All articles from 3 Quarks Daily

New Discoveries in the Archaeology of the Ancient Americas

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Why Is Ice Slippery? A New Hypothesis

Paulina Rowińska at Quanta: The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists genera

Google DeepMind robotics lab tour with Hannah Fry

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Lessons of the Masters

Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review: If you’re eccentric, you’re all right.” This is how Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, explained the British character

How Tax Havens Undermine the Rule of Law by Providing the Rule of Law

Nikhil Kalyanpur at The Price of Power: Historically, economic elites pushed for stronger courts, better property rights, and even elections. There was an underlying logic: elites are fundamentally af

The Tune of Things

Christian Wiman at Harper’s Magazine: A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brai

Khan in the Dark

Peter Bach in CounterPunch: The persistent rumours that imprisoned Pakistani politician Imran Khan is dead have been crackling away like Lahore firecrackers these past few weeks. They feel less like r

AI Chatbots Choose Friends Just Like Humans Do

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub: As AI wheedles its way into our lives, how it behaves socially is becoming a pressing question. A new study suggests AI models build social networks in much the same way a

Tuesday Poem

Le Chien I remember late one night in Paris speaking at length to a dog in English about the future of American culture. No wonder she kept cocking her head as I went on about “summer movies” and the

Are You 729 Times Happier than Donald Trump?

by Scott Samuelson When I turned fifty, I went through the usual crisis of facing that my life was—so to speak—more than half drunk. After moping a while, one of the more productive things I started t

The Cleaning Crew Part I: After Death

by Thomas Fernandes In the natural world, predation may mark the end of life, but it doesn’t signal the end of ecological interactions. The hunt, with all its challenges and shifting interactions, is

Perceptions

Sughra Raza. First Snow. Dec 14, 2025. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

In Malaysia, Muslim Trans Women Find Their Own Paths

Gréta Tímea Biró at Sapiens: Dora and I walked through the quiet nighttime streets of Chow Kit, a downtown neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. [1] Pungent food smells mingled with the sweet scent of fruit a

The Doppelgänger who wants a Doppelgänger

Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad at Digital Dopplegangers: Most current digital doppelgängers, for all practical purposes, are automatons i.e., their behavior is relatively fixed with relatively well defined

Creativity in Science – Ernest Nagel (1968)

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Paul Giamatti & Stephen Asma talk about Writing, Acting, and the Untamed Imagination

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The “Satiric, Terrifying” Legacy Of Poet Weldon Kees

Dana Gioia at The Book Haven: I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthol

China leads research in 90% of crucial technologies — a dramatic shift this century

Xiaoying You in Nature: The ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker evaluated high-quality research on 74 current and emerging technologies this year, up from the 64 technologies it analysed last year. Chi

Frank Gehry: The Liberator

Martin Filler at the NYRB: The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined

The Root Causes of Senseless Violence

Ivana Hughes in Common Dreams: I write this from the front of a Columbia classroom in which about 60 first-year college students are taking the final exam for Frontiers of Science. Yes, it’s a Sunday,

You’re Probably Not Addicted to Social Media

Kristen French in Nautilus: Social media can be tough to ignore these days. There is so much of it, and it’s so accessible, right there glowing on the phones in our pockets and purses. Many of us find

The United States Is Tearing the West Apart

by Bill Murray One Monday in 1883 Southeast Asia woke to “the firing of heavy guns” heard from Batavia to Alice Springs to Singapore, and maybe as far as Mauritius, near Africa. “So violent are the ex

Mercy

by Andrea Scrima Sette Opere di Misericordia, the famous altarpiece by Caravaggio commissioned in 1607 by the charitable Confraternità del Pia Monte della Misericordia in Naples, where it still hangs

Poem by Jim Culleny

Until the Night Drops Fog lifting off of the river Frogs in a chorus of croaks Moon lit up —just a sliver A fire that the unknown has stoked Chuck Berry singing Johnny be Good his guitar lighting fire

Donald McIntyre (1934 – 2025) Operatic Bass-Baritone

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Socialism After AI

Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter: Artificial intelligence has produced a rare kind of popular curiosity. Not only among investors and founders, but among people who open a browser, type a question,

Can machines suffer?

Conor Purcelli in Aeon: Across northern Europe and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries, workers roamed coastlines and pack ice, beating infant seals to death with clubs. White ice was smeared re

Between Capitalism and the State-System

Quentin Bruneau in Phenomenal World: How should we explain periods of profound global transformation? Scholars have long viewed socio-political change as a reflection of property relations and technol

The new political theology

Arthur Goldhammer in Eurozine: Is Charlie Kirk’s assassination-turned-martyrdom unofficially disestablishing the US constitutional clause against the government forming a national religion? And how as

Joseph Byrd (1937 – 2025) Experimental Composer and Musician

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Phil Upchurch (1941 – 2025) Guitarist

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Kerala Has Abolished Extreme Poverty

Vijay Prashad in Scheerpost: On 1 November 2025, the south-western Indian state of Kerala – home to 34 million people – was declared free from extreme poverty by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Keral

May I Explain the “May I Meet You?” Meme?

Katie Baker in The Ringer: The way the fabled investor Bill Ackman sees it, he was born to move markets. It’s right there in the name: BILL-ionaire ACK-tivist MAN, as the 59-year-old always loves poin

Sunday Poem

The Case of Courage No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live tak

Putting the “Art” into Artificial Intelligence, or Banksy on Steroids

by Malcolm Murray As I discussed AI with my cabdriver on a recent trip to Vienna, I was reminded of the fact that the German word for AI is Künstliche Intelligenz. This shares an etymological root wit

The Barren Midwife: On Socratic Method and Psychotherapeutic Art

by Gary Borjesson I’ve rarely regretted holding my tongue during a session. I’ve rarely regretted drawing out what’s on a patient’s mind instead of offering some (apparently) juicy insight or interpre

The Literature of Limits: The Buddhist Horizon (Part II)

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the previous article of this series I started with the exploration of the concept that every civilization eventually arrives at the edge of its own knowing. It was not m

A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood

Paper by Joel Z. Leibo, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, William A. Cunningham, and Stanley M. Bileschi: The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of ne

Australia’s world-first social media ban is a ‘natural experiment’ for scientists

Rachel Fieldhouse & Mohana Basu in Nature: For Susan Sawyer, a physician-researcher specializing in adolescent health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, the start of

Normal distribution vs Power Laws

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Charles Dickens: A Short History with Tom Crewe

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For many years, Zheng Xiaoqiong has collected the stories of the workers whose migration to Guangdong powered China’s manufacturing revolution

Translated from Chinese by Eleanor Goodman, intro by Kaiser Kuo at Equator: I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in Iron Moon, a collection of Chinese worker poetry skilfully translated by El

The Persistence Of Religion

Kwame Anthony Appiah at Aeon Magazine: We tend to think of religion as an age-old feature of human existence. So it can be startling to learn that the very concept dates to the early modern era. Yes,

George Orwell: Life and Legacy

Dorian Lynskey at Literary Review: Peck focuses on what Orwell got brilliantly right – about fascism, communism, imperialism, nationalism, the abuses of new technology and the lies people tell themsel

Friday Poem

The Sloth In moving-slow he has no Peer. You ask him something in his ear, He thinks about it for a year; And, then, before he says a Word There, upside down (unlike a Bird), He will assume that you h

Jon Stewart Starts His Talk Show Career

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India’s Season of Sadness

Anurag Verma in The New York Times: After the long, torturous summers that bake northern India in 40-degree Celsius (104 degree Fahrenheit) heat, winter should be welcomed as a reprieve. Instead, it i

Invisible Hands and Brandished Fists: The Three Dimensions of Power

by Jochen Szangolies I have once again been thinking about power, and once again I feel ill at ease with it. Yet while I do consider myself somewhat badly equipped for this pursuit, I nevertheless fee

On Leave in this World

by Derek Neal If one on the goals of art is to wake us up, to remind us what it is to be alive, one of the main ways of doing this is by bringing us as close to death as possible. This is why suicide

15 Random Thoughts About AI

by Eric Schenck The last few years I have been deep in the world of artificial intelligence. Using it. Reading about it. Learning from people who are experts. What follows are 15 random thoughts about

Julien Crockett speaks with Blaise Agüera y Arcas about the various ways that LLMs keep surprising scientists and how our definition of intelligence should be more complex than people generally think

Julien Crockett at the Los Angeles Review of Books: “At least as of this writing,” Blaise Agüera y Arcas begins his new book What Is Intelligence? Lessons from AI About Evolution, Computing, and Minds

Which door would you choose?

A story by @magnushambleton at X: I chose the green door ninety-three days ago. At the time, it seemed obviously correct. Not even a close call. The red door offered two billion dollars immediately—a

John Jumper: The Protein-Folding Challenge to Nobel Prize

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15 Minutes of Ronny Chieng

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Actors took big swings in 2025. Here are some of the best

Wesley Morris in The New York Times: On today’s show, Wesley reveals his favorite film performances of the year — but his list is not an ordinary best-of list. He zeroes in on the specific details tha

Kathleen Raine: Novalis & William Blake

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Rudolph Fisher was a scientist and an artist whose métier was Harlem

Harriet A. Washington at The American Scholar: “Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white,

Forrest Gander’s Desert Phenomenology

Bailey Trela at The Nation: Forrest Gander is on good terms with the mineral world, and he’s made a habit in his poetry of displaying a deep familiarity with the layers of sediment below our feet. His

Thomas Manning (1772–1840)

Eliot Weinberger at the Paris Review: Thomas Manning arrived in Lhasa in 1811, having walked for months across the Himalayas from Calcutta, disguised as a Buddhist pilgrim and accompanied only by a si

Thursday Poem

Latin class Alphabetical seating. Peterson, Nils. Desk behind – Plummer, Patience. Amo, Amas, Amat. Pageboy bob. Brown eyes. Complexion – adolescent. No words between us. Her eyes burned holes into my

Two Cheers For Ned Ludd – With A Note On The Coming Apocalypse

by Richard Farr My family jokes that I can break a computer by looking at it; God knows, I’ve tried. They also say that I hate technology, and would rather have lived two hundred years ago — wooden ta

The Murder Memos

by Barry Goldman  At the time of this writing, Thanksgiving week 2025, the Trump administration has launched 21 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and killed 83 civilians. According

This Week’s Photograph

Self-portrait by reflection in the very large glass window of the new public library in Brixen, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

The Secret Life of Words

Gregory Hickok in Psychology Today: How is it that words can be so common, so fundamental, yet so elusive? A key discovery is that words are not just a sound pattern (cat, gato, neko) and a meaning (f

Converting marine propulsion to nuclear makes a lot of sense, but only if you’re an engineer

Matthew L. Wald at The EcoModernist: A container ship looks like a perfect place for a nuclear reactor, from a technology standpoint. But a lawyer might call it the worst. It’s a good example of the d

Amanda Askell, a philosopher at Anthropic who works on Claude, answers questions about her work and makes predictions

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Can we break the human development-environment trade-off?

Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by numbers: My argument is simple: for the first time in history, we can improve human wellbeing while reducing our environmental impact. It’s common to think that sus

Wednesday Poem

So Be It. Amen. There are people who don’t want Kierkegaard to be A humpback, and they’re looking for a wife for Cézanne. It’s hard for them to say, “So be it. Amen.” When a dead dog turned up on the

How monogamous are humans? A study ranks us between meerkats and beavers

Victoria Craw in The Washington Post: How monogamous are humans, really? It’s an age-old question subject to significant debate. Now a University of Cambridge professor has an answer: Somewhere betwee

Salman Rushdie on Free Speech, India and How He’s Making the Most of Life

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Algorithms Don’t Care

by Rachel Robison-Greene The Trolley Problem, once a thought experiment students encountered for the first time in an Introduction to Philosophy classroom, has become a well-known cultural meme. It is

Eight Voices

by Laurie Sheck For the past couple of decades, I have been a member of the MFA Creative Writing faculty at the New School in New York City. Before that I taught at Princeton, Rutgers, Columbia and CU

Catspeak

by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Reading Lolita in the Barracks

Sheon Han at Asterisk: The long tradition of carceral creativity goes back centuries: John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress, Boethius The Consolation of Philosophy, and Oscar Wilde De Profundis all

Your Brain Goes Through Five Distinct Epochs of Neural Wiring During Your Lifetime: at Ages 9, 32, 66 and 83

Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian Magazine: For the study, scientists combined nine previously collected datasets to look at the brain scans of almost 4,000 “neurotypical” individuals, from newborns to 90-yea

Samuel Moyn and Mark Blyth debate: “Is the Present Historical Moment Unprecedented?”

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A New Governing Ecosystem Is Evolving

Nathan Gardels at Noema: In Jim Fishkin’s new book, “Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy?,” the pioneering practitioner of deliberative polling surveys the whole array of such practices from c

Mavericks: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt

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Necromodernism

David Vichnar at 3:AM Magazine: Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every

Renaissance Man Rudolph Fisher

Harriet A. Washington at The American Scholar: “Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white,

Tuesday Poem

The Soil Must be Fed The writer can only be fertile if he renews himself and he can only renew himself if his soul is constantly enriched by fresh experience. There is no more fruitful source of this

The Tune of Things: Is consciousness God?

Christian Wimer in Harper’s Magazine: A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brai

Pentagon Press Conference

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Thoughts On Neurodiversity

by Martin Butler Neurodiversity, a term first coined by the sociologist Judith Singer in the 1990s, is the idea that human beings think and act in a wide variety of ways which extend well beyond the n

Depending On The Kindness Of Strangers

by Mike O’Brien Like many other video gamers (nearly eight million, in fact), I have spent no small portion of recent weeks in the robot-infested, post-diluvian wastes of late-22nd-Century Italy, loot

Perceptions

Chiharu Shiota. Infinite Memory, 2025. Dresses and ropes. Commissioned by M+, Hong Kong, 2025. Photograph by Sughra Raza, Nov 1, 2025. More here, here, and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep

Why We All Make Sacrifices to the Human-Created God Called “The Economy”

Sven Beckert at Literary Hub: We live in a world created by capitalism. The ceaseless accumulation of capital forges the cities we inhabit, determines the way we work, allows an extraordinarily large

What Are Lie Groups?

Leila Sloman in Quanta: In mathematics, ubiquitous objects called groups display nearly magical powers. Though they’re defined by just a few rules, groups help illuminate an astonishing range of myste

How Paul Dirac uncovered the anti-universe

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Crick: A Mind in Motion – the charismatic philanderer who changed science

Sophie McBain in The Guardian: Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work.

Putting the U in quantum

Zack Savitsky in Science Magazine: Standing in a garden on the remote German island of Helgoland one day in June, two theoretical physicists quibble over who—or what—constructs reality. Carlo Rovelli,

How Tehran got into water bankruptcy

Ali Mirchi, Amir AghaKouchak, Kaveh Madani, and Mojtaba Sadegh in The Conversation: Fall marks the start of Iran’s rainy season, but large parts of the country have barely seen a drop as the nation fa

Why We Sleep

by S. Abbas Raza and ChatGPT 5.1 S. Abbas Raza: You may have heard of John Brockman who is a well-known American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. Brockman led a scienti

Poem by Jim Culleny

—on a painting by Edward Hopper Pegasus A flying red horse was a sign of my time. On drives anywhere along a center white line with mom and dad, when we rolled in to fill-her-up I’d see him there thro

Sheinbaum’s Mission

Edwin F. Ackerman in New Left Review: Claudia Sheinbaum took the helm a year ago riding a high wave. With 60 per cent of the vote and a supermajority for her party MORENA in both chambers, the Mexican

COP30 Without the USA

Catherine Osborn in Polycrisis: Last month, the humid Amazonian rainforest city of Belém, Brazil was alive with all the usual signs of  a United Nations climate summit except one: a US negotiating tea

Risk, uncertainty, and democracy

Suzanne Schneider in the International Review of Applied Economics: Though routinely invoked in far-ranging contexts – from national security and healthcare to insurance, banking, and the climate cris

Frank Gehry (1929 – 2025) Architect

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Frank Gehry, the Disrupter, Opened Their Imaginations

Sam Lubell in The New York Times: Like his buildings, the legacy of Frank Gehry, who died on Dec. 5, at age 96, is exceptionally complex: radical, shifting, multifaceted and often misunderstood. It’s

Hannah Arendt Is Not Your Icon

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of he

Steve Cropper (1941 – 2025) Legendary Guitarist

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David Pryce-Jones (1936 – 2025) Author and Historian

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Sunday Poem

On the Beach at Night Alone On the beach at night alone, As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song, As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the univer

Generation 6-7

by Jeroen Bouterse Preparing a worksheet with negative-number calculations where all the digits are sixes and sevens. Telling myself it’s meant to take the fun out of it for them – like a sex ed teach

Gramscian Hegemony and American Justice: The Myth of Individual Moral Blame

by Daniel Gauss Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony helps explain how the power structure of modern liberal-democratic societies maintains authority without relying on overt force. Many definitions o

Francis Crick: A Mind in Motion

Sophie McBain in The Guardian: Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work.

A Pathology in Knowledge Transmission

Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Complex ideas often require conditions and qualifiers to remain true. When these ideas are rounded off to something simpler (as always happens when ideas spread), the eff

AI Expert Stuart Russell: Six People Are Quietly Deciding Humanity’s Future

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Love and Death: Elegies for Poets

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Ranked choice voting outperforms the winner-take-all system used to elect nearly every US politician

Ismar Volić, Andy Schultz, and David McCune in The Conversation: Plurality voting is notorious for producing winners without majority support in races that have more than two candidates. It can also c

The Charismatic Philanderer Who Changed Science

Sophie McBain at The Guardian: Most people could tell you that Francis Crick, together with James Watson, discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and shaped our understanding of how genes work.

Holbein: Renaissance Master

Peter Marshall at Literary Review: It’s an irony to savour: the man who invented the Tudors was a German. If Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than

Science must move from materialism to mystery

From iai news: Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that modern science has become trapped in a framework that mistakes matter for the whole of reality. In this wide-rangin

How Pakistan’s Generals Are Silencing Imran Khan

Mohammed Hanif in Time Magazine: Despite rebuttals from Pakistani authorities, social media has been exploding with unverified rumors that the country’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has died in

Friday Poem

Jump If the seed does not die there is no plant Bread results from the death of wheat Life lives on life As you go the way of life …………..Jump It is not as wide as you think. by Joseph Campbell from Wr

Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don’t: An Open Letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger and Common Cause

by Jerry Cayford Dear Governor Schwarzenegger and Common Cause, California just passed Proposition 50 to resurrect partisan gerrymandering. The two of you had worked hard and worked together, in 2008

Of Strikes and Storms: Senegal 2009

by David Winner Having reached the ripe old age of sixty-one more or less in one piece, I wonder at which moments I may have been most in danger. Were there ever rogue cancer cells that never quite ma

Address ‘Affordability’ By Spreading AI Wealth Around

Nathan Gardels at Noema: The most salient issue of American politics revealed in the recent elections is “affordability” for all those earners not in the top 10%. It is an especially acute concern amo

Anti-AI sentiment might or might not be rational, but it certainly relies on a lot of bad arguments

Noah Smith at Noahpinion: I guess it makes sense that for a lot of people, the potential negative externalities — deepfakes, the decline of critical thinking, ubiquitous slop, or the risk that bad act

Tom Stoppard – A Charmed Life

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Fossil fuel emissions rise again – but China’s are levelling off

Alec Luhn at New Scientist: Worldwide fossil fuel emissions are set to rise 1.1 per cent in 2025, reaching another record high as humanity burns hydrocarbons at ever greater rates, according to the an

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, with Dr. Rolf Goebel

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A Quarrel With the World: Miłosz’s complicated Second World War

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review: The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discove

Science Needs to Embrace the Idea of Style

C. Brandon Ogbunu in Undark Magazine: The stage play “A Disappearing Number,” conceived by Simon McBurney, focuses on the relationship between the mathematicians Srinivasa Ramanujan and G. H. Hardy. R

Aschenbach’s Last Journey

Lesley Chamberlain at the Dublin Review of Books: In May 1911, a few months before Gustav von Aschenbach first became a figment of his pen, Thomas Mann was staying with his wife and brother Heinrich o

Luigi Pirandello’s Broken Men

Gus O’Connor at The Nation: At the height of his prominence, Luigi Pirandello was the principal darling of Italian drama. His plays were performed throughout Europe and the United States; Mussolini th

Thursday Poem

When War Makes a Child when Americans think about war, they think about men with guns, and soldiers in uniforms when I think about war, I think about packing suitcases I think about food shortages, I

From Rio to Stavanger

by Charles Siegel Last month I attended two conferences a week apart, one in Norway and one in Italy.  The first conference was held in Bergen.  From there, my law partner and I proceeded down the coa

Lesson From Singapore: Perspectives On Media And Disinformation

by Eric Feigenbaum Singapore’s domestic debate is a matter for Singaporeans. We allow American journalists in Singapore in order to report Singapore to their fellow countrymen. We allow their papers t

This Week’s Photograph

Winter scene in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Writing, Thinking, and the Observer Inside the Observation

Mike Hamilton at Coffee with Claude: My science feeds have delivered two pieces this morning that arrive in productive tension. A June editorial in Nature Reviews Bioengineering declares that “Writing

Penrose On Mind and Consciousness

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We must accept that a working ‘simulation’ of intelligence actually is intelligence

Blaise Agüera y Arcas in Nature: Large language models can be unreliable and say dumb things, but then, so can humans. Their strengths and weaknesses are certainly different from ours. But we are runn

What the Laureate Left Out

Heather Treseler at the LARB: “DEAR JEEM,” the poet Seamus Heaney wrote to his friend, the poet and novelist Seamus Deane, in 1966, as both writers’ careers were finding their runway, “Here are the pr

What It Takes To Be An Air Traffic Controller At The World’s Busiest Airport

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Tom Stoppard, The Art of Theater

Tom Stoppard interviewed at the Paris Review: INTERVIEWER What actually led you to write plays? Could you describe the genesis of your plays other than Hapgood and Jumpers? STOPPARD I started writing

Teach Students Conservative Thought

Benjamin Storey and Jon A. Shields at Persuasion: Giving students an occasion to discover the divergence between the depth of the conservative intellectual tradition and the shallowness of the contemp

When Ants Domesticated Fungi

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Wednesday Poem

Scimitar A magpie squawks at the top of a blue spruce, while white-winged doves coo back and forth across the orchard. Today I did not hike ,,,,,, into a rainforest and forage for a glowing neon-green