Tessa Hadley and Joanne O’Leary at the LRB: https://lrb-website-production-assets.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/original/audio/0fbca5e6a17e4626c6cb9ea9ca3d6c0a.mp3 Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Sam Jacobs in Time Magazine: Much has changed since 2001, when creative director D.W. Pine produced his first cover for TIME. (That cover, for a story about online privacy, rendered a desktop computer as a heavy-duty lock.) In 2010, Steve Jobs showed up at Time Inc. to show off t … | Continue reading
Zeeya Merali in Nature: Five scientists who contributed to the development of the blockbuster weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy have picked up one of this year’s US$3-million Breakthrough prizes — the most lucrative awards in science. Originally developed to treat diabetes, th … | Continue reading
by Alizah Holstein How are we to live, to work, when the house we live in is being dismantled? When, day by day, we learn that programs and initiatives, organizations and institutions that have defined and, in some cases, enriched our lives, or provided livelihoods to our communi … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr I read somewhere that Mexico City has more museums and art galleries than any city in the world except London. Seems plausible: two weeks wasn’t enough, and would not have been enough even without all the hours spent wandering the boulevards, exploring labyrinthin … | Continue reading
The Tao that can be thought of is not the real Tao; therefore, the Tao that can be spoken is not real either; so, the Tao that can be named is likewise no thing too. ………. —Lao Tzu, sort of My Religious life I was Catholic, but was not universal enough when I was. I… | Continue reading
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David Adler, Vanessa Romero Rocha, and Michael Galant in Phenomenal World: On January 12, tens of thousands of Mexican citizens packed into the Zócalo to hear President Claudia Sheinbaum deliver her report on the first 100 days of government. Her announcements reflected an agenda … | Continue reading
Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter: There is a certain disorienting thrill in witnessing, over the past few years, the profusion of bold, often baffling, occasionally horrifying ideas pouring from the ranks of America’s tech elite. Consider the heresies of Balaji Srinivasan and P … | Continue reading
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Amber Dance in Smithsonian: Back in 2014, a woman with advanced cancer pushed Adrienne Boire’s scientific life in a whole new direction. The cancer, which had begun in the breast, had found its way into the patient’s spinal fluid, rendering the middle-aged mother of two unable to … | Continue reading
Jill Lepore in The New York Times: Four years ago, I made a series for the BBC in which I located the origins of Mr. Musk’s strange sense of destiny in science fiction, some of it a century old. This year, revising the series, I was again struck by how little of what Mr. Musk pro … | Continue reading
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by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad The arrival of DeepSeek’s large language model sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley, signaling that—for the first time—a Chinese AI company might rival its American counterparts in technological sophistication. Some researchers even suggest that the … | Continue reading
by Kevin Lively “-isms” are dangerous things. Weighty ideologies with wide sweeping narratives packed into a neat little bundle, whose slogans are repeated ad-nauseam until the word itself becomes the message and any empirical weight the narrative may have had recedes into the ba … | Continue reading
by Eric Schenck I love public transportation. As an American, I know that makes me weird. Over the years, from both family and friends, I’ve heard many complaints about it: Public transportation is dirty Public transportation is slow The people using it are weirdos Why bother whe … | Continue reading
Why We Need Bodies A song remains unheard unless it passes through some body’s throat. This morning I watched a wren nibble apart a beetle and digest it into birdsong. Even air needs loose-leafed trees to express its melancholy. Everything invisible seeks a shape. Remember how, i … | Continue reading
Will you please consider becoming a supporter of 3QD by clicking here now? We wouldn’t ask for your support if we did not need it to keep the site running. And, of course, you will get the added benefit of no longer seeing any distracting ads on the site. Thank you! NEW POSTS BEL … | Continue reading
Eigil zu Tage-Ravn in The Public Domain Review: It is among the most memorable moments in American literature. At the start of Chapter Three of his masterwork, Moby-Dick (1851), Herman Melville has his protagonist, the existential castaway Ishmael, newly embarked on his fateful c … | Continue reading
Morgan Kelly at the website of Dartmouth: Dartmouth researchers conducted the first-ever clinical trial of a generative AI-powered therapy chatbot and found that the software resulted in significant improvements in participants’ symptoms, according to results published March 27 i … | Continue reading
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Josh Rothman at The New Yorker: Many people don’t know how seriously to take A.I. It can be hard to know, both because the technology is so new and because hype gets in the way. It’s wise to resist the sales pitch simply because the future is unpredictable. But anti-hype, which e … | Continue reading
Matt Lutz at Humean Being: So Trump’s basic starting point is that he thinks trade deficits are bad. They’re not, but he thinks they are. He has this very dumb idea that a trade deficit is a deficit of trade, and the dollar amount of the trade deficit is the amount that other cou … | Continue reading
Lucy Moore at Literary Review: Today we think of Josephine Baker as the personification of the Jazz Age – the skinny black kid from Missouri who took Paris by storm. In retrospect, her show-stopping Revue Nègre act can be read as a subversion of the prejudices of her age. At the … | Continue reading
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Norman Doidge in Tablet: Travelers to Unimaginable Lands is that rarity: true biblio-therapy. Lucid, mature, wise, with hardly a wasted word, it not only deepens our understanding of what transpires as we care for a loved one with Alzheimer’s, it also has the potential to be powe … | Continue reading
Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist: In 2015, scientists made a surprising discovery about physiologically normal human skin: More than 25 percent of cells carried genetic mutations known to cause cancer and the average number of mutations per cell was similar to the burden observed … | Continue reading
Metropolis with Ghazal Come walk with me through the bones of this bustling city. Time hedges its bets in the spit-spatter of this hustling city. On the streets, fragrance is rampant. Catharsis of us, strained through the finely-woven forgetfulness of this muslin city. A silent m … | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells There is no good reason for small countries to exist, and we should stop making more of them. The World Bank classifies 40 countries as ‘small states’ on the basis of having a population smaller than 1.5 million. Some are as small as 11,000 (Tuvalu), and the to … | Continue reading
by Steven Gimbel The list of Nobel laureates in physics, chemistry, and medicine includes men and women, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and atheists, gay men, lesbians, and cis-scientists, people from Europe, Asia, Africa, North America, South America, and Australi … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: In Ballad of the White Horse, G.K. Chesterton describes the Virgin Mary: Her face was like an open word When brave men speak and choose, The very colours of her coat Were better than good news. Why the colors of her coat? The medievals took th … | Continue reading
Jaime Herndon at Undark: It’s an iconic image: A polar bear perched on a lone ice cap, drifting at sea. Is that the fate climate change has in store for this powerful Arctic inhabitant? In 2004, the discovery of a fossil polar bear jaw on Svalbard, a Norwegian archipelago, sugges … | Continue reading
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David Kay at Harbus: One doesn’t need a philosophy degree to recognize that the way we think about animals is, at best, deeply inconsistent. Consider the following: many Americans love dogs and cats and shudder at the notion of any harm befalling their furry companions. We reserv … | Continue reading
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Marcel Theroux in The Guardian: Ben Markovits’s quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book’s narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of pa … | Continue reading
Jenny Lehmann in Discover: While a drop in libido is often associated with aging in women, it’s not just a female issue. Around 26 percent of men over 70 report a loss of sexual desire as well. Sex isn’t just about reproduction — physical intimacy fosters emotional connection, re … | Continue reading
Peter Brooks at The Paris Review: When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a … | Continue reading
In the Light of Dreaming Rinny She was a lens in the sun in a corner fitting into herself settling in like batter. Smooth and easy. And music. Oh, the music everywhere. Romantic Russian anguish splaying loud— like hearing your dreams turned up loud for all to read. At night in a … | Continue reading
by Jochen Szangolies In 1950, during a lunch conversation with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Enrico Fermi asked the wrong question. Famously, after a discussion on the subject of recent UFO sightings, extra-terrestrial life, and the possibility of faster-than- … | Continue reading
A pedestrian bridge hangs over the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, suspended from two of these cables which are anchored to these concrete abutments on the two sides of the river. It is a somewhat odd bridge in that the cables from which it hangs are mostly lower than … | Continue reading
Marilyn Simon in The Hedgehog Review: In general, we view sexual jealousy as bad. Jealousy creates distrust and destroys harmony. It does not always cause the kind of outright physical violence it does in Othello, but it certainly does violence to one’s peace of mind and to one’s … | Continue reading
Michael Skuhersky at Asterisk: A near-perfect simulation of the human brain would have profound implications for humanity. It could offer a pathway for us to transcend the biological limitations that have constrained human potential, and enable unimaginable new forms of intellige … | Continue reading
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John Timmer at Ars Technica: It’s no secret that “driving while black” is a real phenomenon. Study after study has shown that minority drivers are ticketed at a higher rate, and data from speed cameras suggests that it’s not because they commit traffic violations more frequently. … | Continue reading
Reed McConnell at Cabinet Magazine: Wilhelm Rumpf is a naughty boy, and Schoolmaster Heinzerling isn’t having it. When Dr. Heinzerling walks into his classroom one morning to find Rumpf holding forth in an uncanny imitation of his own peculiar manner of address, he sentences him … | Continue reading
Jerry Saltz at The Vulture: Square foot for square foot, the Frick has the densest concentration of masterpieces in America, installed alongside decorative objects in gloriously stuffy interiors. The art historian Bernard Berenson once sniffed that the Frick, founded by the moral … | Continue reading