My Quaker-Atheist Friend, Who Has Come to This Meeting-House since 1913, Smokes & Looks Out over the Rawthey to Home Fell what do you do anything for? you do it for what the Mediaevals would call the Glory of God doing it for money that doesn’t do it; doing it for vanity, that do … | Continue reading
Patrick Warner in Literary Review of Canada: Writers are those naïfs among us who believe that language can be used to take the measure of experience. Readers demonstrate faith in them when they commit to a book or short story. The reader-writer relationship is a contract of sort … | Continue reading
Aparna Nathan in The Scientist: When a rogue cell starts proliferating out of control, the first responders on the scene should be the body’s own immune cells—for example, natural killer (NK) cells, which use toxic molecules to dissolve foreign cells. Ideally, proteins that are s … | Continue reading
by Laurence Peterson I do not specifically remember when I lost my you-know-what about the way the word “humanitarian” is being tossed around these days. Possibly it was when a State Department spokesperson referred to what he called “humanitarian circumstances”, implying thereby … | Continue reading
by Azadeh Amirsadri My sister Leyla and I are walking in New York City, talking about how some people love their dogs almost more than their children. In fact, in a very uncharacteristic moment, Leyla shares that she can’t stand the late night tv ads for abused dogs when there ar … | Continue reading
Matt Dinan in The Hedgehog Review: I do not think that being mean is a virtue, but it is related to the virtue by means of which we tell the truth. There are other ways of telling the truth. We can be circumspect or ironic—there is very often a nicer way to put something. Yet… | Continue reading
Weizi Li in The Conversation: Robotic vehicles can optimize the flow of traffic in cities even when mixed in with vehicles driven by humans, thereby improving traffic efficiency, safety and energy consumption, my colleagues and I found. Robot vehicles are no longer a sci-fi conce … | Continue reading
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Charles T. Rubin in The New Atlantis: One of the core assumptions of modern liberalism is that if you can solve the problem of material scarcity, you can go a long way to solving the problem of free and peaceful coexistence among equals. Modern technology has been essential to th … | Continue reading
Pam Belluck in The New York Times: A newly developed blood test for Alzheimer’s has diagnosed the disease as accurately as methods that are far more expensive or invasive, scientists reported on Tuesday, a significant step toward a longtime goal for patients, doctors and dementia … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: If you hear the word Ozempic, weight loss immediately comes to mind. The drug—part of a family of treatments called GLP-1 agonists—took the medical world (and internet) by storm for helping people manage diabetes, lower the risk of heart disease, an … | Continue reading
White Man Says to Me, Save White man says to me, save. I save, String, Bricks, Trees. Horses, Leather. Nobody wants what I save. So I go into the desert, rolling my ball of string which is four feet in diameter. Two white men come. They look at the bricks. Trees. Horses. Leather. … | 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
by Dwight Furrow In an age where there is little agreement about anything, there is one assertion almost everyone agrees with—there is no disputing taste. If someone likes simple food instead of complex concoctions, who is to say that’s wrong. If I prefer bodice rippers to 19th C … | Continue reading
Some friends gave me a “sauce dispenser gun” and I am dispensing sauce. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Dan Falk at Undark: There’s no question that we love to talk — but how did it happen? Yes, humpback whales sing, vervet monkeys use alarm calls, and bees convey information about food sources through dance, but only humans have full-blown language. Steven Mithen, a professor of e … | Continue reading
Richard Van Noorden in Nature: How many clinical-trial studies in medical journals are fake or fatally flawed? In October 2020, John Carlisle reported a startling estimate1. Carlisle, an anaesthetist who works for England’s National Health Service, is renowned for his ability to … | Continue reading
Cat Orman and Jason Lu at Noahpinion: Last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would ground over 70% of America’s industrial drone fleet. The Countering CCP Drones Act seeks to ban DJI, a Chinese unicorn and the world’s largest commercial drone manufacturer, fr … | Continue reading
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Elizabeth Yuko in Reader’s Digest: Fact: The Windy City nickname has nothing to do with Chicago’s weather If you live in Chicago, you might already know this random fact, but we’re betting most other people don’t. Chicago’s nickname was coined by 19th-century journalists who were … | Continue reading
Alison Abbott in Nature: Like many Alzheimer’s researchers, neurologist Randall Bateman is not prone to effusiveness, having endured disappointments in his field. But he and others have found one big reason to be excited lately. In just a few years, he predicts, there will be a s … | Continue reading
Elevation Above the lakes, above the vales, The mountains and the woods, the clouds, the seas, Beyond the sun, beyond the ether, Beyond the confines of the starry spheres, My soul, you move with ease, And like a strong swimmer in rapture in the wave You wing your way blithely thr … | Continue reading
Stella Sanford at Aeon Magazine: It was once common, in Western societies at least, to think of plants as the passive, inert background to animal life, or as mere animal fodder. Plants could be fascinating in their own right, of course, but they lacked much of what made animals a … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson I used to tell my creative writing classes the artistic form that came the closest to depicting the lives we lead was the soap opera – because, as in the soap opera, we all have many stories going on at the same time. Some are short, some are like lyrics in tone… | Continue reading
by X. Muller Lyon, France, Croix Rousse University Hospital, 1 AM, February 10, 2023. * Three hours into the surgery, I placed the surgical clamp on the upper part of the vena cava, the large vein carrying the deoxygenated blood from the lower body to the right atrium of the hear … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Sign up to read Brooks Riley’s new Substack “Art At First Sight” here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Nick Whitaker & J. Zachary Mazlish at Works in Progress: Many entrepreneurs have tried to create prediction markets, contracts that trade on the outcome of future events. Luke Nosek, cofounder of PayPal, once worked on the problem. Sam Bankman-Fried, the jailed founder of cryptoc … | Continue reading
M.V. Ramana at Literary Hub: As someone trained in physics, and as an academic paid to research, I have been drawn to studying one essential contributor to these crises: how energy and electricity are produced, especially those methods proposed to mitigate climate change. Promine … | Continue reading
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Rahul Bhatia in The Guardian: Running a finger over a row of books in a Delhi library one afternoon, I stopped at a title that promised danger. The stacks were abundant in books like RSS Misunderstood and Is RSS the Enemy?, which often turned out to be self-published polemics tha … | Continue reading
Daniel Pink in The Washington Post: Hundreds of millions of people across the globe now earn their living less with their backs and more with their brains, relying on sharp reasoning and creative thinking. So how about seeing who’s best at that? One idea: a competition such as th … | Continue reading
Kayla Guo in Undark: When Texas’ highest criminal court stopped Robert Roberson’s execution in 2016, it agreed with his lawyers that there was enough doubt over the cause of his daughter’s death to warrant a second look. Roberson, who was convicted in 2003 of killing his 2-year-o … | Continue reading
On the Subway for the First Time The train is a creature that moves like water. It has no eyes, only a sharp mouth that closes on those too slow. All around is accident. All around is climb and slip and fall and that current below could kill you but you’re riding now so the… | Continue reading
Janique Vigier at Bookforum: OPEN ANY BOOK BY CAROLINE BLACKWOOD and you will encounter the same woman. Articulate, adrift, callous, cosmically self-absorbed. She’s in the middle of her life, a retired actress or model, once striking and sought-after. Her misery has a predatory q … | Continue reading
by Sander Van de Cruys If there’s one motive governing all our behavior, supervening and bringing about all our other goals or desires, what would it be? Some might say ‘survival’, pointing to Darwin’s theory of evolution. But in practice, this motive is hard to implement: It is … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar How do we regulate a revolutionary new technology with great potential for harm and good? A 380-year-old polemic provides guidance. In 1644, John Milton sat down to give a speech to the English parliament arguing in favor of the unlicensed printing of books … | Continue reading
Firelei Báez. Sans-Souci, (This threshold between a dematerialized and a historicized body), 2015. Collection Pérez Art Museum, Miami. “The premise of the show is to bring out subaltern histories, things that are not taught in our textbooks, that exist but haven’t been always nam … | Continue reading
Nick Ripatrazone at Literary Hub: At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe easily won the decathlon in the first modern version of the event. The grueling, ten-part feat was not the only addition to the burgeoning modern games. Other events that debuted at the 1 … | Continue reading
Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist: Drivers on a busy US freeway have been controlled by an AI since March, as part of a study that has put a machine-learning system in charge of setting variable speed limits on the road. The impact on efficiency and driver safety is unclear, as re … | Continue reading
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Robert Muggah at Project Syndicate: Transnational organized crime is a paradox: ubiquitous yet invisible. While criminal tactics evolve rapidly, government-led responses are often static. When criminal networks are squeezed in one jurisdiction, they rapidly balloon in another. Al … | Continue reading
Mikkael Sekeres in The Washington Post: My family history of cancer is impressive, and not in a good way. My mom has lung cancer, and both her brother and mother were diagnosed with leukemia. On my dad’s side of the family, his father had prostate cancer and mother had ovarian ca … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: The brain is like a medieval castle perched on a cliff, protected on all sides by high walls, making it nearly impenetrable. Its shield is the blood-brain barrier, a layer of tightly connected cells that only allows an extremely selective group of m … | Continue reading
Chase Padusniak at Commonweal: Freud’s influence waned during the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the so-called “Freud Wars,” during which critics like Frederick Crews took psychoanalysis to task for a lack of scientific support or clinical success. Crews tried to put a final … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Donald Trump is not running for President. He is running to be, as he openly says, “a dictator on day one.” He sometimes implies he will give up these dictatorial powers at some later point. But given that he fomented a coup to prevent the peaceful exchange of powe … | Continue reading
by Jeroen van Baar Now that I live in Washington DC, I take every opportunity I get to sample the seafood sold at a floating market down by the wharf. It’s the oldest open-air fish market in continuous operation in the United States, dating back to 1805. But while the market is a … | Continue reading
I Crane My Neck My view is of nothing other than the black dot of Icarus hung beneath the canopy of a wax wing in a field of grey, a boy suspended by invisible filaments thinner than human hairs strung (I must assume) from the canopy above now caught in an updraft drawing the car … | Continue reading
Erik Gleibermann in LA Review of Books: HUMAN BEINGS ARE autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos. Yet just as they provide … | Continue reading