by Sue Hubbard Siena It’s Easter and the museum is empty. Nothing but relics and saints’ bones – a thumb, a foreskin – it’s impossible to tell, in their ornate reliquaries, what things are – and holy of holies, a sacred nail. There’s also a gilded gospel from Constantinople enamelled in cobalt blue. Tiny Byzantine…

by Gautam Pemmaraju Abbas Kazmi, the defense lawyer for Ajmal Kasab, the lone Pakistani terrorist who participated and survived the Mumbai attacks of 26 November 2008, shares a double bed with Rahul Bhatt, the son of Mahesh Bhatt, renowned filmmaker and desk-thumping arbiter of public culture. A gym trainer and famous person in waiting, Rahul…

by Michael Blim In the Chicago of the Daley dynasty, they have been disparaged as the “goo-goos.” They are the “good government” types whose passion for honesty and the pursuit of the public good have offended generations of political machine hacks whose motto for the great seal of the city, Mike Royko was fond of…

by Sue Hubbard The first work in Tate Modern’s retrospective of the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs is, fittingly, a chimera. Projected onto the wall is a 16mm film of a mirage shimmering on the horizon of a Patagonian desert highway. There is no sound, except for that of a tolling cathedral bell from another work…

by Gerald Dworkin Last week I learned, while lecturing in Spain, of the sudden death of my closest friend, and best philosophical interlocutor, Jerry Cohen. A graduate student once asked me for what audience I wrote my philosophical papers. Was it for all philosophers, for just moral and political philosophers, for the general public? I…

by Beth Ann Bovino This was a record-breaking year, though there was almost no good news. As it came to a close, most welcomed its departure. Unfortunately, we expect more tough times ahead in 2009, with no turn around likely until later next year. The current financial crisis has deeply frightened consumers and businesses, and…

by Norman Costa [Part 1 of “My Father: A Veteran's Story” can be found here.] The Meaning of War There is nothing about war that is to be celebrated. As an art, a force, or an institution, war is the killing of people and the destruction of property in the name of, and in the…

by Beth Ann Bovino Two months ago Robin Varghese of 3QD turned the ripe old age of 40 and celebrated with many of his closest friends in Vegas, including me. Robin planned to make his riches at the tables, but success eluded him (and almost everyone else). And while Robin still has a few more…

The late and much missed Sidney Morgenbesser used to say that the whole moral and intellectual dilemma posed by the universalism-particularism dichotomy was an uninteresting, if not false, one: to paraphrase Morgenbesser’s reasoning, we all come from a specific time and place, but we leave the world with more than what we were given by…

by Beth Ann Bovino The financial markets marked the centennial of the Great Panic of 1907 by holding another panic.  David Wyss, chief economist at Standard and Poors (and my boss) asked whether it’s an accident that these crises often seem to occur in years ending in ‘7’?  He said that “we had financial problems…

by Beth Ann Bovino September sent me to Scandinavia for work. Assuming that summer lasts through the ninth month, I arrived equipped for the beach. There was no beach and the temperature barely made it to 45 degrees Fahrenheit during the day, even colder at night. With one sweater and a jeans jacket, I explored…

by Beth Ann Bovino The house party has started to wind down. The result of these excesses has finally started to appear. Big sub-prime mortgage lender New Century Financial has filed for bankruptcy, while tens of thousands of sub-prime borrowers are unable to make their payments. Defaults on these mortgages, which are granted to homebuyers…

by Ram Manikkalingam I read two books recently. Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekeran recounts experiences of the administration of Paul Bremer and the occupying forces of the US in the Green Zone. The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, by William Dalrymple, on the…

On November 5, one year and 17 days after his trial began, Saddam Hussein was found guilty. Predictably, the trial was subject to criticism and questions of legitimacy before it began, and from quite different sides of the issue no less. In the lead up to the war but especially in the wake of the…

I’ve spent the last two months binge watching nearly every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Season 6 sadly got sent to a different address, forcing me to wait and watch the series out of order. I’ve seen every episode at least a few times, so no surprise is ruined. (Since I’ve bought my DVD…

Like a large number of people, I read and enjoy wikipedia. For many subjects on which I need to quickly get a primer, it’s good enough, at least for my purposes. I also just read it to see the ways the articles on some topics expand (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer), but mostly to…

One probably apocryphal story of the Alhambra tells of how Emir Al Hamar of Gharnatah (Granada) decides to begin the undertaking. One night in the early 13th century, Al Hamar has a dream that the Muslims would be forced to leave Spain. He takes the dream to be prophetic and, more importantly, to be the…

It’s one of the moments in the annual cycle where some of us at 3QD increase our focus on Darfur. Tilting toward the liberal-lefty bleeding heart side of the spectrum, we get incensed by the news, then feel that perhaps we’re being too monomaniacal and strident. Perhaps something by the powers that be suggests that…

I recently completed Raymond Geuss’ Outside Ethics, a collection of essays from various talks on contemporary Western political and moral philosophy. I’ve been a fan of Geuss’ work ever since reading his very thin but insightful book The Idea of a Critical Theory, which Ram once described as lacking an unnecessary word, and after taking…

I’ve generally been dissatisfied with the idea that media outlets such as Fox TV and Sinclair are the drivers behind the rightward move in politics in recent decades. It’s not that I find the claims impossible. I certainly have come across enough people whose arguments for this or that right-wing view pretty much echo Rush…