Crucifixions
I am not an Idealist, nor a cynic,
but merely unafraid of contradictions.
I have seen men face each other when
both were right, yet each was determined
to kill each other, which was wrong.
What each man saw was an image of the
other, made by someone else. That is
what we are prisoners of.
—A personal Testament by Donald Hogan
Harpers Magazine, January 1972
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harcourt Books 1991
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Varouxakis’s book is primarily about Westerners’ own conception of the West — an approach that allows him to prove that even within the so-called West, the notion was not a coherent container. It is as much a history of terms and discourses as it is about ideas, and it starts the historical clock on those terms pointedly late. Most historians trace the concept of the West back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC, when the “western” Greeks fought the “eastern” Persians. In fact, Varouxakis writes, “‘The West’ as a potential political entity based on civilisational commonality is a modern idea that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century.”
Many of us experience a 
My husband and I, newlyweds of just one year, live an ordinary life. We drag each other to Costco on Saturdays, jointly complain about how much we hate a specific restaurant on the Delmar Loop, and endlessly debate the China and America relationship. Yes, he walks through the world with the undeniable privileges of a White American man. And yes, his “expert” insights into China often leave me caught between a laugh and a heavy sigh.
L
F
“The relation between the chauffeur and the chauffeured can be curiously intense,” Iris Murdoch wrote in “The Sea, the Sea.” This was true in David Szalay’s Booker Prize-winning novel “Flesh” (2025) and it is also true in Daniyal Mueenuddin’s sensitive and powerful first novel, “This Is Where the Serpent Lives,” set largely in rural Pakistan.
In recent years, scientists have begun to use magic effects to investigate the blind spots in our attention and perception [G. Kuhn, Experiencing the Impossible: The Science of Magic (2019); S. Macknik, S. Martinez-Conde, S. Blakeslee, Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals about Our Everyday Deceptions (2010)]. Recently, we suggested that similar techniques could be transferred to nonhuman animal observers and that such an endeavor would provide insight into the inherent commonalities and discrepancies in attention and perception in human and nonhuman animals [E. Garcia-Pelegrin, A. K. Schnell, C. Wilkins, N. S. Clayton, Science 369, 1424–1426 (2020)]. Here, we performed three different magic effects (palming, French drop, and fast pass) to a sample of six Eurasian jays (Garrulus glandarius). These magic effects were specifically chosen as they utilize different cues and expectations that mislead the spectator into thinking one object has or has not been transferred from one hand to the other.
A squad of amateur fascists feast around a table at a busy restaurant, their eyes flicking from their meal toward a crowd across the room, and then to their de facto leader, a balding 35-year-old newspaper man. They practically hover above their chairs, panting, licking their lips, gripping their glasses of wine instead of drinking from them: they are poised for something else, and so they check in again with their boss, whose curt nod gives them assent to take action. They leap up, bludgeon the other men with batons and kick them repeatedly; a few days later, they perform a similar attack on the headquarters of the socialist newspaper L’Avanti, smashing their equipment, stabbing their workers, lighting people and things on fire. The year is 1919 and the man who leads the squadrismo is Benito Mussolini.
There’s a surreal television interview with Camus at the Parc des Princes stadium in Paris, during a football match between Racing Club de Paris and AS Monaco. It’s 1957 and Camus has recently won the Nobel Prize. The interviewer asks for a few thoughts from Camus on why he won. ‘Well, I don’t know,’ says Camus. ‘I’m not privy to the secrets of the Swedish Academy. But there are two or three writers who deserved the prize before me.’ He’s also invited to criticise the Racing Club goalkeeper. A former goalkeeper himself (for the Racing Universitaire d’Alger), Camus says, ‘Don’t blame him. If you were out there in the middle you’d realise how difficult it is.’ Notable aspects of this interview are: Camus’s diffident charm, how he never stops watching the game, how he seems more interested in football than in speaking of the Nobel. The same wry, self-deprecating tone courses through his notebooks, the same natural gift for aphorisms. The notebooks were published in French between 1962 and 1989; previous English translations have appeared, including by Philip Thody. Now, they have been published for the first time in a single volume, beautifully translated by the author and scholar Ryan Bloom.
“Call me Ishmael.”