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You’ve heard of a third eye—the mystical organ that sees what the other two can’t? What’s the Third Ear?

Recently, I noticed I was hearing things. Narratives, news, ideas, that others weren’t. I also became sensitive to the fact I was hearing many things that everyone was hearing, and they all sounded the same. In the left side, in the right, a ringing feedback that began to afflict like tinnitus.

Whenever this irritating and monotonous, binaural noise subsided, I heard a tertiary signal. Beyond the realm of mysticism or hearing disorders, between the two lobes of the head, it became undeniable.

I had a third ear. Call it a bullshit detector, call it a mediator, call it a hungry listener. Call it a critic.

I read, and listen, a lot. More than any sound individual has the time, or inclination, to listen. Podcasts, music, journalism, histories, criticism, anthropologies, films, television, literature high and low.

It’s a vocation, a calling. And while I’m heeding it: I hear things others won’t.

That’s nothing special. You would too, and will, if not for that most precious of resources, time. That’s what the Third Ear is for, that’s its function. To listen and learn, to read the culture, and suggest what’s worth your precious time.

I’ve read fantastic articles this year, with enormous explanatory power, that most of my friends and family will never see. They deserve to, and the journalists who authored them deserve to be heard. You’ll find links to them here, each week, month, and year.

I’ve read some stultifying histories, and critical theories, that no innocent lay reader deserves to be subjected to. Novels that many were happy to avoid in school. Yet the ideas contained in some of these six-hundred-page sleeping pills also have enormous, cultural explanatory power.

Others, meanwhile, contain insipid ideologies that are, nonetheless, profoundly altering the cultural landscape as we speak.

Let me do the heavy listening, and tell you what I hear.

“The Third Ear” is a term I lifted from one such book, a great one. But it’s likely that anyone outside the world of literary criticism would need A Clockwork Orange ocular fittings to keep their eyeballs open to the pages of that book. So here’s a summary: the Third Eye is an intercultural go-between, a messenger bearing gifts.

There’s a lot of noise out there, and I humbly suggest a signal.

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