All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
Elisabeth Waldo (1918 – 2026) Violinist And Ethnomusicologist
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Orion Samuelson (1934 – 2026) Agricultural Broadcaster
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Trump Making Calls
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Oscar Wilde’s Only Grandchild Reckons With the Shadows of Scandal
Elizabeth Winkler in The New York Times: On the evening of Nov. 30, 1994, Merlin Holland sat in a dim side aisle of the Église Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Paris church where, in 1900, Oscar Wilde had
Sunday Poem
Two Tramps in Mud Time Out of the mud two strangers came And caught me splitting wood in the yard, And one of them put me off my aim By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!” I knew pretty well why he had
Afrika Bambaataa (1957 – 2026) Godfather of Hip-Hop
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All My Conversation Partners
by Eric Schenck Over the last 10 years, I’ve learned three languages. Egyptian Arabic, German, and Spanish. And the best thing I’ve done for each one? Meet with quality conversation partners so I can
Half of Us Have to Put the Knives Away
by Peter Topolewski “Wilcox married a police officer who worked crime scenes. He gave her advice on how to protect herself from an attacker: She should always carry keys in her hand when she walked to
The New Millennium
by Anton Cebalo The film The Matrix famously froze its simulation in the year 1999. It was chosen as the alleged peak of human civilization. What unknowns might the new millennium bring? Many were und
City animals act in the same brazen ways around the world
Daniel T. Blumstein, Peter Mikula, and Piotr Tryjanowski in The Conversation: The urban monkeys in New Delhi are so bold they’ll steal the lunch right off your plate. If you’ve spent time in New York,
CAR T-cell therapy takes woman from bedridden to ‘perfectly fine’
Michael Le Page at New Scientist: A woman who had three different autoimmune conditions has not required treatments for almost a year after her immune cells were genetically modified and used to kill
Demis Hassabis: Why AGI is Bigger than the Industrial Revolution & Where The Bottlenecks in AI Are
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Internet “brain rot” has escaped our phones to take over … well, everything
Willy Staley in the New York Times: Maybe a decade ago, it still felt as if there were a wild expanse within your phone, a portal to a vast and sometimes terrifying alternate dimension. If the sensati
The Audacity Is a Sharp Satire for Tech’s Fear and Self-Loathing Era
Judy Berman in The Time Magazine: In a scene from AMC’s new tech-industry drama The Audacity, two old friends reunite around a crackling campfire. “Men like you and me, we gotta duck when sh-t f-cks t
One Human Faced 100 Hungry Mosquitoes to Model Where They Bite
David Hu in The Scientist: “Four minutes is too long.” That’s the note undergraduate Chris Zuo sent me along with photos of countless mosquito bites on his bare skin. This full-body massacre wasn’t th
Friday Poem
Enter Book The book you held in your hands now lies on the nightstand by your bed, in its heart the lines you sketched under the sentences you read more than once, bewildered, before you put the book
Memory, a Terrible Sound
by TJ Price I For years after an abrupt departure from college, I floated around, aimless and pathless. It was only a matter of time before I lost any buoyancy and began to drown, most likely in one o
This Is What Happens
by Mike Bendzela This is what happens when you revere the fancies of Iron Age sheep: This is what happens when you christen a parcel of dust Holy Land: This is what happens when you refuse to give up
The Singularity is Almost Here… or Not
by Carol A Westbrook When did you first notice that you cell phone was finishing your sentences? Sure, spellcheck had been around for a while, however annoying it might be, but coming up with whole se
The writing secrets of Stephen King
Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian: When Caroline Bicks first met Stephen King she was worried. As a teenager she had scared herself silly with his books – Carrie and The Shining were the two that crept u
Laws of Nature and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations
Craig Callender at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: This book’s subtitle is based on a question the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What breathes fire into the equations…?” If understood as as
Ultralightweight sonar plus AI lets tiny drones navigate like bats
Nitin Sanket at The Conversation: To help small aerial robots navigate in the dark and other low-visibility environments, my colleagues and I developed an ultrasound-based perception system inspired b
Sam Altman, Josh Achiam, and Adrien Ecoffet talk about the future of AI
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On Ben Lerner’s Transcription
Maggie Millner at n+1: Transcription is his first book written as an elegy, a mode that comes with a thornier-than-usual crop of formal mandates. What kind of verbal machine is an elegy supposed to be
‘Stay Alive,’ about daily life in Nazi Berlin, shows how easy it is to just go along
John Powers at NPR: It’s been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker, yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now I’ve read and seen so many different things that I’m a
The Push for Artificial Inheritance
Ashley Smart in Undark Magazine: Last June, at a conference and retreat center not far from downtown Berkeley, California, around 100 people gathered to mull a new, techno-centric future of human repr
This May Be the Most Important Medical Story of the Decade
Jeff Coller in The New York Times: When KJ Muldoon was born in the summer of 2024, his parents were told he had a disease so rare, it strikes about one in 1.3 million newborns. His condition, a severe
Thursday Poem
Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles, Miles and miles ……………………………..— Robert Browning, “Love Among the Ruins” A Postcard from Tehran bed-bruised I opened eyes on pellucid puddles after the la
The philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’
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Ghost Urbanism: Haunted Concrete and Its Cultural Forms
by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho Maybe in the many nearby ghost towns, ghosts do roam and send old-fashioned good wishes to abstract relatives in distant homes. —from the poem “Maybe”, If I Do Not Reply (2024) *
Web of Perception Part I – Extended Senses
by Thomas Fernandes Last time, we explored how insects navigate and hunt using motion-based vision, and how these perceptual interfaces can themselves be exploited by dragonflies using motion camoufla
This Week’s Photograph
Remnants of a celebration on the streets of Brixen, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Gray took over the modern world but color may be returning
Frank Jacobs at Big Think: No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that
How Grains and Grasses Fed (and Still Feed) Humankind
David George Haskell at Literary Hub: As I walk through the broomsedge in June, dozens of grasshoppers clatter away with every footstep. Bees and wasps wing past, leafhoppers spring, and beetles scurr
Project Glasswing: An initiative to secure the world’s software
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Moral relativism has nothing to do with tolerance
Matt Lutz at Humean Being: My academic work is mostly in the field of metaethics, which is the area of philosophy that investigates the nature of morality. It’s a rather abstract subject, but one that
The Lubitsch Touch
David Hudson at The Current: The 2026 version of The Lubitsch Touch isn’t quite as expansive as the one New York’s Film Forum presented in 2017, but it is certainly just as welcome. Writing in the Vil
The Art of Reading Minds
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Chuck Close and Pulp
Benjamin Clifford at the Brooklyn Rail: Take Self-Portrait (Rigid) (1982), one of the most straightforward examples of what Close is up to. In this work, the bearded and bespectacled face of the artis
Mini models of the human brain are revealing how this complex organ takes shape
Alison Abbott in Nature: The development of the human brain, with its extraordinary range of cognitive abilities, is an awe-inspiring feat of evolution. Each of its tens of billions of cells must be b
Wednesday Poem
Dear March—Come in Dear March—Come in— How glad I am— I hoped for you before— Put down your Hat— You must have walked— How out of Breath you are— Dear March, how are you, and the Rest— Did you leave N
1959 The Year that Changed Jazz
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On Being Afraid of Iranians
by Scott Samuelson One of my early memories is lying awake at night, trying to discern through the sounds of the wind the creeping of an Iranian on the roof outside my bedroom window. For a few months
Dirty Dishes
by Steve Szilagyi It’s been many decades since I worked as a restaurant dishwasher. The best part of the job was the camaraderie of the kitchen—the japes, the clash of pans, and the friendly female se
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
What’s in a Name? A livelihood, if that name is Banksy
Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria: The artist known as Banksy has made a fortune in graffiti and irony and ironic graffiti. No, he’s not the guy—we now know that Banksy is a middle-aged Englishman nam
Dawkins’s paradox: dissecting the body’s battle to keep selfish genes in check
C. Brandon Ogbunugafor in Nature: Some thirty-five years ago, biologist Richard Dawkins coined the phrase “paradox of the organism” to encapsulate a conundrum. If genes are ‘selfish’ — driven to incre
The World’s Most Expensive Stuff: Antimatter
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Are criminals born or made?
Sophie McBain in The Guardian: In 2021, the psychologist and writer Kathryn Paige Harden co-authored a paper outlining her research into the genetic patterns linked to a higher risk of developing subs
Angine de Poitrine – Sherpa
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Virginia Woolf’s Juvenilia
Ruby Eastwood at the Dublin Review of Books: The Life of Violet brings together three interconnected short stories written by Woolf in 1907, at the age of twenty-five. They show her beginning to think
Ben Lerner’s Transcription and the Literary Readymade
Gemma Sieff at Artforum: Transcription is a work of art for a new age of mechanical reproduction, a meditation on imperfect facsimile. Its cover features an embossed finger- and thumb-printed brick wi
Great Writers “Tell” All the Time
Freddie deBoer in FdB: “Show, don’t tell” is among the most repeated piece of writing advice in the English language, up there with hatred for the passive voices, disdain for adverbs, and endorsements
Can We Disagree Better? A Harvard Professor Has Tips.
Olivia Farrar in Harvard Magazine: 1. What’s the most common mistake we make when we disagree? Trying to win. We go in wanting to persuade the other person they’re wrong and we’re right. That usually
Tuesday Poem
Man the Toolmaker Man the toolmaker, tooluser, son of the burning quests fixed with roaming forearms, hands attached to the forearms, fingers put on those hands, a thumb to face any finger— hands cunn
Science under Siege, Michael Mann and Peter Hotez (Review)
by Paul Braterman Study this book if you are at all interested in the threats to the scientific and rational underpinnings of our culture, in the US and to some extent elsewhere. It is not an easy rea
The Fall and Fall of International Order
by Bill Murray International order in the twentieth century was set by empires, then blocs engaged in ideological struggle, and finally by alliances based on common ideological and financial interests
The man, the mind, the series, and 314 trillion digits
by Dilip D’Souza Here’s a factoid that, over a century later, still stuns: In 1914, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan published an academic paper in which he spelled out 17 – yes, seventeen – form
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Fungal Abstractions. March 2022, Vermont. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
The April Fool’s Vaccine — Why We Need to Be Fooled
Oscar Rey de Castro at The Crossover Project: Every April 1st, the world agrees to lie to each other. Not the dangerous kind — not the kind that topples governments or breaks marriages. The small kind
New Advances Bring the Era of Quantum Computers Closer Than Ever
Charlie Wood in Quanta: Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor(opens a new tab) took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum
Can AIs genuinely act emotional?
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Banking beyond the law
Miles Kellerman at Aeon: The global financial system is a colossal factory containing an endless web of information assembly lines. Every time you tap your card on a payment terminal, whether it’s for
The Biology of Belief
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Teenage Frida Kahlo’s Moving Letters
Maria Popova at The Marginalian: One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez
About 80% of breast cancer biopsies turn out benign – new imaging tool promises clearer diagnoses and fewer biopsies
Quing Zhu in The Conversation: Ultrasound is widely used in breast cancer diagnosis. While it can effectively show that a lump is filled with fluid – indicating it is unlikely to be cancer – it cannot
‘Yes, we can’: a blueprint for a clean economy and healthy society
Andrew Macintosh in Nature: It is a dark time for climate policy and global affairs. Wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and now Iran, as well as the domestic and international policy and trade agendas of
Finding the Cattle Queen
Rachel Ossip at n+1: In 1967, in the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, my grandfather Jerry opened a steakhouse. The Cattle Baron took the energy of a theme restaurant and gave it an adult polish
The Arrow and the Leap: Towards a Shared Framework of Meaning for Humans and AI
by W. Alex Foxworthy We are trying to build artificial intelligence systems that share our human values. Yet we cannot agree – across worldviews and cultures – on what those values are, or why they ma
The Many Failures of Professional Sportspeople
by David J. Lobina The role of failure is an underappreciated issue in professional sports – and a brutal reality for most sportspeople in general, in fact, professional or otherwise. I myself play te
Poem by Jim Culleny
Lucky Again Yesterday today might never have come but I’m lucky again It did and here you are my bulwark against a lone sea. In the garden you began years ago in our plot of sand where little grew but
Expanding Battlefield
Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar: The Israeli-American war against Iran has thrown financial markets into turmoil and there is growing concern across national economies. Does this remind you of the oil pri
Mamdani Lands at LaGuardia
Sarah Miller-Davenport in The Ideas Letter: The most facile assessments of Zohran Mamdani’s extraordinary campaign to lead New York City attribute its success to his innovative use of social media and
The Epstein Class
Lindsay Beyerstein in Dissent: Jeffrey Epstein checks every conspiracist box. The late sex trafficker was a Jewish financier linked to the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Trilateral Commission, and
Bettina Köster (1959 – 2026) Musician And Avant-Gardist
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‘Enough of this me me me’
Blake Morrison in The Guardian: Every day I meet strangers who share intimate details with me. It’s called reading. In a newspaper piece a former sex addict recalls her need for BDSM (“when a sexual p
What Were Bob Dylan and John Lennon Really Saying in the Back of That Limo?
Jim Windolf in The New York Times: On the night of May 26, 1966, the Beatles entered EMI Studios on Abbey Road to work on their most ambitious album yet, “Revolver.” Three miles away, their friend Bob
Ben Stevenson (1936 – 2026) Choreographer And Dancer
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Sunday Poem
Wait a Minute I open my eyes in the morning. For a minute I am neither here nor there. Then in the next minute I am here but starting to be there. The day has begun. I will get up and start to seek, a
Dolores Keane (1953 – 2026) Irish Folk Singer
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Looking at Looking
by Richard Farr I’m on a trip to London and Spain. In Trafalgar Square with a spare half hour, I plunge into the National Gallery because I want to see the Arnolfini portrait again. Alas, van Eyck’s c
The Achilles Heel of Trump’s Mafia-State Authoritarianism
by John Ambrosio In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, drew on a paper written by the renowned Czech dissident, and later president, Václ
Species of leased concern
by Mike O’Brien A few weeks ago, Québec’s official housing tribunal (TAL) ruled on a case about no-pet clauses in residential leases. The case involved a tenant, M. Desjardins, who had lived in the sa
Saturday Poem
Design I pour a coating of salt on the table and make a circle in it with my finger. This is the cycle of life I say to no one. This is the wheel of fortune, the Arctic Circle. This is the ring of Ker
Photographs from the collection of Hasan Belal
From the European Review of Books: Belal felt life had become « too fast, stripped of slowness and reflection, and constrained by the lack of freedom to live and experience fully. » Visiting his homet
The Many Roots of Our Suffering: Reflections on Robert Trivers (1943–2026)
Steven Pinker at Quillette: In March 2026, three prominent thinkers died within a day of each other. Lavish obituaries immediately marked the deaths of the always-wrong environmentalist Paul Ehrlich a
Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI
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A Shakeup Is Coming for the Nation-State
Stephen Sims in The New Atlantis: The drones had been trained using AI to recognize Tu-95 “Bear” bombers based on photographs taken of a decommissioned version in a Ukrainian air museum and to recogni
The Carracci Cartoons
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The house is a work of art: Frank Lloyd Wright exalted the individual and made ordinary life beautiful
Andrew Deming in aeon: I was 10 when Frank Lloyd Wright first entered my consciousness. I was sitting crosslegged on the beige carpet of my bedroom in a tract house in Melbourne, Florida, watching a K
Brothers and Sisters: On the fiction of siblings
Christine Smallwood in Harper’s Magazine: To live in society involves putting up with people who we did not choose to know and may in fact prefer not to exist. Even those we basically like and get alo
Friday Poem
Hints of Pale Lemon the light pouring in my window has hints of pale lemon as they might say on the back of a wine bottle well, yes, it is the best of wines so I sit in my chair drinking it in but fin
Jan Morris: A Life
Piers Brendon at Literary Review: The subject of this excellent biography wished to be remembered as Jan ‘Empire’ Morris, author of the great imperial trilogy Pax Britannica, but she correctly predict
The Importance of Being Idle
Robert Zaretsky at The American Scholar: During Lafargue’s own lifetime, the nature of work was undergoing a traumatic transformation. The seismic effect of the first and second industrial revolutions
Trust the Machine?
by Barry Goldman Let’s start with a simple case. You want to know if the tires on your bike are properly inflated. You give them a squeeze. They feel fine. But you want to be sure. So you get out your
The Secondary Narrator
by Derek Neal I find myself increasingly unable to read anything resembling AI text, that is, anything seemingly preformed, readymade, or mass produced, like an IKEA chair; but even as I write this, I
Ideal Ideologies: The Cosmogony Of “The Settlers Of Catan”
by Jochen Szangolies The world is not the world. How’s that for a gnomic, faux-profound fortune cookie opener? There’s all sorts of places we can go now, from Chopra-esque quantum mysticism to watered
Wars Of Whim, Government By Goons, All Too Many Seem OK With This
by Laurence Peterson History is not rhyming; it is not repeating itself; it is being ignored, dismissed as an inconvenience, perhaps on a uniquely vast scale. Events that have already affected all of
Against The Concept Of Telescopic Altruism
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: “Telescopic altruism” is a supposed tendency for some people to ignore those close to them in favor of those further away. Like its cousin “virtue signaling”, it u
Inside the ‘self-driving’ lab revolution
Rachel Brazil in Nature: Measuring 5 metres square by 3 metres high, Eve takes up at least half of the floor space in the laboratory it now calls home. The robotic platform at the Chalmers University
OpenAI President Greg Brockman: AI Self-Improvement
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How Elon Musk is reshaping the world
Christopher Webb in The Guardian: Genius industrialist or clownish conman, humanity’s saviour from a rapidly crumbling planet or rabid social media troll – the verdicts on the world’s richest person v
PJ Harvey: Tiny Desk Concert
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The Met Museum’s Historic Raphael Exhibition
Natalie Haddad at Hyperallergic: “Nature created him as a gift to the world,” wrote Giorgio Vasari of Raphael in the 16th-century compendium The Lives of the Artists. Roughly 500 years later, the sent
Thursday Poem
In Solitude In solitude, we remain face to face with the naked being of things. And yet we find that the nakedness of reality, which we have feared, is neither a matter of terror nor of shame. It is c
Trump Drops in on SCOTUS & Bulldozes Judge’s Ballroom Construction Ruling
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Looking Beyond the Brain to Alleviate Depression Symptoms
Shelby Bradford in The Scientist: Worldwide, more than 330 million people have depression, with major depressive disorder representing one of the most common psychiatric disorders in clinics. Up to 30
Poet, Lucky Poet: The Poems of Seamus Heaney
Mark Jarman at the Hudson Review: By the end of Heaney’s life, all literary laurels became destined for him and created a lore of fame, from the rhyming epithet “Famous Seamus,” said to have been coin
From Code to Being: The Strange Phenomenon of the Wireborn
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad While mainstream AI debates are focused on the usual argument about benchmark scores, hallucinations, alignment etc., there is a different sort of debate regarding AI going
Everyday Actions Still Matter
by Rachel Robison-Greene People all over the country wake in the morning and instantly dread the news headlines awaiting them on their phones. Have Americans bombed another school? Gutted one more pro
This Week’s Photograph
On the road. In front of my house. Very mysterious. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Euripides’ Medea | The Tragedy of Womanhood
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How Addiction Became a Central Motif in Crime Fiction
Theodore Martin at LitHub: It has long been conventional for crime novelists to describe killers using the language of insanity, madness, and mental illness. But in the crime novels of the 1990s, anot
Bettina’s Obsessive Geometries
Katherine Rochester at Artforum: IN 1974, a strand of hair twirled in a porcelain sink in room 503 of the Chelsea Hotel. It belonged to an artist named Bettina, who photographed its sinuous formations
Down on your luck? How behavioural neuroscience could help
Nobuko Nakano in The Guardian: When the founder of Panasonic, Kōnosuke Matsushita, was asked what quality he valued most in job candidates, his answer baffled everyone: whether they were lucky. Not th
Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: Instead of having companies build a specialized interface for every kind of work, the AI generates the right interface on the fly. I suspect the future isn’t one int
Fields Medalist Michael Freedman introduces his provocative new paper, “Compression Is All You Need”
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The Bills That Destroyed Urban America
Joseph Lawler in The New Atlantis: Think of what the typical American city looks like today: its hollowed-out core dotted with parking lots, its run-down inner-city neighborhoods, its sprawl. How did
Artemis II mission is about to fly humans to the Moon — here’s the science they’ll do
Alexandra Witze in Nature: If all goes to plan, as soon as tomorrow, NASA will launch four people on a journey around the Moon. The mission, known as Artemis II, would be the first time humans have le
Forget Antibiotics: These Killer Cells Wipe Out Deadly Superbugs in a Day
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: A mixture of bacteria lounge in a dish. Like the bugs populating our guts, most are benign or beneficial. But a deadly strain hides among them. These bacteria can easily
Wednesday Poem
Paterson: Early Winter, ’78’ —for Ed Smith I will see you once again on the long silver train people call “night”. The sizzling green neon of Van Houten Ave. pizzeria will smooth the wrinkles of your
Boundaries Dissolving: The Secret Power of the Eleusinian Mysteries
by Gary Borjesson In my essay, On the Eleusinian Mysteries, I described the origin story of the Mysteries and what we know about the rites of initiation, which lasted as long as nine days. Here I will
Buffalo Medicine: A review of “Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie”
by David Hoyt It’s hard to love the prairie. If you love it, you tend to be loving a memory of something you’ve hardly known, or a vision of something you dream might return some day, like the America
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
On a new history of pedantry
Hannah Katznelson at The Hedgehog Review: At the beginning of On the Nature of Things, a sort of textbook of Epicurean philosophy, the Roman poet Lucretius explains his choice to write in verse by com
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing but the truth is more worrying
Kevin T Baker in The Guardian: On the first morning of Operation Epic Fury, 28 February 2026, American forces struck the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school in Minab, in southern Iran, hitting the buildi
Grant Sanderson: How (and why) to take a logarithm of an image
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Francesca Wade On Gertrude Stein
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A blueprint for how we use AI to reinvent the way we govern ourselves
Andy Hall at Free Systems: Right now is a weird time to be a political economist. AI is straining our already brittle political institutions. We might lurch into a dystopia in which we live in the gri
The Enigma of Gertrude Stein
David Schurman Wallace at The Nation: No one understands Gertrude Stein. For this, we should all give thanks. It is almost a cliché to emphasize her work’s difficulty, but her writing remains imposing
Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf
Mark Krotov at n+1: Dry Leaf is concerned above all with the materiality of the camera—what it captures as it meanders off, and what it fails to detect. To paraphrase the title of Koberidze’s previous
Abigail Adams Asked Her Husband to ‘Remember the Ladies’ as He Drafted America’s Laws. Here’s What She Really Meant
Ellen Wexler in Smithsonian: As John Adams lobbied in Philadelphia for American independence, his wife, Abigail, was consumed with questions. She filled pages with them, often complaining when John di
Blaise Pascal’s Night of Fire
Graham Tomlin in Plough: On a cold November night in 1654, a young Frenchman, well known in fashionable circles for his scientific experiments and mathematical genius, sat down to pray in his small ap
Tuesday Poem
Sonnet to spring: When in Minnesota we arrive at the vernal equinox, We know that grass and flowers are not quite here, That more snow will fall on our driveway and sidewalks, And that spring, as alwa
Key World Indicators in AI Forecasting
by Malcolm Murray In forecasting the evolution of AI, we are rapidly losing the middle. The outcomes are diverging to the extent that it no longer makes sense to think about “an average timeline” or “
Walking in the City
by Laurie Sheck 1. In his 1980 essay Walking in the City, Michel de Certeau describes looking out at Manhattan from the 110th floor of the World Trade Center. Viewed from above, the city is “a wave of
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Esplanade Walks As Days Get Longer. Boston, March 2022. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Are morally good people any happier or sadder than others?
Jessie Sun at Psyche: Most of us have experienced both how good it can feel and how hard it can be to do the right thing. Helping strangers or supporting a friend can leave you with a deep sense of sa
Scott Aaronson reviews the movie “The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist”
Scott Aaronson at Shtetl-Optimized: I thought that the filmmaker, Daniel Roher, did about as good a job as can be done, in fitting into a 100-minute film a question that honestly seems too gargantuan
Prime Numbers Might Not Be Random After All
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The Weirdness Of Dinosaurs
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Does South Asia need secularism? Interview with Akeel Bilgrami
Priyam Paul at The Daily Star: The Daily Star (TDS): Could you elaborate on the origins of secularism in Europe? How did the idea evolve there? Akeel Bilgrami (AB): ‘Secularism’, first of all, should
Bitch: A History
Karen Stollznow at Aeon Magazine: In its most literal sense, a bitch is a female dog, and this is also the word’s earliest meaning. Because bitch feels so contemporary, so casually present in everyday