Quico Toro at Persuasion: The climate debate is in a strange place. We’re told we face an epochal, civilization-ending calamity within our lifetimes. But when scientists bring up unconventional new ways of managing that risk, we’re told we mustn’t even talk about them. Why? Becau … | Continue reading
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From The Economist: A new study published in Science, a journal, finds that artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots may be better than humans at convincing truthers to stop believing nonsense. A trio of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Cornell University … | Continue reading
Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker: Vice-Presidential debates are normally for the archives: the transcript gets recorded and then filed away. Strain your memory and try to recall: Who won the debate between John Edwards and Dick Cheney? Biden-Ryan? Even Harris-Pence, just … | Continue reading
Autumn Poem from Campbell, CA: First rain since April and my small dog, nose close to the ground, sniffs his way about a New Eden – telephone pole, his old stop, smells fresh and new, the corner mailbox, shiny again, gets a quick sniff and a new pee. The grass has little drops of … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Scientific breakthroughs rely on decades of diligent work and expertise, sprinkled with flashes of ingenuity and, sometimes, serendipity. What if we could speed up this process? Creativity is crucial when exploring new scientific ideas. It doesn’t c … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Bill Gates has long been one of the world’s leading optimists, and his new documentary, “What’s Next,” serves as a testament to his hopeful vision of the future. But what makes Gates’s optimism particularly compelling is that it is grounded not in dewy-eyed … | Continue reading
by Azadeh Amirsadri I lived in Philadelphia in 1977 and would go to the Gallery mall on Market Street, a walking distance from our river front apartment. One day, around lunch, I decided to get Chinese food at the food court and looking for a place to sit, I asked two older ladie … | Continue reading
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Clayton Purdom at the Los Angeles Review of Books: The first time I tried to write this essay, I failed. It was the middle of the pandemic—a time in which uncountable numbers of introspective personal essays were written to no apparent end—and I watched Sans Soleil, director Chri … | Continue reading
Richard Schiffman at Undark: Peter Godfrey-Smith does not use the word miracle in the title of his ambitious new book, “Living on Earth: Forest, Corals, Consciousness and the Making of the World,” but there is scarcely a page that does not recount one. His subject is the astoundi … | Continue reading
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Terry Eagleton at Verso Books: I first met Fred Jameson in 1976, when he invited me to teach his graduate students at the University of California, San Diego. Before then I had known of his existence only through the stunning Marxism and Form, published five years earlier, a set … | Continue reading
Rebekah Rutkoff at Artforum: Though the history of experimental film is rife with iconoclastic visionaries, Robert Beavers somehow remains one of its under-sung heroes. Together with his partner, Gregory Markopoulos (1928–92), Beavers developed an approach to cinema defined by it … | Continue reading
Christenna Fryar in The Guardian: If there is one thing that all historians must make peace with, it is that it is hard, often impossible, to know how people in the past felt. Historical fiction has the upper hand in its ability to render the complex yet plausible emotions and mo … | Continue reading
Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist: Worldwide, more than three million people lose their lives each year to lung-damaging conditions like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or cystic fibrosis.1 In contrast, fewer than 5,000 individuals per year are fortunate enough to receive lif … | Continue reading
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Carson McCullers she died of alcoholism wrapped in a blanket on a deck chair on an ocean steamer. all her books of terrified loneliness all her books about the cruelty of loveless love were all that was left of her as the strolling vacationer discovered her body notified the capt … | Continue reading
Srikanth Reddy at the Paris Review: For a while there in the late nineties, it seemed to me like every other book of poetry that I flipped open in the bookstore was prefaced by an austere epigraph from the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Plato, Rousseau, Nietzsche, Sartre, and W … | Continue reading
by Jeroen van Baar In the chart-topping podcast The Rest is History, British historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discuss key events from the past at great length and in sumptuous depth. I was listening to their fourth episode on the French Revolution when a detail caught … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson Galway Kinnell said all good writing has a certain quality in common, “a tenderness toward existence.” I agree and feel that one of the great maladies of our age is the communal loss of this feeling. Wendell Berry says “people exploit what they have merely conclu … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Meadowstream Afternoon, Maine, 2001. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Brian Patrick Eha in The Hedgehog Review: If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis … | Continue reading
John Naughton in The Guardian: In 2011, the psychologist (and Nobel laureate) Daniel Kahneman proposed that we humans are bimodal animals capable only of two modes of thought. One (which he called “System 1”) is fast, instinctive and emotional. The other (“System 2”) is slower, m … | Continue reading
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Elaine Scarry in the Boston Review: The key structure of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is audible in the September 4, 2024, speech by U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Cara Abercrombie: “Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the United States or its allies and partners … | Continue reading
Matthew James Seidel at The Millions: Difficult relationships between fathers and sons have been fodder for writers for millennia. Sometimes these relationships are simply power struggles, as in so many Greek myths, such as the conflicts first between Uranus and his son Cronus an … | Continue reading
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Belinda Luscombe in Time Magazine: The early days of the pandemic were a complicated time for a lot of couples. But it’s fair to say that in the sprawling, Pacific lodge-style home of Melinda and Bill Gates, the complexity was particularly acute. The foundation the couple co-led … | Continue reading
Smriti Mallapaty in Nature: A 25-year-old woman with type 1 diabetes started producing her own insulin less than three months after receiving a transplant of reprogrammed stem cells1. She is the first person with the disease to be treated using cells that were extracted from her … | Continue reading
George Dunn at Compact Magazine: George Parkin Grant, who died in 1988 at the age of 69, was world-famous in Canada—at least, that was the jest frequently made at the philosopher’s expense. The joke reflected his status as a public intellectual who made frequent appearances on Ca … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers By all accounts, Alexandre Lefebvre’s new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is odd. For one thing, as Stephen Holmes points out, Lefebvre oscillates between saying that liberalism is so pervasive and all-encompassing that “Love it or hate it, we all swim…in libera … | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If yo … | Continue reading
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Samuel Moyn in The Nation: In the chilling speech he gives at the end of the film Margin Call, Jeremy Irons says that no one should say they believe in equality, because no one really thinks it exists: The very idea camouflages the endurance of hierarchy in an essentially unchang … | Continue reading
Sophia Nguyen in The Washington Post: Zadie Smith did not understand why anyone would be interested in her bookshelves. “I think the problem is, I feel like interiors and books are used as a kind of social and political capital, meant to express something about you. But I just do … | Continue reading
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by Adele A.Wilby Books on nature abound. More recently, physicist Helen Czerski’s deep knowledge of the seas functioning as an ‘ocean engine’ in Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes the World, elevates our understanding of the ocean and provides us with a new appreciation of its in … | Continue reading
Most people live in almost total darkness… people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning live in a darkness which — if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize, … | Continue reading
Alexander Prescott-Couch in Aeon: In Human, All Too Human (1878), Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘A lack of historical sense is the original failing of all philosophers.’ In accusing philosophy of lacking historical sense, Nietzsche was echoing broader trends in 19th-century thou … | Continue reading
Benjamin Kunkel in Sidecar: The great Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, who died on Sunday at 90, cast a cold eye on death. Death in our society derives its glamour and pathos from representing the extinction of an allegedly unique, not just solitary but singular individual, once u … | Continue reading
Andrew Yamakawa Elrod in Phenomenal World: The Biden administration first embraced the slogan of “modern supply-side economics” six months before anyone uttered the phrase “Inflation Reduction Act.” Speaking before the World Economic Forum in January 2022, Treasury Secretary Jane … | Continue reading
Francis P Sempa in the Asian Review of Books: Tokyo-based American author Ronald Drabkin has written a riveting, fast-paced account of a Beverly Hills-based spy who engaged in intelligence collection for Japan and provided the Japanese Navy with naval aviation technical expertise … | Continue reading
Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: One lesson of the development of our best fundamental theory is that the new ideas that went into it were much the same ideas that mathematicians had been discovering as they worked at things from an independent direction. Our currently fundamental c … | Continue reading
Rajiv Shah in the New York Times: The data shows that trying to make modest improvements on all issues is not working. It is only diffusing already thin resources. As world leaders gather this week for the United Nations General Assembly they should reimagine their approach. In t … | Continue reading
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Emma Madden at Billboard: Canonized by a team of Spotify editors, including Lizzy Szabo in the summer of 2019, ‘Hyperpop’ was a term taken from Szabo’s data science colleague Glenn McDonald, in an attempt to contextualize the growing traction surrounding an internet infected duo … | Continue reading