by Paul Braterman This book is a delight. Drawing on a deep love of her subject matter, the author interweaves descriptions of a sequence of rock types with the story of her own personal and professional life. An extremely difficult feat to bring off, but Marcia Bjornerud (M) man … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr The tree was immense even by local standards: a western red cedar that might have been a thousand years old. A botanist would want to measure it; I only wanted to touch its wrinkled face, or kneel among the roots and capture a dramatic snapshot looking up along th … | Continue reading
My favorite tree next to the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Adam Rutherford in The Guardian: All things must pass, but some leave legacies. That is the story of life on Earth. Fossilised remains of organisms represent just one of the various treasure troves of information about how life used to be, one set of clues to why it is the way it … | Continue reading
Rohini Subrahmanyam in The Scientist: Aging is inevitable for most cell types in the human body, but hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) seem to defy the process. They retain their self-renewing ability almost throughout an organism’s lifetime and exhibit a delayed onset of typical h … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images. I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, … | Continue reading
Raymond Zhong in the New York Times: Big-name investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman have staked hundreds of millions of dollars on this, fusion’s potential Kitty Hawk moment: the one that shows that the limits of our species’ mastery have once ag … | Continue reading
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Chris Power in The Guardian: In the early evening of 12 November 2015, three cars left Charleroi in Belgium, arriving a few hours later at a rented house in the northern suburbs of Paris. The occupants of the cars – or “the death convoy”, as they called it – were Islamic State te … | Continue reading
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Dawn Clouds rise from their nests with flapping wings, they whisper of worn leather, bracken, long horizons, and the manes of dark horses. In the waking stream the stones lie like chestnuts in a glass bowl. I pass the bones of an old harrow thrown on its side in the ditch. Now th … | Continue reading
Samanth Subramanian at the New Yorker: In some Indian languages, the word for “language” is bhasha—the vowels long and warm, as in “car” or “tar.” It has a formal weight and a refined spirit. It comes to us from the classical heights of Sanskrit, and it evokes a language with a s … | Continue reading
by Katalin Balog If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Laments about young people’s dec … | Continue reading
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Charlotte Gordon in The Washington Post: The Monty Python sketch of Thomas Hardy writing “The Return of the Native” takes place inside a packed soccer stadium with an announcer providing play-by-play analysis of the author’s glacial writing process. In hushed tones, the announcer … | Continue reading
Sahana Sitaraman in The Scientist: Cancer cachexia, or the wasting syndrome, is a catastrophic condition that causes dramatic and involuntary loss of muscle mass, fat and weight, alongside extreme fatigue, anorexia and anemia in patients with cancer.1 This severe stress reduces t … | Continue reading
Ronald K. Fried at The Millions: McNeal, the new play by Ayad Akhtar, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Disgraced, focuses on an egocentric, self-destructive white male novelist, played by Robert Downey, Jr. The fictional Jacob McNeal—think Mailer or Roth at their worst—wins the Nob … | Continue reading
Jessica T Mathews in The Guardian: Decades of agonisingly difficult negotiations built up a dense structure of treaties, agreements and even a few unilateral moves dealing with offensive and defensive nuclear weapons of short, medium and long range, with provisions for testing, i … | Continue reading
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Jonathan Lethem at The Paris Review: Dick’s use of the name New Israel in Martian Time-Slip is pretty stock. Dick traveled beyond North America only once, to a conference in Metz, France, where he delivered a legendary speech titled “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Som … | Continue reading
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Maria Popova at The Marginalian: The year is 1617. His name is Johannes Kepler (December 27, 1571–November 15, 1630) — perhaps the unluckiest man in the world, perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived. He inhabits a world in which God is mightier than nature, the Devil reale … | Continue reading
Ed Simon at Lit Hub: The vampire as it’s developed over the past century of popular culture, from Dracula onward, is different from the folkloric eastern European creature—a gloaming animal of the night, subaltern to humanity—though elements have obviously been preserved. Stoker’ … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” –HL Mencken I’ve always loved Winston Churchill’s comment about his political rival Clement Attlee: “He’s a modest man, a lot for which to be modest.” Churchi … | Continue reading
Julya Hajnoczky. Boletinellus Merulioides, 2021. Archival pigment print. More here and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Mario Hubert in Aeon: The Sun rises every day. Water boils at 100°C. Apples fall to the ground. We live in a world in which objects behave the same given the same circumstances. We can imagine living in a different world: a world that constantly changes, a world in which the Sun … | Continue reading
Gina Kolata in the New York Times: Dr. Adam Rodman, an expert in internal medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, confidently expected that chatbots built to use artificial intelligence would help doctors diagnose illnesses. He was wrong. Instead, in a study D … | Continue reading
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Ella Creamer in The Guardian: Poems written by AI are preferred to those written by humans, according to a new study. The non-expert poetry readers who participated were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as being written by humans than those actually written by humans. The … | Continue reading
Traci Watson in Nature: Even after drastic weight loss, the body’s fat cells carry the ‘memory’ of obesity, research1 shows — a finding that might help to explain why it can be hard to stay trim after a weight-loss programme. This memory arises because the experience of obesity l … | Continue reading
Sarah Thankam Mathews at Lux: On June 14 of this year, Delhi Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena authorized the prosecution of author Arundhati Roy and Kashmir-based academic Sheikh Showkat Hussain for speeches they made in 2010 about the disputed territory of Kashmir. Put otherwise, … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray Maybe it’s defeat in a short, sharp war far from home. Maybe Russia captures Ukraine, or China attacks Taiwan. Maybe nothing happens yet, maybe it’s four or eight years away, but however the big change comes we’ll all agree the signs were there all along. Our execu … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook This autumn we had to buy two cars. If you are a typical, average, middle-class American, there are times in your life when you have to buy a car. Americans take car ownership—and car buying—very seriously. Since cars and their accessories (insurance, maintai … | Continue reading
Rattling My Cage Are you looking at me? I say to the mountain which moves as I run the tiller down the row. But it may not be the mountain I engage. Are you talking to me? I say to the pale moon which sits upon the mountain like a ghost ball. But maybe the moon is… | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: The Science Museum in Britain holds numerous items associated with the Nobel Prize-winning mathematical physicist Sir Roger Penrose: books on consciousness and the nature of space and time; a set of wooden puzzles made by his physician fathe … | Continue reading
Thomas Floyd in The Washington Post: Most conversations about Eddie Redmayne’s craft, whether you’re chatting with the Oscar winner himself or one of his collaborators, will invariably include the word “meticulous.” Or “granular.” Maybe “methodical.” One way or another, expect to … | Continue reading
Michael A. McCarthy in Sidecar: Trump’s crushing victory over Harris casts serious doubt on one of the darling concepts of American political science: ‘polarization’. As of the latest count, Trump won the popular vote by over 3.5 million, capturing most swing states and flipping … | Continue reading
Hans Kundnani in Dissent: During the past year, as the reality gradually dawned on them that Donald Trump might be re-elected as U.S. president, European foreign policy analysts coalesced around the conventional wisdom that Europe must unite and “Trump-proof” itself. This new con … | Continue reading
Iza Ding in The Ideas Letter: Sometime in the mid-12th century, a Chinese poet named Lin Sheng traveled 365 kilometers from his hometown Pingyang to Lin’an—what is now Hangzhou, a city on the southeast coast, where the tech giant Alibaba is based. Lin stayed at a B&B and roamed t … | Continue reading
Jack Gross and Dylan Saba interview Lisa Bhungalia in Phenomenal World: On October 28, the Israeli Knesset voted to shut down the operations of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and to designate it as a terrorist organizati … | Continue reading
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by Barry Goldman “Who is rich?” the Talmud asks. “He who is satisfied with what he has.” By that measure, I’m richer than Musk and Bezos. I’m richer than Stephen Schwartzman, head of the Blackstone Group. Far richer than Trump. It’s a nice feeling. Part of the explanation for thi … | Continue reading
Ella Creamer in The Guardian: Orbital, which was published last November and is now available in paperback, was the highest-selling book of the shortlist in the run-up to the winner announcement, with 29,000 copies sold in the UK this year. The book, which follows its characters … | Continue reading
Azeem Azhar at Exponential View: In the corridors of Silicon Valley’s most secretive AI labs, a quiet revolution is unfolding. Headlines scream of stalled progress, insiders know something the market hasn’t caught up to yet: the $1 trillion bet on AI isn’t failing—it’s transformi … | Continue reading
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Andrew Hui at The Public Domain Review: Sant’Andrea in Percussina lies about ten kilometers south of Florence, nestled in the proverbially beautiful Tuscan landscape, surrounded by vineyards, olive groves, cypress trees, wild rosemary patches, and soft rolling hills. Outside the … | Continue reading