Theodore Hill

Oct 27, 2024 | quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Evelina Silveira

Arm-in-arm, the three of us prowled cobblestoned streets in the pitch black of a moonless night, hurling rocks at factory windows. Inebriated by our socialist fervour, Jennifer, Karl, and I followed each missile with a shouted slogan, damning the capitalist managers who, come morning, would bear witness to our brave act of anti-capitalist defiance.    But when morning broke, those managers never arrived—because their factory existed only as a dream. Still, I was giddy upon waking.

Oct 27, 2024 | quillette.com | Kevin Mims |Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton

A review of Sonny Boy by Al Pacino, 384 pages, Penguin Press (October 2024)When I’m reading celebrity memoirs, I’m usually tempted to skip the first few chapters. I generally don’t care about the family history, the toddler years, or the misadventures of adolescence. I want to jump to the parts of the story I know best—the books they wrote, the films they made, the songs they played, and so on. I’m glad I overcame that temptation when reading Al Pacino’s new autobiography, Sonny Boy.

Oct 25, 2024 | quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |Bradley Strotten

A review of I Will Live by Lale Gül; 320 pages; Virago (August 2024)Lale Gül’s autobiographical debut novel Ik ga leven (“I Will Live”) was first published in Dutch in 2021 when the author was just 23. It became an immediate bestseller and was published in English translation last month. The story follows the dramatic unveiling of Gül’s fictional counterpart, Büsra, a twenty-year-old Muslim rebel living in the Netherlands and chafing against religious and cultural authority.

Oct 25, 2024 | quillette.com | Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |John Lloyd

After Quillette published an essay by evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven titled, “Why Do Men Dominate Chess?,” a number of friends asked me if her essay explained a similar phenomenon in my own field of mathematics. After all, aren’t many of the traits that Hooven identified as crucial to excellence in chess—innate spatial ability, competitiveness, obsessiveness—similarly crucial for excellence in mathematics? And don’t men dominate mathematics for some of the same reasons?