Alexandra Skores at CNN: Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston. On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Fre … | Continue reading
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David Gordon White at Aeon Magazine: Demonology, the ‘science of demons’, has always comprised two complementary facets – the one theoretical and the other practical. If one was to battle one’s enemy effectively, one first had to know him, his human confederates, his disguises, h … | Continue reading
John Cassidy in The Guardian: Trump’s assault on the old global order is real. But in taking its measure, it’s necessary to look beyond the daily headlines and acknowledge that being in a state of crisis is nothing new to capitalism. It’s also important to note that, as Karl Marx … | Continue reading
Peter C. Baker at The New Yorker: Kanakia isn’t the only one playing with fiction on Substack. The National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie posts fiction, poetry, and essays on his Substack, and Chuck Palahniuk (of “Fight Club” fame) serialized a novel on his. The renowned Israe … | Continue reading
Postscript And sometime make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Foggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slat … | Continue reading
Kieran Setiya in Substack: I made a joke, last year, about philosophy’s failure as a pedagogy of death: if it was meant to teach me how to reconcile with mortality, it doesn’t seem to have done its job. Not that philosophers haven’t tried. Some make the case directly, arguing tha … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Gibney in Nature: OpenAI is best known for ChatGPT — the free-to-use, large language model-based chatbot that became a household name after its debut in 2022. The firm, in San Francisco, California, has since released a string of cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI … | Continue reading
by Ken MacVey Many have talked about Trump’s war on the rule of law. No president in American history, not even Nixon, has engaged in such overt warfare on the rule of law. He attacks judges, issues executive orders that are facially unlawful, coyly defies court orders, humiliate … | Continue reading
by Christopher Hall When this article is published, it will be close to – perhaps on – the 39th anniversary of one of the most audacious moments in television history: Bobby Ewing’s return to Dallas. The character, played by Patrick Duffy, had been a popular foil for his evil bro … | Continue reading
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Pranab Bardhan at his own Substack: In my last substack piece I discussed the need for voice of labor in influencing the R & D decisions of companies in shaping the pattern of innovations in a labor-absorbing direction—otherwise increasingly more powerful AI is likely to make mos … | Continue reading
Chris F Westbury and Daniel King at Psyche: Have you ever noticed how someone who’s drop-dead gorgeous can also seem charming, honest and kind – even before they’ve said a word? That’s the halo effect, a common psychological bias where one trait (such as good looks) influences yo … | Continue reading
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Kenneth Roth in Foreign Policy: That willingness to abandon democracy can be traced to two primary causes: the disillusionment of some people with the democratic system, and the demagoguery of autocratic politicians. The disenchantment is found in people who believe that democrat … | Continue reading
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Jessi Jezewska Stevens at Bookforum: AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days. The critic, novelist, and short story writer Lynne Till … | Continue reading
Siddhant Pusdekar in Science News: Add a little-known species of assassin bugs to the list of animals that can fashion and wield tools. And true to their name, the insects use that tool to draw their prey into an ambush, researchers report May 12 in Proceedings of the National Ac … | Continue reading
Audrey Wollen in Harper’s Magazine: Legends, fairy tales, and myths are rife with the constraints of prophecy: the necessity of surrender before the all-powerful grammar of future time; the hubris of trying to manipulate destiny; the shock of having already fucked your mother, de … | Continue reading
Frances A. Yates at the NYRB (1979): When Fontenelle was composing his éloge of Isaac Newton for delivery in the Académie Royale des Sciences, he was able to consult notes by John Conduitt from which he would have learned that one of Newton’s motives in beginning his work in math … | Continue reading
Round Them Up Family With 2 US Citizen Children Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop Cheerios, dinner plates, wedding Rings—teapots and targets. Eyes On the circumference of your wrist. On a round table in my classroom With broken chairs: the globe. Holes punched in the left margin … | Continue reading
by Kyle Munkittrick To write well with AI, you’ve got to understand Socrates. Paul Graham and Adam Grant argue that having AI write for you ruins your writing and your thinking. Now, honestly, I tend to agree, but I thought these smart people were making a couple mistakes. First, … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson I A friend sent me a day or two ago a poem that contained this story: The Buddha tells a story of a woman chased by a tiger. When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below. And two mice—one… | Continue reading
Elif Saydam. Free Market. 2020. 23 k gold, inkjet transfer and oil on canvas. More here, here, and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Bennett Kleinman at Word Smarts: If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you’d probably get 100 different answers. There’s a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound m … | Continue reading
Riley Black in Smithsonian Magazine: The repeated evolution of huge birds is part of the dinosaurian legacy. Beaked birds were the only dinosaurs to have survived the asteroid-triggered mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. Avians like the six-foot-tall Palaeeudyptes that … | Continue reading
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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Even experts disagree about current and near-term AI capabilities. Research proceeds along multiple lines, sometimes in secrecy. New algorithmic approaches are reducing or bypassing previously anticipated compute requirements, undermining predictions … | Continue reading
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Note: Must watch. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Laura Tran in The Scientist: Colorectal cancer (CRC) rates are rising in adults under 50, with incidence patterns varying significantly by global region.1 As researchers dig into the age- and geography-related shifts, they’re zeroing in on risk factors behind early-onset cases. E … | Continue reading
Charles C. Mann at The New Atlantis: Water systems and their problems are as old as the first cities, and possibly older. The urban complex of Mohenjo-Daro, on the banks of Pakistan’s Indus River, arose about 2600 b.c., around the time that Egyptians were erecting the pyramids. M … | Continue reading
Naguib Mahfouz at the Paris Review: Dream 209 I found myself sitting with President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a small garden, and he was saying: You may be asking why we don’t meet as often anymore. I said: I did wonder about that. He said: It’s because every time I consult you about … | Continue reading
by Katalin Balog Nathaniel in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman loses his sanity over having fallen in love with a wooden doll, the beautiful automaton Olympia. Olympia is an invention of a mad scientist and a master of the dark arts. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, born of the romant … | Continue reading
by Lei Wang It’s my birthday twice a month, every month. Or at least I treat each 13th and 27th as if it were my birthday. I don’t ask anyone else to pretend with me; I keep to the usual annual celebratory imposition. It is an internal orientation. From morning to night on the 13 … | Continue reading
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David Nasaw in The New York Times: The partnership between the president and the richest man in the world is coming to an end. There is one clear loser in the breakup of this affair, and it is Elon Musk. He fell from grace as effortlessly as he had risen. Like a dime-store Icarus … | Continue reading
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A Call ‘Hold on,’ she said, ‘I’ll just run out and get him. The weather here’s so good, he took the chance To do a bit of weeding.’ ………………………………… So I saw him Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig, Touching, inspecting, separating one Stalk from another, gently pulling … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela We recently found out we have new neighbors. Millions of them. I had seen signs in the blond appearance of the upper limbs of some trees on the other side of the field across from our Maine farmhouse. I have been waiting a long time for them to show up, so I… | Continue reading
Tony Wood in Sidecar: On 5 March, Mexican families searching for missing relatives made a grim discovery at a ranch in Teuchitlán, Jalisco: two hundred pairs of shoes, heaps of clothing and fragments of bone. The place had been raided by the National Guard last September and a ha … | Continue reading
Cornel Ban and Jacob Hasselbalch in Phenomenal World: Energy transitions the world over are at an impasse. With the Trump administration’s scrapping of the Inflation Reduction Act and the mobilization of the European Far Right against existing climate legislation, the future of a … | Continue reading
Dania Rajendra in Dilettante Army: American football, like all politics, is war by other means. Quite literally, American college students (men) invented the game in 1869, stressed about having “missed out” on serving in the Civil War. It was part of a decades-long freakout about … | Continue reading
by Adele A. Wilby In a recent article, ‘What are Microplastics Doing to Our Bodies’, Nina Agrawal reveals how researchers in a leading laboratory in New Mexico are studying the accumulation of anthropogenic microplastics in our bodies. Although present in many organs in the body, … | Continue reading
by TJ Price It was an unbearably hot and humid day. The clouds were starting to mass in the west, slowly but surely rolling their way into the city and darkening as they came. For sure, it would rain a deluge by mid-afternoon. The skyscrapers were already quivering with the antic … | Continue reading