Peter Moore at Literary Review:
An exemplary tour of the High Enlightenment might go something like this. You’d begin in the streets of 1760s London to feel the pulse of Georgian commerce. You’d then hop aboard one of Captain Cook’s colliers and cruise through the Pacific, having encounters every day. Returning to Europe you might watch Benjamin Franklin in diplomatic action at Passy and dine with Casanova in Vienna, before sailing up the Rhine with Humboldt. Having inspected the Soho Manufactory in Birmingham and admired the picturesque scenery of the Peak District, you’d cross the Channel just in time for the grand and bloody finale in Paris.
Only this isn’t a fantasy. This is the singular and spectacular trajectory of George Forster, subject of Andrea Wulf’s irresistible new biography. ‘George’, as he is called throughout, was an unlikely person to lead what Wulf terms a ‘revolutionary life’. Born in 1754 in a hamlet outside Gdansk, he was a shy and curious child. Long after he won fame as a traveller and naturalist, people described him as calm and tolerant, kind and gentle.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
In late March around 
On 9 July 2025, the government of the United States imposed sanctions on Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on Palestine. Earlier in the spring, Albanese had written confidential letters to US companies, warning that she would name them in her forthcoming UN 
A
At the turn of the 20th century, 
Most popular training advice emphasizes optimization: how do you maximize muscle and strength? Programming for those kinds of goals entails lifting heavy loads, training near muscular failure, and doing so for long sessions, many times per week. While effective, these approaches impose meaningful costs in time, effort, and perceived risk, creating a barrier to entry for many people. Here we encounter a mismatch: what is optimal isn’t necessarily what is sustainable for everyone, especially those new to weight training.
Parker believes he briefly lost his own tone at Berklee when he tried to adhere to jazz pedagogy and the way that esteemed jazz guitarists, like former Berklee professor 
“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” “My Heart Will Go On,” “Without You,” “I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing,” and “Total Eclipse of the Heart” are songs that have transcended their original moment and become enduring pop culture touchstones.
The robot army that saves the world won’t be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren’t little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during 
Art is long, life is short. Most of us only manage to not do a few things in our limited span on Earth. But the Frankfurt School managed to not invent so many movements – to not be involved in so many of the crucial ideological shifts of the past century – that they caught my attention. Who were these people? What other aspects of our culture might we be unable to say they were involved in? For answers, I turned to the classic history of the group, Martin Jay’s 
Ozempic was supposed to be a gut story. Then Allison Shapiro looked at the brain scans. An assistant professor at the University of Colorado Anschutz, she was part of a team studying 13 teens and young women with a hormonal disorder affecting the ovaries who were put on GLP-1 drugs. As part of testing to catalogue the effect of the medication on their bodies, Shapiro took snapshots of their brains before and after.