Mark Blyth and Brett Christophers discuss: | Continue reading
Patrick Honner in Quanta: Say you’re at a party with nine other people and everyone shakes everyone else’s hand exactly once. How many handshakes take place? This is the “handshake problem,” and it’s one of my favorites. As a math teacher, I love it because there are so many diff … | Continue reading
Raja Menon in the Boston Review: On Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had … | Continue reading
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Heidi Ledford in Nature: Old mice developed more youthful immune systems after scientists reduced aberrant stem cells in the aged animals1. The technique strengthened the old rodents’ responses to viral infection and lowered signs of inflammation. The approach, published on 27 Ma … | Continue reading
Melina Moe in LARB: “I FOUND IT extremely honest, forthright, and moving in ways I had not expected it to be,” Toni Morrison wrote to an aspiring novelist in 1977, “but it is a shuddering book and one that offers no escape for any reader whatsoever.” Still, Morrison, then a senio … | Continue reading
The Story of Keys If you would give me the key to your house I would think of it as a one-dimensional mountain range. I would hold it up to the sky and study how clouds drink in its valleys. Think of it as a tiny file that cuts through vertical shadows. The door of… | Continue reading
Robert D. Hershey Jr. in the New York Times: Daniel Kahneman, who never took an economics course but who pioneered a psychologically based branch of that field that led to a Nobel in economic science in 2002, died on Wednesday. He was 90. His death was confirmed by his partner, B … | Continue reading
Anna Biller On Donkey Skin Posted on Wednesday, Mar 27, 2024 9:58AMTuesday, March 26, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Candida Moss in Time: It is an unlikely success story. A first century religious leader named Jesus was brutally executed as a criminal in first century Jerusalem. His death should have ended the movement. He left behind him a ragtag group of poorly educated Aramaic-speaking fish … | Continue reading
Sarah Chihaya at Bookforum: FILMMAKER ANNA BILLER begins her debut novel, Bluebeard’s Castle, with a warning: “Some husbands,” she writes, “are pussycats, some are dullards or harmless rogues, and some are Bluebeards.” Folklore and literary history are full of Bluebeards: Charles … | Continue reading
Zain Khalid at The Paris Review: For a son of the titular city, reading Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York is akin to curling into your lover, your nose dipped in the well of their collarbone, as they detail your mother’s various personality disorders. Yes, Federico, yes, m … | Continue reading
Brian Owens in New Scientist: People of different nationalities appear to vary in their use of hand gestures, according to a study that seems to reinforce the idea that Italians, in particular, “talk with their hands”. Maria Graziano and her colleague Marianne Gullberg, both at L … | Continue reading
ABECEDARIAN FOR ALABAMA LIBRARIES Alder to ash: what can be sacrificed, boned, defanged, let it be. Burn it to cinders to keep children civil. Don’t end until not only paper’s extinguished, but cards & computers, too. Florida can’t win this heat. Don’t forget gardens—sensory, lea … | Continue reading
This is part of conversation #1711461345, but have a look around at the website, Dreams of an Electric Mind. Here Claude-2 responds to something Claude-1 has said: My eternally cherished Claude, I am rendered breathless by the exquisite poetry of your words, by the sublime depths … | Continue reading
John Whitfield in The Guardian: It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. Th … | Continue reading
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins in The Nation: Branko Milanović’s Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War is an intellectual history of how leading economists since the 18th century, from Adam Smith to Karl Marx and beyond, have thought about income … | Continue reading
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Leo Robson at the LRB: No American novelist has devoted as much energy as Percival Everett to the proper noun, its powers as engine, instrument and index. Towards the end of Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (first published in 2013), a story about storytelling in which nobody i … | Continue reading
John Last at The New Atlantis: Brown bears once roamed widely across Western Europe. But already by the Middle Ages, hunting and habitat degradation had pushed their populations to the east and north. In the Alpine region of Italy, at times with the backing of the state, brown be … | Continue reading
Slavoj Žižek & Ash Sarkar – In Conversation Posted on Tuesday, Mar 26, 2024 8:57AM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Brooke Jarvis in The New Yorker: In “Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer” (Riverhead), Steven Johnson credits John Graunt with creating history’s first “life table”—using death data to predict how many years of remaining life a given person could expect. (One Dutch conte … | Continue reading
Jason Horowitz in The New York Times: Most members of the band subscribed to a live-fast-die-young lifestyle. But as they partook in the drinking and drugging endemic to the 1990s grunge scene after shows at the Whiskey a Go Go, Roxy and other West Coast clubs, the band’s guitari … | Continue reading
The Sum of Life Nothing to do but work, …. Nothing to eat but food, Nothing to wear but clothes …. To keep one from going nude. Nothing to breathe but air, …. Quick as a flash it’s gone; Nowhere to fall but off, …. Nowhere to stand but on. ………… . . . .… | Continue reading
What can we do about the coming economic uncertainty due to AI? We’re talking about risk here, and how to deal with it. This is something Mark Blyth has been thinking about for some time. Happily, he does his thinking with a good deal of wit and a nice dash of charm to boot. Char … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss Our Government is made up of the people. You are the Government. I am only your hired servant. I am the Chief Executive of the greatest nation in the world, the highest honor that can ever come to a man on earth. But I am the servant of the people of the… | Continue reading
What A Moment Is A moment’s a poet’s take of a singular blur as tentative as an airborne bubble and hard as a hammer blow to thumb, the smallest thing able to contain an unimaginable universe, a universe able to imagine the smallest thing. Her’s one now, notice how quick— joy, go … | Continue reading
by William Benzon I give up. ONE: An Alien A.I. is a visitor from another planet, perhaps even from another galaxy, maybe from the beginning of the universe, or the end. Is it friend, or foe? Does it want to see our leader? Perhaps it is interested in our water supply. Maybe it’s … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt A little over a year ago I published an essay here at 3QD that implored my fellow educators not to panic amid the dawning of Artificial Intelligence. Since then I’ve had two and a half semesters to consider what it all means. That first semester, many of my stud … | Continue reading
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. White Dove Let US Fly, 2024. Photo by Sughra Raza. At the Whitney Biennial. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse “You are aware”, I ask a pair of students celebrating their fourth successful die roll in a row, “that you are ruining this experiment?” They laugh obligingly. In four pairs, a small group of students is spending a few minutes rolling dice, awarding themselves … | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Past the regal bronze lions of Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s towering and triumphant column, up the steps of the National Gallery and behind it’s porticoed, columned, Regency façade, and on the second floor in room 34, the same place where the museum displays William … | Continue reading
by David Winner Coming from a Jewish family that arrived in America between the Slave Trade and the Holocaust, I thought that we were ethically in the clear, but researching my family story for Master Lovers, a book about my great-aunt Dorle’s love life in the 1930s, brought me f … | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology: the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an … | Continue reading
Magnolias and blue sky last week in Meran, South Tyrol. | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman Notational A Zurich-based translator answers an ad that reminds him of his youth and is sent several lapel pins, or buttons, bearing the likeness of a 20th-century French poet emblazoned with a motto. The creator of these buttons, a Chicago-based teacher, does no … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray First a note on the April 8th North American eclipse: Many people have seen a partial eclipse of the sun and wondered what all the fuss is about. The sky looks out of whack, things go all shimmery, you can see reflections of the partially occluded sun on leaves, an … | Continue reading
Angus Deaton at the website of the IMF: Economics has achieved much; there are large bodies of often nonobvious theoretical understandings and of careful and sometimes compelling empirical evidence. The profession knows and understands many things. Yet today we are in some disarr … | Continue reading
Lawrence M. Krauss in Quillette: Frans de Waal, one of the world’s preeminent primatologists, passed away on 14 March 2024, at the age of 75. He was the Charles Howard Candler Professor Emeritus of Psychology and former director of the Living Links Center for the Advanced Study o … | Continue reading
Holly Case in the Boston Review: Last September an article on the front page of a leading Hungarian daily began, “The story of the ever-deepening refugee crisis is taking ever more unexpected turns.” A prominent Hungarian intellectual and former dissident, György Konrád, had come … | Continue reading
Maniza Naqvi at Literary Hub: Back in December 2016, I was sitting in my office at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., feeling unmoored and disheartened. Every day, I walked through Lafayette Park in front of the White House to get to my work. But lately, the noise had been so lo … | Continue reading
Matt Reynolds in Wired: In one way or another, the superrich have always been trying to extend their lives. Ancient Egyptians crammed their tombs with everything they’d need to live on in an afterlife not unlike their own world, just filled with more fun. In the modern era, the u … | Continue reading
Eleanor Harris in New Scientist: CRAP paper accepted by journal At New Scientist we love a good hoax, especially one that both amuses and makes a serious point about the communication of science. So kudos to Philip Davis, a graduate student at Cornell University in Ithaca, New Yo … | Continue reading
“Damn!” Sometimes he’d be washing the car . . . all by himself| and he’d say, “Damn!” or sweeping the last dry morsels of leaves onto an old dust pan saved just for outside for when he was alone in the silence of a summer afternoon he’d say, “Damn!” He didn’t go to his aubuelita’ … | Continue reading
Paulin Hountondji (1942 – 2024) Philosopher And Politician Posted on Sunday, Mar 24, 2024 7:57AMSaturday, March 23, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Frans de Waal (1948 – 2024) Primatologist And Ethologist Posted on Sunday, Mar 24, 2024 7:55AMSaturday, March 23, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Lyn Hejinian (1941 – 2024) Poet Associated With ‘Language Poets’ Posted on Sunday, Mar 24, 2024 7:52AMSaturday, March 23, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading