[{"id":311487,"date":"2026-09-15T14:45:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T18:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311487"},"modified":"2026-09-15T03:52:32","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T07:52:32","slug":"on-tom-sawyer-and-the-challenge-of-loving-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/on-tom-sawyer-and-the-challenge-of-loving-america.html","title":{"rendered":"On Tom Sawyer and the challenge of loving America"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ivan Kenneally at The Hedgehog Review<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"Mark Twain unreservedly disdained celebrations of the Fourth of July, those perfervid cataclysms of self-aggrandizement whose blasts of fireworks stand in for \u201cbombs bursting in air.\u201d As he saw it in \u201cThe War Prayer\u201d (1905), they stoke the always hot embers of the \u201choly fire of patriotism\u201d and encourage the unbinding of a rabid nationalism. He joked that thousands die every year in these orgies of jingoism\u2014he lost two uncles himself.<\/p>\n

Twain\u2019s principal grouse was that patriotism lobotomizes its practitioners, subduing reason with heedless exuberance. Most patriotism is \u201cmajority patriotism,\u201d he averred in \u201cAs Regards Patriotism\u201d (1901): a herd-like solidarity sophistically fashioned by politicians and newspapers. This unthinking nationalism is just rote convention mixed with gunpowder, sparked by a tinderbox of passion and dim-wittedness. By contrast, Twain defined a healthy patriotism as one \u201cmanufactured on a man\u2019s own premises\u2026reasoned out in the man\u2019s own head, and fire-assayed and tested and proved in his own conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, this seems a tall order for what he called, in\u00a0Life on the Mississippi,<\/em>\u00a0a \u201cnation of moral cowards\u201d whose citizens exhibit an \u201cexquisite sensitiveness\u201d to criticism and a terror of defying consensus sentiment, with every small step outside the cozy circumference of public consensus pronounced an apostasy.<\/p>\n

All of this raises, and was intended to raise, the question of what constitutes a befitting patriotism, a truly rational love of one\u2019s country.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ivan Kenneally at The Hedgehog Review: Mark Twain unreservedly disdained celebrations of the Fourth of July, those perfervid cataclysms of self-aggrandizement whose blasts of fireworks stand in for \u201cbombs bursting in air.\u201d As he saw it in \u201cThe War Prayer\u201d (1905), they stoke the always hot embers of the \u201choly fire of patriotism\u201d and encourage…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311487"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311491,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311487\/revisions\/311491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311484,"date":"2026-09-15T13:45:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T17:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311484"},"modified":"2026-09-15T03:48:20","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T07:48:20","slug":"stephen-hawking-the-dark-side-of-genius","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/stephen-hawking-the-dark-side-of-genius.html","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Hawking: The dark side of genius"},"content":{"rendered":"

Philip Ball in The Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"W<\/span>hen I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking\u2019s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was \u201ctoo early\u201d to voice anything other than praise for the physicist who died, aged 76, that March. It was apparently still too early in 2021, when no British publisher would touch Charles Seife\u2019s expos\u00e9 of Hawking\u2019s bullying and self-aggrandising behaviour, Hawking Hawking.<\/p>\n

In this new biography, veteran science writer Graham Farmelo takes a different approach. It is a comprehensive and accessible portrait of a brilliant scientist and an extraordinarily determined man who also possessed deep personal flaws to which the scientific community and the public mostly turned a blind eye. The uncomfortable but unavoidable truth is that Hawking\u2019s overweening ambition and self-promotion, his repeated failure to acknowledge the work of others, his sexism and controlling behaviour were largely ignored because of his disability. I think it is indeed going to take us years to process that.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Philip Ball in The Guardian: When I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking\u2019s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was \u201ctoo early\u201d to voice anything other than praise for the physicist who died, aged 76, that March. It…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311486,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311484\/revisions\/311486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311481,"date":"2026-09-15T12:45:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T16:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311481"},"modified":"2026-09-15T03:41:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T07:41:00","slug":"ezra-klein-why-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-the-end-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/ezra-klein-why-i-cant-stop-thinking-about-the-end-of-history.html","title":{"rendered":"Ezra Klein: Why I Can\u2019t Stop Thinking About \u2018The End of History\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"