Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Fiction shines a light on the human condition by putting people into imaginary situations and envisioning what might happen. Science fiction expands this technique by considering situations in the future, with advanced technology, or with ut … | Continue reading
Colleen Walsh in The Harvard Gazette: The mass shootings over the weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, killed at least 31 people and wounded scores more. Those incidents were just the latest such deadly attacks in the United States, which has tallied more than 250 since J … | Continue reading
[Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette.] | Continue reading
Rachel Connolly at The Baffler: But there is a catch. This groundbreaking research is relevant mostly to people of European descent. In short: white people. While every GWAS uses a vast amount of genetic data, it is often of European origin only. And while it is well known that f … | Continue reading
Richard Carwardine at Literary Review: Frederick Douglass – runaway slave, radical activist, brilliant orator and writer, tireless advocate for his race, political office-holder – lays claim to being the most influential African-American of all time. Certainly, no other black Ame … | Continue reading
Emma Taggart in My Modern Met: Today, many science books are full of detailed photos that reveal the intricate parts of plant life, but prior to the invention of photography (and macro photography), it was up to botanical illustrators and researchers to record the fascinating for … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: During the three years that Billy Budd took shape, Britten and Forster occasionally disagreed about just how brazen the piece should be. In one instance, Forster complained that one of Claggart’s arias was just not hot-blooded enough. “I want p … | Continue reading
Emma Yasinsky in The Scientist: This past April, Mount Sinai oncologist Joshua Brody and his team announced a clinical trial that delivers immune modulators directly to the tumor environment that stimulate a patient’s immune system to treat several types of cancer. The approach i … | Continue reading
“They are the ones who broke the law, they are the ones who endangered their own children on their trek. The United States on the other hand, goes to extraordinary lengths to protect them while the parents go through a short detention period.” – Jeff Sessions excerpt from “Cajas/ … | Continue reading
Christopher Benfey in the New York Review of Books: In a glass case at the Musée Rodin, displaying preparatory studies, my attention settled on a terra-cotta fragment identified as “The Thinker’s Right Foot.” His foot! Suddenly, I had a completely different feel for The Thinker. … | Continue reading
Jean-Pierre Dupuy in Inference Review: DANIEL ELLSBERG is well known for releasing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their publication led indirectly to the Watergate scandal and the downfall of Richard Nixon. Less well known is that in 1961, whil … | Continue reading
C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout: Noam, what are some of the tangible and intangible factors that seem to be pushing the country — socially, politically and economically — backward rather than forward? Noam Chomsky: Trump’s diatribes successfully inflame his audience, many of whom a … | Continue reading
Richard Lea at The Guardian: Born in an Ohio steel town in the depths of the Great Depression, Morrison carved out a literary home for the voices of African Americans, first as an acclaimed editor and then with novels such as The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. Over the … | Continue reading
Francis Gooding at the LRB: ‘We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place,’ Wallace-Wells writes, ‘in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and … | Continue reading
Jenny Uglow at the TLS: The laughter of Morrison’s characters disguises pain, deprivation and violation. It is laughter at a series of bad, cruel jokes. The real joke in naming Sula’s neighbourhood “The Bottom”, when it perches on barren Ohio uplands is that, in many senses it re … | Continue reading
The Most of it He thought he kept the universe alone; For all the voice in answer he could wake Was but the mocking echo of his own From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the boulder-broken beach He would cry out on life, that what it wants Is not its own… | Continue reading
Meera Subramanian in Nature: Crawford Lake is so small it takes just 10 minutes to stroll all the way around its shore. But beneath its surface, this pond in southern Ontario in Canada hides something special that is attracting attention from scientists around the globe. They are … | Continue reading
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 BELOW | Continue reading
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 BELOW | Continue reading
by Joseph D. Martin and Marta Halina Calls for a Manhattan Project–style crash effort to develop artificial intelligence (AI) technology are thick on the ground these days. Oren Etzioni, the CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, recently issued such a call on Th … | Continue reading
Mohau Modisakeng. Inzilo 2013, still from video. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Mathematics and music have a pristine, otherworldly beauty that is very unlike that found in other human endeavors. Both of them seem to exhibit an internal structure, a unique concatenation of qualities that lives in a world of their own, independent of the … | Continue reading
by Emily Ogden Fans are the people who know the quotes, the dates of publication, the batting averages, the bassist on this album, the team that general manager coached before. I am not a fan. Don’t get me wrong. I’m full of enthusiasms. But I can’t match you statistic for statis … | Continue reading
Azra Raza, author of the forthcoming book The First Cell: And the Human Costs of Pursuing Cancer to the Last, oncologist and professor of medicine at Columbia University, and 3QD editor, decided to speak to 26 leading cancer investigators and ask each of them the same five questi … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat When I watched the 2019 documentary on Apollo 11, it carried me back not to the summer of 1969, when it happened, but to the mid-1980s, when I was an undergrad. I was eight when Apollo 11 launched; of course I was aware of the space program and the moon landings, b … | Continue reading
This post explores whether it is a positive development that there are no discussions of race and religion in Danny Boyle’s and Richard Curtis’s Yesterday. | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey Our expectations sculpt neural activity, causing our brains to represent the outcomes of our actions as we expect them to unfold. This is consistent with a growing psychological literature suggesting that our experience of our actions is biased towards what we expe … | Continue reading
by Marie Gaglione Into the Woods Most college students would readily submit that there are any number of external forces that inhibit their ability to perform or engage meaningfully with their academic endeavors, even when there is a genuine motivation and desire to do so, altho … | Continue reading
Our cat, Frederica Krüger, has taken to spying on me while I work in my home office. | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer The first real work of art I ever saw was Auguste Renoir’s Les Parapluies. I was a teenager, and the painting had arrived in Dublin following a 1959 agreement between the governments of Ireland and Britain. This they had signed to solve an arts wrangle as tortuo … | Continue reading
by Gabrielle C. Durham My friend does not use punctuation when he texts, so there is a stream-of-consciousness quality to much of his communications. According to the fine folks at Buzzfeed, you would likely infer that he is a millennial, but that is not true. He conveys his poin … | Continue reading
Connie Bruck in The New Yorker: “A lie is a lie is a lie,” Whoopi Goldberg said. It was May 2nd, and she was on the set of “The View,” the daytime talk show that she co-hosts. The subject was Attorney General William Barr, who had argued that the special counsel Robert Mueller’s … | Continue reading
Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction: My colleague Patrick Riley from Google has a good piece in Nature in which he describes three very common errors in applying machine learning to real world problems. The errors are general enough to apply to all uses of machine lear … | Continue reading
Sonia Faleiro in the New York Review of Books: One night in May, a strange and seemingly inexplicable thing happened in India. A divisive and ineffectual prime minister returned to power with a historic mandate. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s triumph on May 23 was conclusive. His … | Continue reading
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Alison Willmore in BuzzFeedNews: The Cannes Film Festival has been an adoring showcase for Quentin Tarantino ever since he was anointed with the big prize, the Palme d’Or, for Pulp Fiction in 1994. That only made the discomfort of his tense exchange with New York Times reporter F … | Continue reading
Noah Knopf in Harvard Political Review: It took me three tries to understand even a little of Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf’s famous 1925 modernist novel set on a single day in London. Even now, when I try to explain the book, I tend to sound like a stereotypical rambling undergr … | Continue reading
Ceremonias De La Superviviencia at the movies my eye on the Exit sign on the aisles the doorways the space between the seat in front of me and my legs how far could I crawl before I die? wednesday after it happened I went to a work event at a gay bar … | Continue reading
David Wootton in Lapham’s Quarterly: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. —The Declaration of Independence … | Continue reading
Will Fitzgibbon over at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists: A longtime possession of the Dutch, French and then the British, Mauritius was for centuries a poor agrarian society with an economy based mostly on sugarcane. Its economic prospects seemed forever … | Continue reading
Ronald Aronson in Boston Review: To understand the stability of this support [for Trump], we must free ourselves from the prevailing fixation on Trump himself as the explanation for Trumpism. True, he has a cunning charisma; using very ordinary bearing and diction, he makes repea … | Continue reading
Joseph O’Neill in the New York Review of Books: Jill Lepore’s new “little book” is a historian’s attempt to mobilize her knowledge to political effect. Last year Lepore published These Truths: A History of the United States, a monumental and brilliantly assembled work of politica … | Continue reading
From Be a Recorder —after Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary” they work their fingers to the soul their bones to their marrow they toil in blankness inside the dead yellow rectangle of warehouse windows work fingers to knots of fires the young the ancients the boneless the bro … | Continue reading