Peter Marshall at Literary Review: Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion on an unprecedented scale swept across swathe … | 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
by Malcolm Murray By 2030, we will have countries of geniuses in data centers, but we won’t know what to do with them. In my 10+ years as a Superforecaster, I have picked up many techniques and lessons regarding forecasting. Given the fractured state of the debate on Artificial G … | Continue reading
by Gary Borjesson Even if they had all the other good things, still no one would want to live without friends. —Aristotle Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. —Erich Fromm Many of us are, or soon will be, tempted to connect with an AI companion. Maybe you want a … | Continue reading
From Stella Young with EssayGenius’s AI: The origins of Eid can be traced back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Eid al-Fitr, which translates to the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” is celebrated at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The significance … | Continue reading
From BBC: More here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
By the Sea I. To watch a seagull fly overhead, a girl child on the beach in red pajamas tilts her head back and back, impossibly back to anyone a second older. Now she digs a hole tossing the sand back between her legs as if her hands were forepaws. Now she sits on her… | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of the Third Reich, and thus of the industrialized mass murder known as the Holocaust, or Shoah—although 1945 was not the end, according to Timothy Snyder, of World War Two. That conflict, the historian maintains, w … | Continue reading
by Charles Siegel We are barely two months into the second Trump administration, and already certain themes are beginning to feel stale. One of them is that “it’s impossible to keep up with everything.” “The jaw-dropping outrages just keep coming, day after day.” The idea that it … | Continue reading
Luke Winkie in Slate: “People give estimates of what they think we’re making, and it’s always way low,” he told me from the plush interior of his Rolls-Royce, which was still scented with a synthetic new-purchase aroma. “Our watch hours on YouTube [in December] were, like, 5.7 mi … | Continue reading
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: Over the past couple years, we have learned that AI can boost the productivity of individual knowledge workers ranging from consultants to lawyers to coders. But most knowledge work isn’t purely an individual activity; it happens in groups and t … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Betsy Sinclair at The Conversation: Political scientists Steven Webster, Elizabeth Connors and I have investigated what happens to people’s social networks – their friends, family and neighbors – when partisan anger takes over. For example, suppose your neighbor is a member of th … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Lily Scherlis at Harper’s Magazine: Soft-skills researchers have themselves been mired in their own long crisis. None of them have convincingly determined what a “soft skill” even is, despite decades of research. “There is still lack of consensus regarding the definitions,” a tea … | Continue reading
Jamie Quatro at The Paris Review: Mary Flannery was born on the Feast of the Annunciation, the day marking the angel Gabriel’s announcement that Mary would bear the Christ child. O’Connor’s Irish Catholic parents, Edward and Regina, bracketed this festal birth by having her bapti … | Continue reading
Arielle Isack in The Point: Adrien Brody is the most beautiful man in Hollywood, and maybe on the planet. This has to do with the unlikely features of his face: it is profoundly narrow, with a pair of high brows sloping gently away from one another and a resolutely expressive pai … | Continue reading
Anne Banigin in The Washington Post: Many artists hope to create work that prompts conversation. The creators of the hit TV show “Adolescence,” about a boy who fatally stabs his female classmate, actually have. The four-episode British drama debuted on Netflix this month with lit … | Continue reading
Romanticism 101 Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat. Then I realized my friend had lied to me. Then I realized my dog was gone no matter how much I called in the rain. All was change. Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens disguised as orthodontists having a convention … | Continue reading
by David Kordahl Twenty years after Steven Pinker argued that statistical generalizations fail at the individual level, our digital lives have become so thoroughly tracked that his defense of individuality faces a new crisis. When I first picked up The Blank Slate: The Modern Den … | Continue reading
by Hari Balasubramanian I’ve spent twenty-five years in a branch of applied mathematics called operations research; I’ve published papers and taught graduate engineering courses on probability, statistics, and optimization. But even with so much exposure to numbers and quantitati … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong Writing about American cars stranded in Fidel Castro’s Cuba, John McElroy observed that “there’s something very appealing, almost romantic about these cars. Coated in a patina of history they hearken back to a time when Detroit iron dominated the global auto ind … | Continue reading
Max Callimanopulos in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “Leaving. I’ve had years to think about that, leaving and arriving,” Latif, a Zanzibari emigre, tells us in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel By the Sea. The book describes the complicated friendship between two Zanzibari men li … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Kenneth Chang in the New York Times: Masaki Kashiwara, a Japanese mathematician, received this year’s Abel Prize, which aspires to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in math. Dr. Kashiwara’s highly abstract work combined algebra, geometry and differential equations in surprisin … | Continue reading
Yuan Yi Zhu at History Today: In 1966 and 1967 a group of left-wing intellectuals and radical activists, recruited by the nonagenarian philosopher Bertrand Russell, constituted themselves into a self-proclaimed ‘tribunal’ to try the United States of America for its conduct in Vie … | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Tessa Hadley at the LRB: It isn’t necessarily a good thing when a publisher brings out a writer’s uncollected stories. More is sometimes less. Barrels are scraped, doubts – often the writer’s own, if she or he is no longer around – are set aside; these stories may not have been c … | Continue reading
Debbie Nathan in the Boston Review: What happened to former Columbia University student and Palestine rights activist Mahmoud Khalil has rightly alarmed many indignant Americans. Some have sought reassurance in the idea that since his abduction is nakedly unconstitutional, the in … | Continue reading
Being-towards-death All dressed up And nowhere to go Veiled eyes Sealed lips Fettered feet Moved Here, there Against my will Liberate me, Death Let another be born free by Anjum Altaf —transcreation, 3/22/25 of an Urdu Poem by Sara Shagufta Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep … | Continue reading
by William Benzon Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy. It is a fearful problem for the ordinary person, with no special talents, t … | Continue reading
by David Winner Unusual circumstances have given me an odd relationship with bodies, with nakedness. My father wouldn’t have been caught dead at a nude beach and would have been utterly perplexed if anyone described him as a nudist but tended to walk around the top floor of our C … | Continue reading
Plastic rose among a pile of assorted trash at the side of a road in Brixen, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Ed Simon at The Hedgehog Review: Short though her life was, O’Connor produced a distinctive body of work—two short-story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, and her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, along with luminou … | Continue reading
Johnny Lyons at Dublin Review of Books: Anyone who takes on Hegel knows they have their work cut out. He is among the most complex, capacious and ambitious philosophers in the history of Western thought. And unlike other comparable figures in that tradition, such as Plato, Descar … | Continue reading
John Halstead & Phil Thomson at Works in Progress: Hunter gatherers were not non-violent noble savages by any stretch of the imagination. They were relatively violent when compared with modern standards and even when compared with rates of violence experienced by other primates a … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: Consciousness is easier to possess than to define. One thing we can do is to look into the brain and see what lights up when conscious awareness is taking place. A complete understanding of this would be known as the “neural correlates of co … | Continue reading
From the Long Now Foundation: Benjamin Bratton begins his Long Now Talk by noting the “persistent weirdness” of our times. We find ourselves in a “pre-paradigmatic moment” in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. The task of philosophy today is to … | Continue reading
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: The debate over abundance liberalism unleashed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book has, so far, been pretty lopsided. On one hand, you have the abundance liberals themselves, who walk on eggshells to avoid offending the sensibilities of people to the … | Continue reading
Sam Mills in aeon: The Oscar Wilde Temple first opened in 2017, in the basement of the Church of the Village in Greenwich, New York. Wilde is glorified on a plinth: a creamy statue dressed as a dandy, his prison number from his time served in Reading Gaol, C.3.3, on a sign below … | Continue reading
Nic Fleming in Nature: The enduring popularity of intermittent fasting has been fed by celebrity endorsements, news coverage and a growing number of books, including several written by researchers in the field. More than 100 clinical trials in the past decade suggest that it is a … | Continue reading
As For the World As for the world, I am always like one of Socrates’ disciples, Walking by his side, Hearing his opinions and histories; It remains for me to say: Yes, Yes, it is like that. You are right again, Indeed your words are true. As for my life, I am always like Venice:… | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt Medieval historians hate it, don’tcha know, when people talk about the Dark Ages. Scholars haven’t used the term in decades, eschewing it as an unfair and inaccurate description of 500–1000 years of European history, give or take. The Middle Ages weren’t just fi … | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope is a beautiful book, the kind you want to treat with care and won’t dare dog-ear a page. Anselm Kiefer’s illustrations throughout provide a place for contemplative moments between ideas. It’s more immediately accessible than The … | Continue reading