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Jonathan Kramnick

Jonathan Kramnick

Jonathan Kramnick is an English professor at Rutgers University. He lives in Manhattan. Email: [email protected]

Sojourns: On Recessions and Intellectual History: The Case of English

Posted on Monday, Feb 11, 2008 12:03AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

News stories sometimes provide strange anecdotes. One that has often been useful for me came from the flurry of coverage after the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, in 1996. As everyone now knows, this odd duck was for a brief time a math professor at the University of California at Berkeley. One of the…

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Sojourns: Two Views of the Apocalypse

Posted on Monday, Jan 29, 2007 1:11AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

Slavoj Zizek once said “it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end but somehow capitalism will go on.” One is tempted to respond, well yes of course. It is also easier to imagine blowing up a…

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Sojourns: Douglas Gordon’s Moving Pictures

Posted on Monday, Aug 14, 2006 12:18AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

I went the Museum of Modern Art the other day with the intention of seeing the new Dada exhibition. I never made it in, however, because I found myself preoccupied with the Douglas Gordon videos on display in the room next door. Now let me say at the outset that video art has never been…

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Sojourns: What’s on TV

Posted on Monday, Jul 17, 2006 1:51AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

This has been an interminably bad summer for movies. Not one of the blockbusters has been interesting or diverting: X-Men 3 was a lackluster addition to the franchise; MI3 was, well, too Tom Cruisey to get me in the theater; and Superman Returns just seems dull. And so in a reversal of the normal order…

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Sojourns: Bored by the World Cup

Posted on Monday, Jun 26, 2006 2:02AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

Let me confess at the outset that my lack of interest in the World Cup is matched only by my ignorance of the sport itself. Call me what you will. A philistine. A provincial. A vulgarian. An ugly American. But I have not been getting up in the morning to watch the matches. There is…

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Sojourns: True Crime 2

Posted on Monday, Apr 24, 2006 12:15AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

Rape is unique among crimes because its investigation so often turns on the question of whether a crime actually happened. Was there or was there not a rape, did she or did she not consent, was she or was she not even able to consent? These sorts of questions are rarely asked about burglary or…

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Sojourns: True Crime

Posted on Monday, Mar 27, 2006 12:34AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

An eighteen-year old girl drinks heavily at a bar. She leaves with three boys about her age. No one ever sees her again. Her body is never found. Such is the ordinary stuff of crime across the world: a victim and her suspects caught in a prosaic mixture of sex and violence. Add to that…

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Sojourns: Judaism as Style

Posted on Monday, Feb 27, 2006 12:25AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

I’ve found myself listening to the much-hyped, Hasidic reggae/hip-hop artist Matisyahu the last couple days. Needless to say, that makes me a confirmed bandwagon jumper. The live recording of “King without a Crown” and the accompanying video shot in Austin TX have been getting heavy rotation. His new CD is due next week and already…

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Sojourns: Varieties of Academic Reception

Posted on Monday, Jan 30, 2006 2:49AMFriday, December 8, 2017 by Jonathan Kramnick

Over a year ago, Perry Anderson pronounced in The London Review of Books that Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des letters, translated into English last January as The World Republic of Letters (Harvard, 2005) “is likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said’s Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.” I…

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Recent Comments on 3QD

  • David Evans The best opening line and the best closing paragraph I have read for some time. That was a great read.

    Why George MacDonald Matters ·  Wednesday, January 20, 2021

  • Ash Jogalekar Mary, I am very glad! Thank you.

    On the varieties of change ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Ash Jogalekar Thanks for your comment, and especially for "impermanence can be a wonderful gift". We treasure moments precisely because they are temporary.

    On the varieties of change ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Ash Jogalekar Thanks Leanne. Did you know there is a new updated version of The First Three Minutes out this year? It was supposed to be out at the end of December...

    On the varieties of change ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Ash Jogalekar Thanks for your comment Brooks (I could finally manage to log in to respond). The line from Handel's Messiah is beautiful and I thoroughly enjoyed...

    On the varieties of change ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Joan Harvey That really is the question. And you are right, Boebert is just the tip of the iceberg. I grew up in that district, but in the liberal part, though a...

    My Cousin Daryl Pens a Paean to Lauren Boebert ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Ruchira "The good people of Colorado’s Third District weighed those two platforms carefully and chose FREEDOM!" And now it has emerged that she acted as...

    My Cousin Daryl Pens a Paean to Lauren Boebert ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Bill Benzon Yes, agreed.

    My Cousin Daryl Pens a Paean to Lauren Boebert ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Michael Liss "Till April in Paris, chestnuts in blossom Holiday tables under the trees April in Paris, this is a feeling That no one can ever reprise."

    Catspeak ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • aachukay What an incredibly rich life the subject has lived! Such a pleasure to read about him, I can only assume how proud Mrs Shamsie must be to have had...

    In memoriam: Sahabzada M. Yaqub Khan, my uncle ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Mary Hrovat I enjoyed this so much. I loved the grand scale of this piece, from the daily changes of newborns (which I especially loved reading about) to the...

    On the varieties of change ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Joan Harvey Thanks, Bill!

    My Cousin Daryl Pens a Paean to Lauren Boebert ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Bill Murray Brilliant.

    My Cousin Daryl Pens a Paean to Lauren Boebert ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Android Pitanga Nicely done. Poignant and insightful, with a dash of the speculative. The "luxury of dignity" has great sound to it. Impermanence can be a wonderful...

    On the varieties of change ·  Tuesday, January 19, 2021

  • Larry Franz Michael Strevens, who teaches philosophy at NYU, argues in his new book The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science, that what...

    Science and magic ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • S. Abbas Raza Thanks so much, Paul.

    Monday Photo ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • Paul Bigioni Thank you! This is so oddly beautiful. How many of us stop, even for a second, in a given day to see the simple delights with which even the most...

    Monday Photo ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • Leanne Ogasawara Wonderful essay, Ash! It’s a blessing that you’ve got to spend so much time with your newborn daughter. My son was born right after 911 and I...

    On the varieties of change ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • jimculleny I wonder if vilification is never morally called for. If you have a dedicated vilifier on one side of the equation and a dedicated non-vilifier on the...

    Make Love, not War ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • jimculleny It'd be uncommonly considerate if Trump would stop going in the latrine he thinks of as the USA. And, if he would encourage his insurrectionist...

    Catspeak ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • Larry Franz Gosh, yet another call for calm reasonableness from the only side of the political divide that frequently demonstrates calm reasonableness.

    Make Love, not War ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • Rick Passov So true...so good. Perhaps on the way to (western) literature arresting itself, there’s sometching smaller that we can get from it. In 2018, in...

    (Re)reading Don DeLillo in Dark Times ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • Brooks Riley A very thoughtful piece, Ash. I think that change has accelerated in the last year, in all sorts of ways--changes in thinking, behaving, working,...

    On the varieties of change ·  Monday, January 18, 2021

  • Michael Liss There are a lot of good arguments to be made for "must carry" applying to the tech giants, provided that they are permitted to make narrow,...

    How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler ·  Sunday, January 17, 2021

  • Wulf Losee To give some balance, it's worth taking a look at the AWS (Amazon Web Services) court filing in response to the Parler lawsuit. They provided the...

    How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler ·  Sunday, January 17, 2021

  • Rafiq Kathwari Love you, Jim. Thank you for sharing your love.

    Friday Poem ·  Saturday, January 16, 2021

  • PhilipGraham Well, doesn’t that now sound prescient.

    Saturday Poem ·  Saturday, January 16, 2021

  • Leanne Ogasawara Thanks for sharing this, Morgan! Haraway is my hero!

    Donna Haraway – Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene ·  Thursday, January 14, 2021

  • Bf McCune This is wonderful. So simple, precise, no lecturing, just feeling.

    Sunday Poem ·  Thursday, January 14, 2021

  • Eric Weiner Abbas, I would be sure to pick a nice route for your dog (if you had one)! Beautiful vistas, lots of trees, soft ground, and maybe a nice lake to swim...

    What’s The Plan? An Open Letter To Secretary Of Education, Dr. Miguel Cardona ·  Tuesday, January 12, 2021

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.

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