…. Cedar Waxwing, Pyracantha II Here are the ones I think will come: Wren, chestnut backed chickadee, hairy woodpecker, scrub jay. Words of a dream retold dissolve into pulp, into seed glue. Into chips of memory. This morning, I’ve a soft waxwing in hand. We are both stunned. His … | Continue reading
by Kyle Munkittrick Nearly every argument against longevity is a version of, “But death is good sometimes.” Death creates finitude, thereby creating meaning and forcing change. Take Frances Fukuyama’s recent piece “Against Life Extension” in Persuasion. Fukuyama argues slower gen … | Continue reading
by Azadeh Amirsadri Mom, what was it like for you to hand your one-year-old to your mother-in-law and father-in-law, and leave the continent for what turned out to be an 18-month stay in a country where you didn’t speak the language? Your husband was in school all day, learning F … | Continue reading
A plastic ring about 4 inches in diameter that I saw on the ground in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. No idea what it is. I just report these important facts. Make of them what you will. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Brooks Riley in Art At First Sight: Sometimes it pays to spend more time in the detours of art history—leaving behind the rigor mortis of the canon to follow new pathways—not necessarily toward an alternative canon, but to discover forgotten artists deserving of more attention. T … | Continue reading
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in New Scientist: In less than five years, we will have access to an error-free quantum supercomputer – so says IBM. The firm has presented a roadmap for building this machine, called Starling, slated to be available to researchers across academia and in … | Continue reading
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Charles Ferguson at Project Syndicate: Consider the lessons of the Ukraine war so far. First, the impact of drones goes far beyond legacy weapons. Drones have indeed rendered tanks and armored personnel carriers extremely vulnerable, so Russian ground assaults now frequently use … | Continue reading
Mathias Fuelling at The Baffler: Condensing the history of Marxist thought in the United States to one volume is an unenviable task. For those immersed in Marxism, the result is bound to be woefully inadequate, and it risks alienating the merely Marx-curious with its vastness and … | Continue reading
From The Exiled Soul Library: The Wall is a story of an unnamed woman in her 40s who finds herself cut off from the rest of the world by the sudden appearance of the wall made of unknow material that separates a part of the forest from the rest of the world. This occurrence takes … | Continue reading
Piers Brendon at Literary Review: Benson was acerbic and often hilarious about other authors. He describes Henry James’s talk as boring but ‘intricate, magniloquent, rhetorical, humorous’, and quotes him as saying that ‘the difference between being with [J M] Barrie & not being w … | Continue reading
Shelby Bradford in The Scientist: COVID-19 took the world by storm in early 2020, being declared a pandemic in March of that year. While it was the most recent emerging infectious disease, experts anticipate it won’t be the last. Well before COVID-19, scientists have been preppin … | Continue reading
Almost They’ve built porches with striped awnings in the hallways of the dementia unit. Put in a few squares of astroturf, a border of plastic tulips. When we walk out in the mornings we forget where we’ve been; we enter a village that is almost familiar—its street signs and big … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Most of the evidence available to us suggests that there is something. There are probably electrons and other fundamental particles, as well as fields and fundamental forces, likely there are planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies, and there are probably even, w … | Continue reading
by Priya Malhotra When I typically envisioned a woman in her seventies, I—like many of us—pictured someone wrinkled and bent—not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally. I imagined someone dimmed, only to fade further with time. A woman well past the best years of her … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Katie Engelhart in the New York Times: In 2023, one out of 20 Canadians who died received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in the world, when measured in total figures. In one province, Quebec, there were more MAID … | Continue reading
Louis Rosenberg at Big Think: From knowledge and expertise to planning, reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving, we could soon find ourselves thoroughly outmatched. This is a genuine possibility in the very near future, and nobody I know is honestly confronting the profound (a … | Continue reading
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Daniel Treisman in The Conversation: In the early 2000s, political scientist Andreas Schedler coined the term “electoral authoritarianism” to describe regimes that hold elections without real competition. Scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way use another phrase, “competitive aut … | Continue reading
Mariana Lenharo in Nature: Artificial intelligence (AI) already helps clinicians to make diagnoses, triage critical cases and transcribe clinical notes in hospitals across the United States. But regulation of medical AI products has not kept up with the rapid pace of their adopti … | Continue reading
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Susan Gubar at Lit Hub: At midcentury, Marianne Moore emerged as a public personage, but not before a painful period of loss. Prefaced by a host of personal disasters—the death of her mother’s onetime partner Mary Norcross, her own hospitalization for digestive problems, her moth … | Continue reading
Benjamin Buchloh at Artforum: WHEN MARCEL DUCHAMP mounted a challenge to Constantin Brancusi during a joint visit to an exhibition of new airplane technologies in Paris in 1912—asking Brancusi whether he could ever sculpt anything as perfect as an airplane propeller—he figured a … | Continue reading
Too Liberal Does this old poop have any advise for young people in times of such awful trouble? Well, I’m sure you know our country is the only so-called advanced nation that still has a death penalty. And torture chambers. I mean, why screw around? But listen, if anyone here sho … | Continue reading
by David Beer Could there be anything more insulting for a writer than someone assuming that their writing is an output of generative artificial intelligence? The mere possibility of being confused for a neural network is enough to make any creative shudder. When it happens, and … | Continue reading
by Ken MacVey One argument for the existence of a creator /designer of the universe that is popular in public and academic circles is the fine-tuning argument. It is argued that if one or more of nature’s physical constants as mathematically accounted for in subatomic physics had … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Scattered Color. Italy, 2012. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Dear Reader, Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and profes … | Continue reading
Mark Kriegel at Literary Hub: In December 2013, not long after the publication of Mike Tyson’s autobiography, The Wall Street Journal asked him—along with forty‑nine other distinguished writers, academics, artists, politicians, and CEOs—to name their favorite books of the year. A … | Continue reading
Conor Feehly in Quanta: Sharna Jamadar(opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at Monash University in Australia, and her colleagues reviewed research from her lab and others around the world to estimate the metabolic cost of cognition(opens a new tab) — that is, how much energy it ta … | Continue reading
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Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian: There is something biblical about the fraternal relationship between the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor. Both involve bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons to produce a chain reaction via nuclear fission. Both were made possible in the sa … | Continue reading
Rachel Syme at The New Yorker: Two weeks ago, in the run-up to the release of her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” Miley Cyrus, who is thirty-two and one of the most successful pop stars of all time, revealed, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, that she has a … | Continue reading
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Katie Kitamura in The Yale Review: I found the doorknobs at a street market in one of the less fashionable parts of Paris. They were inside a box amid a jumble of other doorknobs, all in many ways indistinguishable. The vendor said they were going for five euros each, which seeme … | Continue reading
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Lyndall Gordon at the New Statesman: Does the accuracy vital to biography preclude art? Is this a limited, documentary genre or might imaginative truth co-exist with factual truth? Can biography lend itself to narrative, selection, even subjectivity? The writer Ann Wroe, reconcei … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar There are physicists, and then there are physicists. There are engineers, and then there are engineers. There are government advisors, and then there are government advisors. And then there’s Dick Garwin. Richard L. Garwin, who his friends and colleagues cal … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa Recently, Chris Drupieski and I released a new research paper. If we were a tech company, we would announce the paper at a lavish event. There, every lemma would be amazing, every proposition would be magic, and every theorem would be world-changing. Instead, w … | Continue reading
Down to the Bone If I could un-ring certain bells and un-wind time I would, but can’t, so instead, I’ll just ride this bucket of bones till the wheels fly off; till ball-joints grind and drop from sockets, till this xylophone of ribs riffs the music of the spheres, until my funny … | Continue reading
Raymond Geuss in Sidecar: Alasdair MacIntyre, who died on 21 May 2025 at the age of 96, never got the memo informing him that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. He never thought that imagining the disembodied subject abstracted from its social context was a good start … | Continue reading
Connor O’Brien in Phenomenal World: The 29th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP29) was the much-anticipated “finance COP.” Negotiators were tasked with replacing the previous $100 billion target with a more ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NC … | Continue reading
Leif Weatherby in The Ideas Letter: As a new surge of AGI talk has taken over the airwaves in the third year of LLMs, a deeply revealing form of Actually Existing AI speaks against the hype: Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency, a sloppy, violent-yet-banal attack on … | Continue reading
Luke Savage in The Walrus: Jordan Peterson’s marketability has always been a bit surprising given his weirdness. He speaks exclusively in a glottal cadence that sounds like Kermit the Frog after a night of heavy drinking. He calls hostile interlocutors “bucko.” He breaks down in … | Continue reading
Ben Brantley in The New York Times: Eight times a week at the Majestic Theater in Manhattan, the entire, harrowing arc of a classic tragedy is delivered in 4½ minutes that are as exhilarating as they are upsetting. All the textbook components of tragedy according to Aristotle are … | Continue reading
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