Skip to content

Sign up for a small monthly payment and enjoy ads-free browsing at 3QD


3 Quarks Daily

Make a one-time donation and enjoy ads-free browsing at 3QD


  • Home
  • About Us
  • Monday Magazine
  • Archives
  • Support 3QD
  • Log In

Haider Shahbaz

Haider is a Pakistani. An undergraduate. At Yale. All these things baffle him. He spends most of his time trying to cope with his bafflement at these and other things. He copes with it by talking to things and people around him and taking various colorful intoxicants. When sane, Haider enjoys South Asian History, English Literature and Film because they allow him to read a lot of books, watch a lot of movies and then act painfully pretentious about them. He, also, tries very hard not to eat cute furry animals and his dream is to obliterate their suffering. That is not his only dream though. Since having spent two years in the countryside in Wales he wants to live atop a mountain with lots of sheep and secretly wants his cottage to become a pilgrimage site after he dies. Email: hshahbaz@gmail.com

Marriage

Posted on Monday, Oct 8, 2012 12:13AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz Rain taps on their window. Tip tap, tip tap. She says to him: “Let’s go outside on the balcony”. “Are you mad? It’s pouring.” he says. “No, of course I’m not mad. You know I like being in the rain.” “I think I’m getting a cold. I might head off to bed.…

Leave a comment

American Sketches

Posted on Monday, Jul 16, 2012 12:15AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz (Note: The theme of one sketch was suggested by fellow 3 Quarks Daily columnist Rishidev Chaudhuri after a night of his delicious summer drinks. As always, I am grateful.) I (Thirty five dollars and seventy two cents) Once he nailed her to the floor he moved back assuredly. He briskly – yet…

Leave a comment

The Last Novel

Posted on Monday, Feb 27, 2012 12:50AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz Kashif is a novelist who is afraid of novels: they all remind him of his failure at love. Novels, with the futility of each word, with the reflection of each phrase, with the silent spaces between sounds, remind him of nothing but loss. His novels are nothing but bloody fights with the…

Leave a comment

Jean-Baptiste Lucanor: A Mediocre Life (Chapter 1)

Posted on Monday, Jan 2, 2012 12:20AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz (and his dear friend, Nicolas MMP) I Under the heading Autobiography, in a notebook otherwise empty, the surrealist scribbled: To wage war with words on the fascists. My manifestos are my diaries; my diaries are my manifestos. An end to bourgeois essentialization. An end to mediocrity. Of the worlds that wine opens,…

Leave a comment

Monks/Juicy Tomatoes

Posted on Monday, Oct 10, 2011 12:30AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz Juicy tomatoes. Crispy lettuce. A succulent chicken breast. Olive oil. Black pepper. Chopped green onions and chopped smelly garlic. Mustard. Rosemary bread, perhaps? Lightly heat the oil. Brown the garlic and the onions as you hear them sizzle. Sprinkle black pepper on one side of the chicken. Sautee the chicken with the…

Leave a comment

When Self became Art and Buttons Became Tender

Posted on Monday, Aug 15, 2011 8:52AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

By Haider Shahbaz In 1917, Marcel Duchamp contributed Fountain, a urinal, to the exhibit of the Society of Independent Artists. The Society was ‘independent’ – but not that much. They rejected the urinal, insisting it was not art. Duchamp defended the piece by Mr. Mutt (his alter ego) in the following words: “Mr Mutt made…

Leave a comment

A Pakistani Let Loose

Posted on Monday, Jul 18, 2011 12:20AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz “To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self.” – Roberto Bolano, Exiles. “You must remember that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in…

Leave a comment

Memories from New York City, Chichicastenango and Amsterdam

Posted on Monday, Jun 20, 2011 12:35AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz We want someone to whisper to us. But nobody does. And we get scared. There are sounds, faint sounds; they come from upstairs and downstairs, and some from the apartment next to us. And we wait for them to whisper to us. They will whisper, we know. From across the skin, across…

Leave a comment

At Home: Letters from Holidays (Or a less pretentious title)

Posted on Monday, May 23, 2011 12:05AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz Try listening to ‘Montezuma’ by the Fleet Foxes while reading this. July, 2008. Quick reply: Yes, was at the protest. No, did not get hurt. There is a certain quality about revenge. Walking and hanging on the sides of buses for more than 15 hours and than sitting in front of Parliament,…

Leave a comment

Holes

Posted on Monday, Apr 25, 2011 12:35AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

By Syed Haider Shahbaz “On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on.” Gabriel Garcia Marques, Chronicle of a Death Foretold. “Before we had religion and other nonsense. Now for everyone there should be someone to…

Leave a comment

Going up a hill

Posted on Monday, Mar 28, 2011 12:40AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

by Haider Shahbaz The first was happy to observe. The second wanted to create. The third was always mimicking. The first one, Mike, tall and thin with bushy Jewish hair was wrapped in a blanket that reminded you of your last LSD trip: colourful, torn and full of bunnies. The second, Dario, with his round…

Leave a comment

Going to the Shire

Posted on Monday, Jan 31, 2011 12:40AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

On Sundays, Sylvia and I go to the Shire. As anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Tolkien’s world will tell you, the Shire is a happy place. It is a place of beginnings, homecomings, nostalgia and merrymaking. I loved the Shire, and I loved going there with Sylvia. There was a train station very…

Leave a comment

Growing up with Osama

Posted on Monday, Jan 3, 2011 9:33AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

I grew up with a mysterious man. He talks about depleting natural resources, the concept of class, Sweden’s welfare state, religion, Kyoto, corporate influence in politics, monarchy in Saudi Arabia and AIDS. And he kills people. Many, many people. I don’t understand him. I’ve never met him. I don’t even know if he’s alive anymore.…

Leave a comment

ABP

Posted on Monday, Dec 6, 2010 12:22AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Haider Shahbaz

ABP is a house; it is one quarter of a house, the bottom left corner of New Haven’s 111 Howe Street to be precise. ABP is short for Alif, Bay and Pay which are the first three alphabets of the Urdu language. It has been given the name ABP by the three Pakistani undergraduates from…

Leave a comment

Receive 3QD Posts by Email

Please fill out the form below to get our email with all the posts from the previous 24 hours, which is sent out a bit after midnight (NY City time) each day. This is completely free of charge for everyone.
Name: 
Your email address:*
Please wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Follow 3QD on Social Media


What People Say About 3QD




"It is a great honor to be mentioned in one of my two ONLY portals to the internet—and the world, since I do not read newspapers. My discipline, to avoid drowning in information, is not to cruise the web outside of these two points. I tried many sites; yours has CHARM."

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. [The other site NNT is referring to is the excellent Arts & Letters Daily.]




3 Quarks Daily is an essential stop for any serious reader on the Web."

—Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch since 1993.




"3 Quarks Daily is one of the most interesting and thoughtful websites out there."

—Sean Carroll, physicist at Caltech, author.




"The algorithms that curate your social-media timeline do so with indifference and programmed greed. The humans who curate 3QD do so with love and well-aged wisdom. Read 3QD instead! It’s so much better!"

—Justin E. H. Smith, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Paris.




"3 Quarks is a daily must-read for intellectuals of all stripes. It is perhaps even smarter and better and more comprehensive than Arts & Letters Daily, the de facto gold standard of the smart set on the internet."

—Laura Claridge, former Professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, and author of Romantic Potency: The Paradox of Desire, Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence, and Norman Rockwell: A Life.




“From my perspective as an early modernist, what you’re undertaking is akin to the heroic labors of Renaissance compositors, who would (like you) read widely and excerpt and synthesize vast amounts of knowledge for others. A real service to the republic of letters.”

—Scott Newstok, Professor of English, Director of the Pearce Shakespeare Endowment, Rhodes College, and author of How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.




"3QD is always interesting--you (and your other contributors) have a fine eye for good writing in both the arts and the sciences, which is a very rare thing indeed."

—Rochelle Gurstein, author of The Repeal of Reticence, and frequent contributor to The New Republic, Salmagundi, and American Scholar.




"3 Quarks Daily is smart and highclass."

—Robert Pinsky, only three-term U.S. Poet Laureate.




"I like to check in from time to time with 3 Quarks Daily."

—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. "One of the most celebrated writers of his generation," according to the Virginia Quarterly Review.




"Thanks for 3 Quarks Daily which has been very high on my reading list for several years now!"

—Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He is also co-founder, with Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn, of a project to establish a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.









Recent Comments on 3QD (we are working to fix this)

3QD Design History and Credits

The original site was designed by S. Abbas Raza in 2004 but soon completely redesigned by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis in 2006. The next major revision was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde in 2013. And this current version 5.0 has been designed and deployed by Dumky de Wilde in collaboration with S. Abbas Raza.

3 Quarks Daily

3 Quarks Daily started in 2004 with the idea of creating a curated retreat for everything intellectual on the web. No clickbait, no fake news, not just entertainment, but depth and breadth —something increasingly hard to find on the internet today. If you like what we do, please consider making a donation.