Reflection Yesterday, I handed all my poems to my publisher. I feel like I handed him my head and the words I speak from now on will come out of his mouth. What a disaster! Disasters don’t show up one at a time. They arrive in legions like a starving hoard. A poet said this… | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder I’ve had several conversations this week about how to be in a time like this when the U.S. government is so overtly corrupted. I’m just the upstairs neighbour in Canada, but we’re high on the list of countries to be overthrown. Even without being in that position, … | Continue reading
by Eric Feigenbaum “This hospital makes mine look filthy,” the nurse manager from Sacramento said to me as we walked the halls of Tan Tock Seng Hospital. This wasn’t a surprising first reaction to a Singaporean hospital. What Nancy said later surprised me more. “I’m not sure abou … | Continue reading
Azeem Azhar and Hannah Petrovic at Exponential View: One number still keeps turning up in speeches, board meetings, my conversations and inbox: “95 percent” Do I need to say more than that? OK, here’s another clue: this number traveled on borrowed authority in 2025, rarely with a … | Continue reading
Hannah Ritchie at By the Numbers: The numbers were quite staggering. So staggering in fact, that I doubted myself. I ran the calculations many times, convinced I’d accidentally added a zero somewhere. I asked Pablo to also come up with an estimate, without telling him how I got t … | Continue reading
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David Austin Walsh at the Boston Review: Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor of New York City. Amid the chaos unleashed by Trump in the first weeks of 2026, it can be easy to lose sight of the truly seismic shift in politics his mayoralty represents. To recap: an obscure, thirty-four … | Continue reading
Laurie Stone in The Paris Review: What are we ever really fighting for? The answer is love. Love in the movies, and on the streets, and in our heads—instead of the dead people we are seeing right now. Existence is a contagion of love. That’s why you have to fast-forward through a … | Continue reading
Sneha Khedkar in The Scientist: The mammalian gut is a dynamic environment, wherein shifts in the local environment can lead to disease. Despite the importance of monitoring biochemical parameters in the gut, the most commonly used tools are invasive endoscopic methods, which pro … | Continue reading
Theme for English B. The instructor said, Go home and write a page tonight. And let that page come out of you— Then, it will be true. I wonder if it’s that simple? I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong In January five years ago, amidst the turmoil and isolation of a world pandemic, I decided it was time to do a month-long art project. I was newly “retired” (a word that I then disdained and avoided using), and I was intrigued by a project that poet Bernadette M … | Continue reading
by Daniel Gauss Did you ever read Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”? If not, it starts as the story of a man who is going to be hanged. As the trap door opens under him, he falls, the rope tightens around his neck but snaps instead of bearing his we … | Continue reading
by Cannon Schmitt, guest columnist “Everyone in my program is queer, neurodivergent, or both.” A soft ding interrupted the conversation, the elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out into a hallway full of people wearing name tags and carrying identical tote bags. I can’t reme … | Continue reading
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Jazz Monroe at Pitchfork: The story of “Human Behaviour” as we know it begins in 1993, when Björk swanned into London in a fluffy white mohair jacket. She was 27 and ready for adventure, so utterly international she could barely eat anything but curries, still high on her late-’8 … | Continue reading
Beatrice Radden Keefe at the NYRB: Another bout of Gothic fever in the early twentieth century revolved less around a style than around a restless Gothic energy, an overwrought Gothic sensibility. In 1921 the German art historian Hermann Schmitz remarked that calling something Go … | Continue reading
Shia Levitt at Reasons to be Cheerful: Bhalla picked up the mantle from his predecessor Mayor Dawn Zimmer, launching a five year analysis of Hoboken’s crash data to learn contributing factors and vulnerabilities that could be used to help shape reforms. That analysis showed that, … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Evolution with natural selection involves an intricate mix of the random and the driven. Mutations are essentially random, while selection pressures work to prefer certain outcomes over others. There is tremendous divergence of species over … | Continue reading
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Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica: The Trump White House yesterday posted a manipulated photo of Nekima Levy Armstrong, a Minnesota civil rights attorney who was arrested after protesting in a church where a pastor is allegedly also an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official … | Continue reading
Michael Shermer in The Washington Post: On Jan. 13, Vermont legislator Troy Headrick (I) proposed creating a state task force that would get to the bottom of “unidentified anomalous phenomena,” or UAPs, that appeared to be buzzing about U.S. military air bases. Days later, Helen … | Continue reading
From The Scientist: AI Will Accelerate the Regulatory Pipeline The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency have been moving—thoughtfully but decisively—toward a more aligned, forward-looking set of rules that do more than protect the public: They crea … | Continue reading
Dream Variations To fling my arms wide In some place of the sun, To whirl and to dance Till the white day is done. Then rest at cool evening Beneath a tall tree While night comes on gently, Dark like me— That is my dream! To fling my arms wide In the face of the… | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt I’ve always found the notion of a handful of Swedes deciding the world’s best anything to be ludicrous, even laughable. Well, not always. When I was a kid, a teenager, I thought the Nobel Prizes must be important and mean something. But by my twenties, they had … | Continue reading
by Jerry Cayford The Google advertising technology trial is a very big deal. While we are waiting for the final decision from Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for Eastern Virginia, I want to present some thoughts on the least resolved of the case’s many issues, th … | Continue reading
Rocky cliff with a dusting of snow (and more snow falling) in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Part of the winter Olympics will be in South Tyrol, starting next week, so this is good. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Graeme Wearden and Heather Stewart in The Guardian: Kristalina Georgieva told delegates in Davos that the IMF’s own research suggested there would be a big transformation of demand for skills, as the technology becomes increasingly widespread. “We expect over the next years, in a … | Continue reading
Andrew Miller at Asterisk: Picture a fall afternoon in Austin, Texas. The city is experiencing a sudden rainstorm, common there in October. Along a wet and darkened city street drive two robotaxis. Each has passengers. Neither has a driver. Both cars drive themselves, but they pe … | Continue reading
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From Equator: I must begin with a condition rather than a confession: my safety, anonymity and physical survival come first. In Iran, where words can still wound the body, this text is written cautiously, stripped of names and coordinates – anything that could invite harm. What f … | Continue reading
Jennifer Tsang in The Scientist: Imagine getting intoxicated without drinking a drop of alcohol. This is what happens in people with auto-brewery syndrome (ABS), where microbes in the gut produce alcohol that then becomes absorbed into the blood stream at high levels. It’s a rare … | Continue reading
Could Have It could have happened. It had to happen. It happened earlier. Later. Nearer. Farther off. It happened, but not to you. You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. Alone. With others. On the right. The left. Because it was raini … | Continue reading
Amanda Schupak in The New York Times: Parent less, play more. If your kid isn’t asking for help, leave them alone! Spend less time managing their feelings — especially unpleasant ones — and more time sharing things that you love. Not everything needs to be a learning experience. … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman One hundred and sixty years ago this month, in a national referendum held on January 14, 1866, Jews were given the official right to reside throughout Switzerland. Jewish people, whether of foreign provenance or Swiss-born and already living on Swiss territory, h … | Continue reading
by Charles Siegel Sun went down in honey And the moon came up in wine You know the stars were spinning dizzy Lord the band kept us so busy We forgot about the time That is a verse from “The Music Never Stopped,” a song written by Bob Weir and John Barlow, and recorded on… | Continue reading
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Paul Sagar in The Guardian: People who experience kidney failure need either lifelong dialysis or a transplant to survive. Yet even for those lucky enough to get a transplant, that is by no means the end of the story. Kidneys from deceased donors last an average of 10 to 15 years … | Continue reading
Dario Amodei at his own website: There is a scene in the movie version of Carl Sagan’s book Contact where the main character, an astronomer who has detected the first radio signal from an alien civilization, is being considered for the role of humanity’s representative to meet th … | Continue reading
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Kent Jones at The Current: The structure of Otrar is certainly all of a piece with German’s own work. But as a total film experience, it feels distinctly different from Khrustalyov, Ivan Lapshin, or German’s posthumously completed Hard to Be a God (2013, a years-in-the-making ada … | Continue reading
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: The U.S. should follow Canada’s lead on EV tariffs, slashing them to a very low level while initially limiting the number of annual imports. While Canada’s deal involved only vague promises of Chinese investment in the Canadian auto industry, the U.S. sh … | Continue reading
Jay Caspian Kang at the New Yorker: Two years ago, I wrote about Wayne Hsiung, the founder of the animal-liberation group Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE. Hsiung is among the most interesting activists I’ve encountered, in part because he faces a nearly impossible task: the publ … | Continue reading
Ewen Callaway in Nature: Which animals came first? For more than a century, most evidence suggested that sponges, immobile filter-feeders that lack muscles, neurons and other specialized tissues, were the first animal lineages to emerge. Then, in 2008, a genomic study pointed to … | Continue reading
Everything That Happens Can Be Called Aging I have more love than ever. Our kids have kids soon to have kids. I need them. I need everyone to come over to the house, sleep on the floor, on the couches in the front room. I need noise, too many people in too small a space,… | Continue reading
Ali Akbar Natiq in Granta: ‘Haji sahib, these kids are beyond me. I can’t teach them any more. Please make some other arrangement,’ he said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘Why do I need another arrangement when I have you?’ Haji Altaf sounded apologetic. ‘I have tried every good … | Continue reading
by William Benzon This article has three main sections. Immediately following the image (created by ChatGPT) is an article by me, ChatGPT 5.2 and Claude 4.5: The Grammar of Truth: What Language Models Reveal About Language Itself. Claude came up with that title. After that there’ … | Continue reading