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Leroy Chiao at Literary Hub: The next morning at 8 AM, everyone in the interview group gathered in a conference room. There were twenty of us. It was the late ’80s, and the group was still dominated by white male military pilots. I was the only Asian there. One guy in my intervie … | Continue reading
Charles McGrath at The Hudson Review: Whatever happened to short biographies? For what seemed like ages I had in my work room three that I could have piled up and used as a stepladder: Ron Chernow’s 1,200-page life of Mark Twain, Sam Tanenhaus’ 1,040-page biography of William F. … | Continue reading
Paper by Kobi Hackenburg, Caroline Wagner, Luke Hewitt, Ben M. Tappin, Ed Saunders, Hannah Rose Kirk, Helen Margetts, Christopher Summerfield: Many societal decisions are settled by contests of persuasion. Conversational AI is a powerful new entrant in these contests, but whether … | Continue reading
Jurriaan Benschop and Thomas Demand at the Brooklyn Rail: Who is in control of the image? This question is at home in the work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964). The German artist pays meticulous attention to the execution of his sculptural and photographic work. But also as a viewer, w … | Continue reading
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Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera at Public Books: “Reflections on Exile” summoned to mind the only seven words my grandfather ever said to me about Ireland, where he had cousins he never knew: “I don’t think I’ll go back there,” he muttered one day in the 1990s, in response to my prodding. H … | Continue reading
Tarika Barrett in Time Magazine: Young people are pushing back on AI hype, and that is a good thing. Several commencement speakers this graduation season have been booed for saying AI is the next revolution. There have also been clapbacks against celebrities who say women should … | Continue reading
Quinn Glabicki in The New York Times: In California, a sprawling 4,000-mile network of canals winds through citrus orchards and fields of tree nuts, delivering irrigation and drinking water to homes and farms across the state. The canals are critical in an increasingly arid part … | Continue reading
……….Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive. I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a… | Continue reading
by Malcolm Murray Javier Milei’s libertarian government in Argentina recently laid out a new framework for corporations in the country. Among the various simplifications to attract more investment, was a highly interesting one – the creation of Sociedad Automatizada – automated c … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman The Wild Duck is an old poker story. It has other names. Lollapalooza is one. But the way I heard it was Wild Duck. It seems a stranger came to town and got in a back-room poker game with some of the local boys. After an hour or two he drew a… | Continue reading
Inlaid stoneware, needle felted wool on industrial felt, 2022. More here, here, and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Martin Puchner at Aeon: Since artificial intelligence went mainstream a few years ago, it has done double duty as a political personality test: tell me what you think about AI, and I’ll tell you who you are. Those worried about climate change focus on energy consumption. Those wh … | Continue reading
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Michael Le Page at New Scientist: No women in England aged 20 to 24 died of cervical cancer between 2020 and 2024. This is the first time that zero cervical-cancer deaths have been recorded for this age group, and it’s thanks to the introduction of a vaccine against the human pap … | Continue reading
Morley Musick at n+1: Earlier this year, I interviewed a retired steelworker named Tom Wells, who had taken hundreds of color photographs of Chicago’s freight train tunnels in the late ’80s and early ’90s. At their peak, the tunnels encompassed sixty miles of track, forty feet be … | Continue reading
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William Whyte at Literary Review: Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls. … | Continue reading
Kyle Orland at Ars Technica: If you hang out in any even vaguely AI-skeptical parts of the Internet, you’ve probably stumbled on plenty of memes and posts premised on data centers’ insatiable thirst for water to power evaporative cooling. But a new report from Amazon highlights j … | Continue reading
Attiya Waris at Aeon: You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals. You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participati … | Continue reading
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From Five Books: The books shortlisted for the 2026 Orwell Prizes, the UK’s most prestigious awards for writing about politics, have been announced. “As judges, we returned again and again to what George Orwell means to us: clarity of prose and unflinching intellectual bravery,” … | Continue reading
Moira Doinegan in Book Forum: SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Crew members and other actors would wait around for hours, wondering when—or if—Marilyn Monroe would show up. Some days, especially toward the end of her life, she never made it to set at all. Monroe is famous for her mix of irre … | Continue reading
Asher Mullard in Nature: Photosynthetic machinery can be harvested from spinach and transplanted into the eyes of mice, where it transforms light into molecules that carry energy and can tame inflammation1. “We are stealing the entire technology that has evolved over millions of … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss Eight years ago, in May of 2018, motivated by a series of discussions with my then-graduating son, I wrote a piece for 3 Quarks Daily titled “The Graduate Schools His Father.” Then, chaos descended upon the land. Trump, Biden, Trump. Wars, pestilence, theological … | Continue reading
by Herbert Harris What gives art its power? There are as many answers as there are powerful works of art, but most seem to fall into a few broad categories. A great deal of art is representational. It is intended to depict or show us something, whether natural or abstract. It suc … | Continue reading
…. Ménage à trois Isn’t it a miracle that three atoms have combined in electric love to become that fluid substance that bears boats and wrecks ships, that fills bays that breed and protect life, that sustains it, the essential stuff of bodies and minds, the billows of overhead m … | Continue reading
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From The Guardian: This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank t … | Continue reading
Angela Haupt in Time Magazine: When your best friend or partner or kid snaps at you, it’s easy to frame them as difficult. Anna Elton, a marriage and family therapist in Palm Beach, Fla., would like you to consider a different story. “When you see anger, it’s just the tip of the … | Continue reading
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The Poet The poet sits and dreams and dreams; He scans his verse; he probes his themes. Then turns to stretch or stir about, unless in thoughts, his strength gives out. Then off to bed, for he must rise and cord some wood, or tamp some ties, Or break a field of fertile soil, Or… | Continue reading
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by Robert Jensen Caitlin Taylor believes that a sustainable food system needs “legible” infrastructure, which is why she proposes—not entirely in jest—building slaughterhouses next to farmers markets. Architects and engineers usually strive to make infrastructure invisible—so fun … | Continue reading
by Lei Wang Stephen Colbert in conversation with the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson: COLBERT Which is better, to know or not to know? TYSON To know. Of course. COLBERT But why? Why is it always better to know? TYSON Well, you asked for my opinion. COLBERT Yes, that’s what Oed … | Continue reading
Henry Reichman at The Hedgehog Review: “It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be,” sobs a young bride in the final line of Joan Didion’s piece “Marrying Absurd.” Just a few pages and slotted neatly in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection before more renowned e … | Continue reading
Gennaro Tomma in Smithsonian Magazine: Between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago, a now-extinct population of wolves evolved into dogs, with a little help from humans. Today—at least in Italy, which hosts one of Europe’s largest wolf populations—genes are flowing in the opposite direct … | Continue reading
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From Noema: Nathan Gardels: It is remarkable in today’s context to remember that 40 years ago, you and I sat here in Cambridge at the dining room table of the famous sociologist Daniel Bell to discuss what we called “the American Cultural Civil War.” The discussion was about the … | Continue reading
Aimee Cunningham in Science News: Around one in 500 women don’t have a functioning womb, needed to carry a pregnancy. This condition, called absolute uterine factor infertility, occurs when a woman is born without a uterus, has had to have it removed or has a defective organ. For … | Continue reading
Laura Tran in The Scientist: Wearable devices and electronics have advanced rapidly, establishing their place as a versatile platform for health monitoring and interventions. Among these technologies, smart contact lenses have been developed to monitor eye pressure or glucose lev … | Continue reading
by Jim Hanas A wag on Substack recently noted that there are apparently only four ideas: the angel of history, the eternal return, will to power, and one I can’t remember, the idea being that all philosophical conversations on the Internet terminate in four commonplaces. (The fou … | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Why be happy when you could be interesting? —Zizek What follows is what I know about the Good Life. Some of it, anyway. It’s what I have gleaned and which may be useful to you. There are obvious limitations: it is one person’s perspective, a white heterosexual mal … | Continue reading
Sarah Lyall in the New York Times: Sometime in the 2000s, the producer Lindsay Doran asked her doctor for a book recommendation. “I’m reading that book everybody’s reading,” the doctor replied. “You know, the one about the shepherd who’s murdered and the sheep solve the crime.” D … | Continue reading
Anton Leicht at Threading the Needle: There’s a common mantra in the outskirts of AI policy thought: driven by market pressures and overheated capital markets, AI tokens will soon be abundant—and the future belongs to those who can use them best. The further you get away from San … | Continue reading
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