Art & Literature

For Saudi royal servants life isn’t as glamorous as that of their employers: writer and actress Jayne Amelia Larson, author of Driving the Saudis, examines the inequalities of working behind gilded bars.

Has the luxury of boundless possibilities paradoxically made timeless human endeavors like getting a job, raising children, and living in a house-with-a-white-picket-fence impossibly difficult? From the cynical rhetoric of economists, environmentalists, politicians, and most remarkably from millennials—the generation defining the #yolo present—it seems that expecting to have a decent, well-paying job and not hate your children might be too much to ask, as highlighted in this curation of 3QD picks.

Images of male literary friendship have become the stuff of legend, often because of their very public natures, like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway surviving riotous drinking sprees. But who were the friends of the English-speaking world’s most famous female authors? How did their relationships become the basis for great literature?

How are green technologies being used in construction and architecture? Is there a way to make our homes not only energy efficient and cost-effective but also aesthetically pleasing? Architect and academic Dan Spiegel provides deeper insights on what it means to construct lived environments with a sustainable focus.

The twenty-first century tourist can get a bad rap: it’s easy to conjure images of loud-mouthed Americans clad in sneakers and Hawaiian shirts, snapping photos of the Colosseum with bedazzled iPhones. Is it possible to be a traveler in the world today? These The Common pieces seek an answer.

Are machine translation softwares the future of language or is a machine never capable of translating language’s nuances? In this piece, translator and language professor Mickey Hong seeks an answer.