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

Samia Altaf

Samia Altaf is a public health physician with an M.P.H. degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She was the 2007 Pakistan Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and is the author, of So Much Aid So Little Development: Stories from Pakistan published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 2011. Her social commentaries on the role of older women in South Asia aired on WUNC Chapel Hill, a station affiliated with National Public Radio. Email: samiaaltaf [at] hotmail.com

A Letter to My Child in These Strange Times

Posted on Monday, May 4, 2020 1:35AMMonday, May 4, 2020 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf My son, it was reassuring to talk to you. We’re lucky that communication has become so easy, though I’d rather hold your dear face in my hands. They’re quite a miracle, aren’t they, these phone calls, especially in these terrible times when one does not know what is going to happen to…

Leave a comment

From Pakistan: COVID Diary

Posted on Monday, Apr 6, 2020 1:20AMMonday, April 6, 2020 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf “Will we survive this?” my husband asks me as we lounge around the living room, glued to our laptops. “We are in the vulnerable group.” I look up at a bald man with thinning gray tufts over his ears, peering anxiously at me over black-rimmed glasses. Yes, we are certainly in the…

Leave a comment

Why Do We Need a March?

Posted on Monday, Mar 9, 2020 1:35AMMonday, March 9, 2020 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Over the past week, Pakistan has been consumed by the Aurat (Women’s) March, which was held today, March 8, International Women’s Day, in all the major cities of the country. The march’s aim is to highlight the continued discrimination, inequality, and harassment suffered by women. There are some people against it who…

Leave a comment

A Young Woman in Lahore

Posted on Monday, Feb 10, 2020 1:35AMWednesday, February 12, 2020 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Some months ago, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, I went to my bank’s ATM in the main market close to where I live in the Defence Housing Authority, Lahore’s latest fancy suburb, which is organized and managed by the military.  The market, usually bustling, was quiet that day. There was barely anyone…

Leave a comment

Where Is Lahore Going?

Posted on Monday, Dec 16, 2019 1:25AMMonday, December 16, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf When we were young and living in Sialkot, we went frequently, almost once a week, to Lahore, the grand and hip city just a two-hour drive away. The trips were ostensibly for some real work—father, a district court lawyer, was appearing in a case being heard in the High Court or, his…

Leave a comment

Fried Eggs and Buttered Toast

Posted on Monday, Nov 18, 2019 1:40AMMonday, November 18, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Baiji, my grandmother, was the custodian of  standards of behavior of  young women in the family. How to comport oneself — sit, stand, speak, eat—were strictly prescribed according to her rules of what was “proper” practice for girls. These rules did not apply to young men and boys. Although I found most…

Leave a comment

Some Thoughts On This October Day

Posted on Monday, Oct 21, 2019 1:45AMMonday, October 21, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf I could not believe my luck when I woke up this morning. It had rained last night, but this morning the sky was blue the breeze gentle,and the wild grass along the smelly sluggish, open sewer that meanders through the swanky Defense Housing Authority—home to lush golf courses and palatial villas—past the…

Leave a comment

Saturday Night at the Club

Posted on Monday, Jul 29, 2019 1:40AMMonday, July 29, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf I was perhaps ten years old when I had unending cups of Eatmore’s fresh handmade mango ice cream while sitting on the lawns of Services Club Sialkot. It was one of the brightest days of my life, with my parents all to myself, undistracted by the demands of their daily doings, and…

Leave a comment

The Inaugural Dress

Posted on Monday, Jun 3, 2019 1:30AMMonday, June 3, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Last night I dreamed I was on my way to the tailor’s in the H-Block market to pick up the outfit that Mrs. Obama was to wear at President Obama’s second inauguration. The State Department official who was to transport it in the diplomatic pouch was on the tarmac waiting in the…

Leave a comment

How I Learned to Like Beets

Posted on Monday, May 6, 2019 1:40AMMonday, May 6, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Soon after President Obama moved into the White House, Mrs. Obama set up her vegetable garden. She planted tubers like carrots and turnips, leafy veggies such as spinach and kale, and herbs—thyme, sage, mint, and whatnot. But she did not plant beets. Why? I was quite perplexed and tried to find out…

Leave a comment

How Can They Kill Their Daughters?

Posted on Monday, Apr 8, 2019 1:05AMMonday, April 8, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf In May 2014, a young man beat his twenty-year-old sister, Farzana, to death by hitting her head with a brick. He did this in broad daylight just outside the High Court building in Lahore, the cultural, artistic and academic capital of Pakistan. He did it as local policemen and passersby looked on,…

Leave a comment

Fifty Shades of Pakistani Feminism

Posted on Monday, Mar 11, 2019 1:30AMMonday, March 11, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf After an anxious and grey winter, the gloom of an unraveling economy, topped by the ominous beating of war drums, spring arrived in Punjab and Lahore’s academies and activists put aside their concerns to celebrate Women’s International Day on March 8. Amidst the blooming of flowers and the heady fragrance of newly…

Leave a comment

World Enough and Time

Posted on Monday, Feb 11, 2019 1:30AMMonday, February 11, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf “Let’s go look at the flowers outside,” I say, as I sense Dad sinking into the recesses of his fading memory. I wheel him out. Look at the petunias. What a riot—purple, pink, white, that ordinary pedestrian flower in such abundant glory. I hold a bunch to his nose and he takes…

Leave a comment

Security Risk

Posted on Monday, Jan 14, 2019 1:35AMMonday, January 14, 2019 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf In October of 2014, a bunch of young men and women did their university proud. A couple of engineers, two finance graduates, a biology major, some finishing accounting and business degrees, and a clutch from the school of humanities and social sciences; Muslims mostly, two Christians, a lone Hindu, one Buddhist wannabe,…

Leave a comment

Dead Girls Giggling

Posted on Monday, Dec 17, 2018 1:15AMMonday, December 17, 2018 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Mandra health center, outside Islamabad, on this spring morning, without the cacophony and confusion of health centers in the city, was the picture of serenity. An emaciated woman of indeterminate age sits coughing in the corridor, in a chair that bears the logo of the United States Agency for International Development, next…

Leave a comment

Stars Above, Part 3

Posted on Monday, Nov 19, 2018 1:05AMMonday, November 19, 2018 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Actors come to each role in a new film bearing the stamp of their old ones so they are richer and more interesting in the new incarnation—the whole more than the sum of the parts. Just last week one saw Nargis as the innocent and naive mountain girl pining away for the…

Leave a comment

Stars Above, Part 2

Posted on Monday, Oct 22, 2018 1:05AMMonday, October 22, 2018 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Part 1 of this essay is here. Pakistani cinema of the nineteen-sixties was active and vibrant, its death knell still a decade away. Memorable movies were made and ran for weeks—Do Ansoo, a silver jubilee hit from fifties, Heera Aur Pathar, Ghunghat, Chakori amongst others, and, of course, the great hit Armaan.…

Leave a comment

Stars Above

Posted on Monday, Sep 24, 2018 12:50AMMonday, September 24, 2018 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf In the 1960s, in the sleepy little city of Sialkot, almost in no-man’s land between India and Pakistan and of little significance except for its large cantonment and its factories of surgical instruments and sports goods, there were two cinema houses, all within a mile of our house, No. 3 Kutchery Road.…

Leave a comment

To Be Fair

Posted on Monday, Aug 27, 2018 12:30AMMonday, August 27, 2018 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf “This girl will never be able to find a husband,” declared Baiji, big mother, my maternal grandmother, soon after she took her first look at me. “Hai hai,” she almost beat her chest, “look at her, just look.” She points at me holding herself back as if from a contaminant, appealing to…

Leave a comment

Mom Goes Shopping for a Grave

Posted on Monday, Jul 30, 2018 12:55AMMonday, July 30, 2018 by Samia Altaf

by Samia Altaf Six months before she died, Saleema, my 85-year-old mother, still in relatively good health – she did have breast cancer and Hepatitis-C, the one in remission, the other inactive – became obsessed with the quality of her grave. “You will throw my corpse on a rubbish heap for all I know,” she…

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




"I really appreciate your selection of generally sane and mostly stimulating articles. 3 Quarks Daily has been my goto website at the end of the day, and now also during the day!"

—Horst Ludwig Störmer, Nobel laureate in physics and emeritus professor at Columbia University.




"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.




"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.




"3 Quarks Daily is smart and highclass."

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




"You guys rock!"

—Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, author of five books, überblogger.




"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.]




"I have placed 3 Quarks Daily at the head of my list of web bookmarks."

—Richard Dawkins, previously Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.




"Just wanted you to know I’m one of many who reads and enjoys 3 Quarks....almost daily."

—David Byrne, musician, former lead-singer of the Talking Heads, artist, intellectual.




"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.




"I'm a big admirer of 3 Quarks Daily!"

—William Dalrymple, award winning historian and travel writer, as well as distinguished broadcaster, critic, art historian, foreign correspondent and founder and co-director of Asia's largest literary festival.









Recent Comments on 3QD

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.