruit ……… forever As i
The Paradox of Contemporary AI: Engineering Success and Institutional Failure
by William Benzon OpenAI released GPT-3 in June of 2020, though not to the general public. Those who had access to it were variously impressed or stunned: Is this it? Is AI really coming at long last?
Sounds and Silence: A Bit of Bach, A Night of Banjo
by Michael Liss For several centuries, as we moved from farm to city, the human ear has engaged in a ceaseless battle against the noise caused by human ingenuity. The ears are losing. It is loud out t
This Week’s Photograph
One end of the new pedestrian bridge across the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Wittgenstein’s Contribution to Philosophy
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The Highly Mobile Cucumber
Andrés Muedano at JSTOR Daily: In the Georgics, a lyrical guide to agriculture published in 29 BCE, the Roman poet noted that “the cucumber, coiling through the grass, swells into a paunch.” His words
The Comfort of Crows
Maria Popova at The Marginalian: Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothin
A.I. Is Writing Fiction and Publishers Are Unprepared
Alexandra Alter in the New York Times: Many publishers don’t explicitly prohibit authors from using A.I. in their book contracts. Instead, they rely on longstanding contractual clauses that require wr
Bill Gates: The next generation of electricity is almost here
Bill Gates at Gates Notes: If you’re an electricity nerd like me, this is an exciting moment. Earlier this month, TerraPower—the next-generation nuclear power company I created in 2008—received federa
NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally speaks with Google’s Chief Scientist Jeff Dean
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The Anywhere–Somewhere Value Divide
Yascha Mounk interviews David Goodhart: David Goodhart: The anywhere–somewhere value divide clearly contributed enormously to both the Brexit vote in 2016 in the UK and Trump’s first election in that
‘No Kings’ Protests May Draw Biggest—and Most Diverse—Anti-Trump Crowds Ever
Philip Elliott in Time Magazine: The next widespread protest against President Donald Trump is set to draw big numbers. As missiles continue flying across the Middle East, gas prices keep rising, and
Plastic-Eating Microbes Work Better in Teams
Laura Tran in The Scientist: Plastic pollution has spread across the land and into the deepest parts of the ocean. Many plastics contain additives such as phthalic acid esters (PAEs), which act as pla
Wednesday Poem
Theme for English B The Instructor said Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true. …….. I wonder if it’s that simple? I am twenty-tw
The Black Atlantic as Intersubjectivity
by Herbert Harris I met Paul Gilroy at a conference on racial identity at Yale in the early 1990s. I was finishing my training and eager for new ideas. He was soft-spoken and thoughtful, but his prese
The Written Voice
by Rafaël Newman Zurich’s electorate went to the polls earlier this month on an Abstimmungstag, or “voting day”, to choose its new city parliament, the Gemeinderat; its new city council, the Stadtrat;
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
The Mysterious Case of Gothic Verse Narratives
Brian Brodeur at The Hudson Review: Much of literary culture regards the Gothic genre as an archaic embarrassment—gloomy ruins and paranormal lovers that serious practitioners have learned to dismiss.
Bitch: a history
Karen Stollznow at Aeon: “Bitch” is a word with bite. Once a straightforward insult, it is now used in so many different ways that it’s no longer clear what it means. Bitch is a linguistic chameleon:
Lisa Yuskavage on David Lynch, Giovanni Bellini, And More
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Gerd Faltings Wins Abel Prize for Number Theory Work
Kenneth Chang in the New York Times: A German mathematician, Gerd Faltings, is this year’s winner of the Abel Prize, an honor that is regarded as mathematics’ version of the Nobel Prize. Dr. Faltings,
What Oliver Sacks Jotted Down In His Books
Bill Hayes at The American Scholar: In Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (1783), Oliver sounded almost comically exasperated as he responded to a rambling critique Kant makes of Da
How do zippers work?
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How to measure a good life – tips for moving beyond GDP
Richard Heys, Himanshi Bhardwaj & Cliodhna Taylor in Nature: For decades, economists have known that using gross domestic product (GDP) alone to guide policy is problematic. The metric is mainly a mea
Pakistan Negotiating An End to Iran War? Kind of Makes Sense
Kathy Gannon in Substack: Pakistan as a possible mediator in America’s war against Iran is not a surprise. Pakistan and its powerful military leader, Gen. Asim Munir, has held meetings with both Iran
Tuesday Poem
Practicing Art “The arts are not a way to make a living. They’re a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or not, is a way to make your soul grow, for heave
Reviving Brain Activity After ‘Cryosleep’ Inches Closer in Pioneering Study
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Floating in a warm, nutritious bath, the slices of mouse brain buzzed with electrical activity. Researchers gave them a few zaps, and parts of the hippocampus strengthen
How Reform Fails
by Jerry Cayford “Failure is the foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved,” says the Tao Te Ching. The current competition between our two parties to gerrymander the country—Texas,
It’s a dog’s life, Miss Angela: Excerpt from a dog memoir in progress
by David Winner A neighbor I ran into out walking his dog in our Brooklyn neighborhood asked me about my recent trip to Chile and relayed his own experience there. He loved the skiing, the landscapes,
Perceptions
Utkarsh Makwana. Detail from ‘Finishing Touches’, 2022. Courtesy: Akara Art. More here, here, and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
AI is making things very hard for 3QD
Dear Reader, there are no algorithms at 3QD—just six human editors trying to keep a human-curated corner of the internet alive. But recent changes in Google search and other AI-driven shifts have cut
In Search of Banksy
Simon Gardner, James Pearson and Blake Morrison at Reuters: In late 2022, an ambulance pulled up to a bombed-out apartment building in this village outside Kyiv. Three people emerged. One wore a gray
The Math That Explains Why Bell Curves Are Everywhere
Joseph Howlett in Quanta: Place a measuring cup in your backyard every time it rains and note the height of the water when it stops: Your data will conform to a bell curve. Record 100 people’s guesses
M. C. Escher’s “Print Gallery” and the complex analysis it invites
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Inside China’s robotics revolution
Chang Che in The Guardian: As in much of the world, AI has become part of everyday life in China. But what most excites Chinese politicians and industrialists are the strides being made in the field o
Jeelani Bano, the matriarch of modern Urdu letters, passes away at age 90
From The Siasat Daily: The world of literature has lost one of its most luminous stars. Jeelani Bano, a titan of Urdu literature and a fierce advocate for the marginalized, passed away on Sunday (Marc
Leqaa Kordia is Free
by Charles Siegel In one of my first columns for 3 Quarks Daily, I began by noting that my law firm had just filed, along with other firms, a petition for habeas corpus relief in federal court in Dall
Why I am still an atheist
by Jeroen Bouterse In his Confessions, Augustine remembers his state after the death of a beloved childhood friend. He writes: “Everywhere I looked I saw death. […] My eyes sought him everywhere, and
Poem by Jim Culleny
Another Piece of Eternity I’m peeling back a page reading a new day by the light of a new sun. Mom died years ago, or was it yesterday? I once read something similar by Camus but was too new to unders
Nagatachō Bubble
Ma Jiajia in Sidecar: Sanae Takaichi’s resounding win in Japan’s snap election last month divided Chinese-language commentary. Many Chinese living in the country were uneasy; some beat their chests in
Pinto’s Lesson
Fernando Rugitsky in Phenomenal World: It is still too soon to fully understand the conditions that enabled the worldwide ascent of the far right over the past decade. But deepening material divisions
Paul Ehrlich (1932 – 2026) Biologist And Author
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Cosma Shalizi Is Aware of All Internet Traditions
Ben Recht over at his Substack arg min: I’ve been wanting to write a summary of the Cultural AI conference I attended at NYU last week, but I’ve been struggling to succinctly capture my thoughts. That
Len Deighton (1929 – 2026) Spy Novelist
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Calvin Tomkins (1925 – 2026) Writer And Art Critic
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Christiane Amanpour Explains The Iran War
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‘I’ve learned first-hand how evil is tolerated’: Colm Tóibín on living in the US under Trump
Colm Toibin in The Guardian: In the early years of this century, I worked for a semester at various American universities in cities where I will not live again. Thus, in a story called Barton Springs,
Sunday Poem
Revolutionary Act “Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of t
Lessons from Ethics Bowling
by Tim Sommers Having previously discussed Ethics Bowl here, I can’t resist bragging just a little, tiny bit. On Sunday, May 8 in St. Louis, Missouri the Ethics Bowl team from William & Mary – our tea
Hamlet and the Act of Betrayal, Part One
by Nils Peterson Something about Hamlet makes us want to love him, some mysterious quality of his being. I was maybe 15 or 16 when I first met the Prince and sitting next to Boots Schneider at the Oli
The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink
Kory Stamper at Longreads: When I was hired by Merriam-Webster in 1998, it was ostensibly to revise the Big Book, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. The Third, or W3 as it’s cal
John Berger and Susan Sontag in Conversation
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Why Insect Farming Startups Are Going Bankrupt
Kenny Torrella at Undark: You personally might recoil at the thought of eating fried crickets or roasted mealworms, but many cultures around the world consume insects, either caught from the wild or f
AI alignment…to whom?
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How To Read Wuthering Heights
Ellen O’Connell Whittet at Lithub: One of the novel’s quietly devastating moments comes when Branwell, in the middle of one of his cycles of resolve, tells Emily he is done with laudanum and alcohol.
Mexico’s Forever War on Drugs
Carlos Pérez Ricart at The Ideas Letter: Two decades have passed, with operations, clashes, and the arrest of drug lords. And yet the same questions remain. What is the true nature of this conflict? H
Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter
Richard Skinner at 3:AM Magazine: When Don Juan came out, the lyrics were printed on the album sleeve. Included in the lyrics for “Paprika Plains” was a 72-line passage of stream-of-consciousness imag
Friday Poem
This is Not a Small Voice This is not a small voice you hear this is a large voice coming out of these cities. This is the voice of LaTanya. Kadesha. Shaniqua. This is the voice of Antoi
In Memoriam: My brilliant friend Sara
Azra Raza in Dawn (April 2022): Sara Suleri Goodyear died peacefully at home on Sunday, March 20, 2022 of pulmonary failure. She was 68 years old. She was my friend. Sara disliked being called exotic;
The Problem With Promoting ‘Gold Standard Science’
Jonathan Scaccia in Undark Magazine: Federal agencies have been branding some of their research and policy work as “gold standard science,” a trend that gained new force after an executive order on th
Why Do We Get Mad at Inanimate Objects?
by Ken MacVey There are many things about who we are that we take for granted yet can still find mysterious. Why do we sleep? Why do we dream? Why do we sing and dance? Why do we laugh? Another, perha
Your Mad World
by Chris Horner Evil also resides in the innocent gaze itself which perceives Evil all around. — Hegel. [1] I have always been vaguely irritated by the song ‘Mad World’, by the duo Tears for Fears, w
Amitava Kumar’s Shout-out to the poet Mikko Harvey
Amitava Kumar at his Substack: There are always deer in my backyard and I try to draw them. In recent days when making those drawings, I have often thought of a poem I read recently by Mikko Harvey. I
I challenged ChatGPT to a writing competition. Could it actually replace me?
Rhik Samadder in The Guardian: Every writer I know is in despair at the prospect being replaced by AI. Many of them say they never use it on principle; I know all of them do. So this week, as part of
The story of the Los Angeles aqueduct
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Antisemitism’s Afterlives
Benjamin Balthaser at the Boston Review: The German state has staked redemption for the Shoah on unquestionable support for Israel even as the far-right party Alternative for Deutschland, with an alar
Sinatra Interrupted Louis Armstrong Being Mocked — What Frank Did Silenced the Entire Room
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Can Tattoos Cause Cancer?
Andrea Lius in The Scientist: Metallica’s lead vocalist James Hetfield often lauds Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister as one of his biggest inspirations. In 2024, nine years after Kilmister passed away, Hetf
What Are Psychedelic Entities?
Joanna Steinhardt at Noema Magazine: In 1960, the beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote about his ayahuasca experience in Peru: “Began to sense a strange Presence in the hut—a Blind Being—or a being I am bli
The Real Joseph Beuys?
Emily Watlington at Art in America: ALL THE DOUBLING MAKES Beuys a tricky figure. And it’s not clear how intentional it all was: Was his healer persona a clever conceptual act, or proof of his repress
The Iliad: Emily Wilson, Juliet Stevenson, Tobias Menzies and Edith Hall
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Thursday Poem
Sonnet All we need is fourteen lines, well, thirteen now, and after this one just a dozen to launch a little ship on love’s storm-tossed seas, then only ten more left like rows of beans. How easily it
Criticism and Critical Thinking
by Christopher Hall There’s a certain problem with the status of the word “criticism” in the phrase “literary criticism.” The critical part seems to be concerned, as criticism is in general, with sepa
This Week’s Photograph
Three mountains. Looking northward from Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
AI is making things very hard for 3QD
Dear Reader, there are no algorithms at 3QD—just six human editors trying to keep a human-curated corner of the internet alive. But recent changes in Google search and other AI-driven shifts have cut
American Diner Gothic
Robert Mariani at The New Atlantis: You’re not hallucinating the great weirding of America. The visual evidence is everywhere. Start with what you can see. You’re in a small town in Wisconsin, the hea
AIs say false things for the same reason you do
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: I hate the term “hallucinations” for when AIs say false things. It’s perfectly calculated to mislead the reader – to make them think AIs are crazy, or maybe just h
Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast: Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single priso
Medical Research Is Hopelessly Caught in Red Tape
Ruxandra Teslo at Persuasion: A story about Paul Conyngham, an AI entrepreneur from Sydney who treated his dog Rosie’s cancer with a personalized mRNA vaccine, has been circulating on X this week. Wha
Sartre vs Camus: The Great Intellectual Conflict
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Wednesday Poem
Black Forest Sometimes my mind goes back to certain things. Like everyone’s. Like to the woman who asked me What keeps you awake at night? She wanted a writerly, magical answer. A black forest, a shin
António Lobo Antunes’s Exhilarating Novels
Yagnishsing Dawoor at The Guardian: António Lobo Antunes, the Portuguese novelist who died this week in Lisbon at 83, had little patience for discussing his craft. The mechanics of writing were, he li
Fred Astaire Cuts Loose: 1970 Oscars
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America’s Former Presidents Should Protect the Oath of Office
Scott Curran in Time Magazine: The road up to and through the White House is a partisan one. But when a President retires from the Oval Office, their path becomes much less so. That’s why the institut
Heated Rivalry In Russia
Olga Nechaeva at the LARB: IT IS HARD to finish Heated Rivalry (2025– ) and simply move on. It has been more than a month since the first season’s finale, but people cannot stop talking about Jacob Ti
Would You Love Me If I Never Finish My Book?
by Lei Wang I’ve been under the weather for about three weeks now: not so incapacitated as to make watching bad TV the only respite, but not quite well either. A persistent, on-off sniffleupagal achin
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Will the Indus Valley script ever be deciphered?
Owen Jarus at LiveScience: Around 4,000 years ago, one of the world’s oldest civilizations emerged: The Indus Valley Civilization, flourishing in what is now Pakistan, western India, eastern Iran and
The Institute Behind Taiwan’s Chip Dominance
Karthik Tadepalli at Asterisk: ITRI is an applied R&D lab, founded to rapidly elevate Taiwan’s technological capabilities, particularly in electronics.1 In addition to conducting research, ITRI acquir
Sonja Lyubomirsky on the one thing you can do today to be happier
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The Shah’s Party: And the Iranian Revolution That Followed
David Chaffetz at the Asian Review of Books: A worldly Hungarian informed me in 1976, as I was leaving to take up a scholarship in Iran, “I was at the Shah’s 2,500 year celebration.” Astounded, I aske
Better than Wuthering Heights? The Brontës’ novels – ranked!
Lucasta Miller in The Guardian: 1 Villette by Charlotte Brontë (1853) Less famous than Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Villette is Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece and deserves to be better known. Here,
Dopamine takes a hit: how neuroscience is rethinking the ‘feel-good’ chemical
David Adam in Nature: When neuroscientists gather in the Spanish city of Seville in May for the annual Dopamine Society meeting, one discussion could be unusually lively. Session 31 will feature a deb
The Real Renaissance
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Tuesday Poem
Deer Trails: Deer trails run on the side hills ………. cross county access roads ………. dirt ruts to bone-white ………. board house ranches, ………. tumbled down. Waist high through manzanita, Through sticky, pr
History, Memory, and Antagonism in Ireland
R. F. Foster at The Hedgehog Review: Burying memory and melting into forgetfulness are sometimes necessary conditions for continued coexistence when faced with a history of hatred. This raises the que
On Pip Adam
Evangeline Riddiford Graham at n+1: Since her debut short story collection in 2010, Adam’s books have been published at a steady clip by Te Herenga Waka Press (formerly Victoria University Press), in
Math in the AI Era
by Jonathan Kujawa In the past few months, there has been a flurry of activity at the intersection of AI and mathematics. There is a keen interest in applying AI to mathematics. One reason is that mat
Nandita Bajaj: Confronting Patriarchy, Pronatalism, and Population Denial
by Robert Jensen Not so long ago, the conventional wisdom in most liberal/left circles was that people concerned about population growth tended to be racists, nativists, and eugenicists. And mostly ol
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Who’s Jealous?!. Celestun, Mexico, March 2025. Digital photograph. “The water in Celestún, particularly near the mangroves and estuary, often appears various shades of green, yellow, brow
The most famous line in literature doesn’t mean what ‘Hamnet’ thinks it means
Robert N. Watson at the Los Angeles Review of Books: No doubt Paul Mescal, playing Shakespeare, wanted to say “To be, or not to be”—what actor wouldn’t want his turn? And it’s not surprising that Hamn
The Machine Rumor Mill
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad at Digital Dopplegangers: A few weeks ago, a curious story began circulating among software developers. Scott Shambaugh, an engineer working on an open-source project rejected
Do We Need God? Steven Pinker vs. Ross Douthat Debate
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Will America ever turn away from imperial arrogance?
George Scialabba at Commonweal: Besides invading other countries, there are other ways to defy international law. The U.S. embargo of Cuba, begun in 1960 and continuing to this day, has caused incalcu
The Most Disruptive Company in the World
From Time Magazine: In a hotel room in Santa Clara, Calif., five members of the AI company Anthropic huddled around a laptop, working urgently. It was February 2025, and they had been at a conference
Trump’s Gas Prices
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Anthony Bourdain’s Life In Fiction And The Kitchen
Lizzy Harding at Bookforum: IN 1999, AT THE AGE OF FORTY-THREE, ANTHONY BOURDAIN had all but given up hope that he would ever be recognized as a major talent in anything. For the man who would soon be
Chaim Soutine: Genius, Obsession, and a Dramatic Life in Art
George Prochnik at Literary Review: The artist Chaim Soutine was obsessed with Rembrandt’s painting of a flayed and headless ox. After managing at the age of twenty, in 1913, to get from Smilovichi, a
Doors of Bresson | by Kogonada
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On empathy
by Ashutosh Jogalekar When people hear that we should empathize with our adversaries, the reaction is often uneasy. Empathy sounds like softness. It sounds like moral compromise, even capitulation. Wh
Your Fellow Americans: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know
by Jim Hanas As the Pew Research Center reported last week, more than half of Americans think their fellow citizens are “morally bad.” The U.S. had the dimmest view of their neighbors among the twenty
Poem by Jim Culleny
Driver’s License Renewal Photo I take a look and first think, whoa! you look like the father of a 50-year old,then think, whoa! you are the father of a 50-year old,then think, whoa! you look like some