Knowing my interest in New Orleans and the history of the area, a friend sent me a link to a thoughtful, intelligent, and well written alternative approach to rebuilding the city: Rethinking, Then Rebuilding New Orleans by Richard Spark. I’ll return to this writing later in an essay on this subject I’m currently writing, but today I wanted to point out the site that originated this link: 3 Quarks Daily.
3 Quarks Daily is a community weblog that features original writing and links to articles on science, art, and literature. I’m sure I’ve heard of this site before, but there are so many that cover art and literature and sometimes one tires of New Yorker clones and therefore I hadn’t checked it out, at least enough to remember doing so. After reading this article, though, and checking out other offerings, I subscribed to the site and now I find it to be one of the first sites I check when catching up on my reading.
So far this week, I’ve read about the James Agee revival, returning to the moon, a Smoking Gun investigation of James Frey (upon reading of which left me going who would want to buy this book regardless of factuality?), and Reductionist versus Pluralist view of cancer. I have about a dozen articles still on my to-read list.
It really is an amazing site, and addictive. Liking the site is unusual for me because normally when I’m faced with a publication that describes itself as covering ‘art and literature’, I find that after keeping up with the site for a time, my butt tightens, my nose raises into the air, and I start thinking with a Harvard accent. Not so with 3 Quarks. Thank goodness, too, because I can now keep up with my more well read, cosmopolitan, and erudite friends, without risk of losing my inner hick.
(Note to the editor, S. Abbas Raza: Consider bringing on more female contributors. I can recommend one to start: Yule Heibel.)