Hal Foster at The MIT Press Reader:
Austere like her prose and engaged like her subjects, Sontag was my first inkling of avant-garde culture, my initial point of access to an edgy alternative to the Anglophonic modernism — Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Joyce — that represented high literature. Her European protagonists — Lukács, Sartre, Camus, Leiris, Artaud, Weil, Sarraute, Pavese, Cioran, Ionesco, Godard, Bresson, Resnais, Bergman — were exotic to me, and the notion that philosophers, writers, and filmmakers could be political was even more so. I didn’t understand the many differences among these figures, but I sensed a shared posture, one that pointed to a way around the given terms of American culture, mass versus elite, and American politics, liberal versus conservative. I, too, wanted to be against. If Sontag could cross over to my living room, maybe I could cross over to her New York downtown (which even then I took to be the name of an elective affinity as much as an actual place), and I was hardly alone in wanting to do so.
It was her combination of lucidity and ambition that made Sontag so attractive; hers was a “style of radical will,” and we didn’t understand then that her emphasis on style might also be her limitation. Certainly, it prepared her critical success, which left Sontag, like other prominent women of her generation, somewhat unmoved by feminist critiques: smart and “serious” (her preferred term of approval) knew no gender for her.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

When amateur writers pitch headlines to The Onion, their jokes often flop. One reason may surprise you: They use too many funny words that wink at the reader, “wacky” elements that sabotage any chance at good parody, former Onion editor Joe Randazzo told our sister site Big Think in 2012.
IT’S 2025, and the turn to genre is old news. Since at least the 1980s, writers of “literary fiction” have been adopting the forms and techniques of popular “genre fiction”—a huge category that includes detective novels, sci-fi, spy thrillers, fantasy, horror, Westerns, and all varieties of romance. By 2012, China Miéville
Penned in August 1925
Bilge’s description of Matthew Lillard’s facial journey in the
Gatsby’s pink suit is, of course, a sign of his vulgarity, every bit as much as his lavish, show-off parties. And it is the vulgarian character of these parties that ties Fitzgerald’s hero to the character Trimalchio from Gaius Petronious Arbiter’s first-century literary burlesque, the Satyricon. Fitzgerald’s publisher had the good sense to reject Trimalchio in West Egg, the initial title of the novel. Fitzgerald’s commercial sense had certainly failed him when he proposed that title, though the allusion itself was sound. Both Jay Gatsby and Petronius’ Trimalchio are social upstarts—“Mr. Nobodies from Nowhere,” to steal Tom Buchanan’s phrase. Both use lavish parties in misguided attempts to pull themselves closer to the glamorous lives they desire.
A
Neuroscientists have been studying more cognition-based questions — like how the brain recognizes patterns, remembers information, or learns rules to get a reward — for some time now. “Studying tasks that tapped into real cognition opened up whole sets of neural properties you simply don’t see in basic sensory tasks,” says Miller. But the experimental setup rarely changed, and the strengths of classical neuroscience — precision and control — limited the reach of these studies.
The Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge isn’t just long, it’s complicated in a way
Kate Winslet has made a career out of playing strong, confident, forthright women: Lee Miller, Mare Sheehan, Rose DeWitt Bukater, Clementine Kruczynski. Her resume is studded with awards recognition (an Academy Award for Best Actress for 2008’s The Reader, a pair of Emmys for playing the eponymous characters in HBO’s Mare of Easttown in 2021 and Mildred Pierce in 2011, an armful of BAFTAs across a 27-year span) and boasts cumulative box-office earnings in the billions (working with
Elon Musk’s personal wealth now
Legend has it that 18th-century Romantic painter Francisco Goya was once a porter here. Ernest Hemingway set the closing scene of The Sun Also Rises at a table in an upstairs dining room, and the signatures of Spanish kings throughout the centuries adorn one of the walls. There is also most definitely a ghost in the wine cellar.
I walk around the town in which I live and there aren’t drones in the sky or self-driving cars or sidewalk robots or anything like that. And when I spend time on the internet, aimlessly scrolling social media sites in the dead of night as I attempt to extract a burp from my newborn, I might occasionally see some synthetic images or video, but mostly I see what has always been on these feeds: pictures of people I do and don’t know, memes, and a mixture of news and jokes.