Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman in Aeon:
With roughly 35 million people, Kerala, which sits along India’s southwestern tip on the Indian Ocean, is among the smaller Indian states, though it is densely populated. In the 1970s, Kerala’s average income was about two-thirds of the Indian average, making it among the poorest states in India. This difference persisted through the 1980s. In the coming decades, a miracle occurred. Kerala, one of the poorest regions in India, became one of the richest. In 2022, Kerala’s per-capita income was 50-60 per cent higher than the national average. What happened?
Even when it was poor, Kerala was different. Though income-poor, Kerala enjoyed the highest average literacy levels, health conditions and life expectancy – components of human development – in all of India. Among economists in the 1970s and ’80s and among locals, ‘Kerala is different’ became a catchphrase. But why, and different from whom?
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
ACHMED ABDULLAH was, during the early decades of the previous century, a playwright with successes on Broadway and the West End, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, an author of dozens of books, and a writer of adventure and fantasy stories for the pulps, including Argosy, The All-Story, Munsey’s, and Blue Book. The gossip columns reported his comings and goings as a man about town.
As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so.
I
The origins of Eid can be traced back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Eid al-Fitr, which translates to the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” is celebrated at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The significance of this festival lies in the completion of a month-long spiritual journey of self-discipline, reflection, and devotion to Allah. It is a time for Muslims to express gratitude for the strength and patience shown during Ramadan. The celebration of Eid al-Fitr is not only a personal milestone but also a communal event that reinforces the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood among Muslims.
“People give estimates of what they think we’re making, and it’s always way low,” he told me from the plush interior of his Rolls-Royce, which was still scented with a synthetic new-purchase aroma. “Our watch hours on YouTube [in December] were, like, 5.7 million hours. And there’s a commercial every 10 minutes.”
Over the past couple years, we have learned that AI can boost the productivity of individual knowledge workers ranging from 
Political scientists 
S
Mary Flannery was born on the Feast of the Annunciation, the day marking the angel Gabriel’s announcement that Mary would bear the Christ child. O’Connor’s Irish Catholic parents, Edward and Regina, bracketed this festal birth by having her baptized on Easter Sunday, three weeks later. Each time I’ve visited O’Connor’s childhood home in Savannah, I’ve been moved by the Kiddie-Koop crib beneath the window in Regina’s bedroom, facing the twin green spires of Saint John the Baptist, the O’Connors’ church. The “crib” is a rectangular box with screens enclosing the four sides and the top. The cagelike design—a chicken coop for babies, really—was meant to allow mothers to leave children unattended. “Danger or Safety—Which?” one Kiddie-Koop advertisement read.
Adrien Brody is the most beautiful man in Hollywood, and maybe on the planet. This has to do with the unlikely features of his face: it is profoundly narrow, with a pair of high brows sloping gently away from one another and a resolutely expressive pair of very thin lips, both ideally situated in orbit of a truly promontory, ponderous nose. He is tall and very thin, like Timothée Chalamet under a rolling pin, and has great hair too; his thick brunette waves lend him a perma-rakishness that stays intact throughout the horrors of World War II that his characters tend to have to endure. Brody is best known for portraying attractive, talented Holocaust survivors: Before The Brutalist, his best-known role was in Roman Polanski’s 2002 film The Pianist, in which he plays a Polish virtuoso pianist who narrowly escapes getting sent to Treblinka. In his latest, directed by Brady Corbet, he is László Tóth, an accomplished Hungarian architect who survives Buchenwald and emigrates to Pennsylvania.