by Jason S. Bardi The holiday season is upon us, and spending the weekend at the relatively unconnected house of a close relative makes me long for all those modern conveniences I take for granted: cell phones, PDAs, digital cable, and high-speed wireless. Lack of wireless is going to force me to find an internet…

In reverse chronological order: Expand the Police Force, in Dawn, 9/2009 Defending Dictatorship: Another View on Pakistan, in n + 1, 3/2008 The Bhutto Dynasty Must End Now, in Foreign Policy in Focus, 1/2008 Welcome to America…You’re Under Arrest, in The Smart Set, 1/2008 [S. Abbas Raza’s writing for 3QD can be seen here.]

I am a nerd. I used to be an engineer and so I like calculating stuff in my head. I hardly ever use electronic calculators, even when exact calculations of something are needed, preferring to do them by hand (try it, it can be a soothing thing) on chit’s of paper, backs-of-the-proverbial envelopes, etc. But…

by S. Abbas Raza Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Professor Bilgrami went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and got a Bachelor’s degree there in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. In 1983 he got his Ph.D. from the University of…

Ram Manikkalingam is visiting professor of political science at the University of Amsterdam. Bilgrami’s paper is centrally located within the contemporary debate about the global divide between “Islam and the West” that is popularly called “the clash of civilisations”. This debate is motivated by the question – “why do they hate us?” – posed by…

by Jason S. Bardi Approaching 1:00 a.m. on Monday morning, I am wondering if I will get my first blog post finished (’twas due 45 minutes ago). I have that desperation that anyone who is up past midnight has, and because of this, coupled with the fact that the story I am telling concerns a…

by Beth-Ann Bovino A walk through the lower east side in New York can feel like Spring-cleaning at mom’s house. Back then mom would have a “Tag Sale, and everything, including my favorite childhood dreams, was priced to sell. Each item would have a tag on it. A stuffed animal from my crib priced at…

by Ahila Sornarajah Stuck in a traffic jam in hot, dusty and dynamic Chennai (formerly Madras) recently, I started thinking about the far away elections for the Mayor of London and what this will mean for Londoners. While America is obsessed with the groundbreaking race for the democratic nomination between Clinton and Obama, we’re proud…

I HAVE WRESTLED WITH AN ALLIGATOR, I HAVE TUSSLED WITH A WHALE If I could meet one person in the world, it would without question be Muhammad Ali, and I would probably collapse in a pool of blubbering tears at his feet, such is my worshipful admiration of the man. The first time I remember…

Review of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up by John Allen Paulos You may know the (almost certainly apocryphal) story of an 18th century encounter between the brilliant Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler and the French freethinking encyclopaedist and philosopher Denis Diderot: Diderot had been invited to the court…

You may have noticed that I have been posting more poetry recently at 3QD. This is not because I have suddenly become more literate, but because my friend Jim Culleny has been sending me poems almost every day. In addition to having exquisite taste in poetry, Jim is himself a distinguished and fine poet. In…

A couple of days ago I had posted a video of the famous Pakistani singer Habib Wali Mohammed singing a poem written by the last, and ill-fated, Mughal emperor of India, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Earlier today my wife was listening to it and asked me what the words mean. I told her I would translate…

The title of this post is a translation of a Latin inscription on Sir Isaac Newton’s tomb. This is the fourth year that we at 3QD celebrate the auspicious 25th day of December as Newton’s Day, an idea that we coincidentally came to independently on the same day as Richard Dawkins proposed it. (Newton was…

by Tolu Ogunlesi Social Networking and Serious LiteratureCan never share the same Posture – Poetry Police Manifesto Recently I got a phone call from a friend. He needed a mutual friend’s phone number. Then, just before the call ended, he chipped in: “Yeah, regarding the Facebook Prize, I don’t know whether to congratulate you or…

All cities and towns in the Südtirol (South Tyrol) have two names: a German and an Italian one. Indeed, the Südtirol itself is called Alto Adige in Italian. The largest city in the province (and its capital) is Bozen in German, Bolzano in Italian. The second-largest is Meran (German) or Merano (Italian). The third largest…

There are two kinds of people: there are the kooky kind who will spend $4,000 on dialysis for their cat whose kidneys are failing (substitute some significant expenditure of resources for individuals in differing financial circumstances—you know what I mean), even if only to extend its life briefly; and then there are the kind who…

A review of The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, by Steven Pinker One of my favorite science books… no, wait… one of my favorite books altogether, is a shortish volume by Steven Pinker entitled Words and Rules. (I cannot remember how many copies of that book I have bought for…

Farrokh Bulsara was born in 1946 in the British colony of Zanzibar (now part of Tanzania). His parents were Zoroastrians (Parsis) from India. As a boy he was sent back to India to attend boarding school in Bombay. He did very well in studies, was a competitive boxer, and also learned to play the piano–even…

If you don’t have TiVO, get it. (I have DVR from Time Warner Cable, which is pretty much the same thing.) If you don’t even own a TV, and especially if you like to proudly announce this fact every chance you get, which is every time normal, sane people are talking about the Sopranos or…