by Jochen Szangolies In 1950, during a lunch conversation with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Enrico Fermi asked the wrong question. Famously, after a discussion on the subject of recent UFO sightings, extra-terrestrial life, and the possibility of faster-than- … | Continue reading
A pedestrian bridge hangs over the river Eisack in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, suspended from two of these cables which are anchored to these concrete abutments on the two sides of the river. It is a somewhat odd bridge in that the cables from which it hangs are mostly lower than … | Continue reading
Marilyn Simon in The Hedgehog Review: In general, we view sexual jealousy as bad. Jealousy creates distrust and destroys harmony. It does not always cause the kind of outright physical violence it does in Othello, but it certainly does violence to one’s peace of mind and to one’s … | Continue reading
Michael Skuhersky at Asterisk: A near-perfect simulation of the human brain would have profound implications for humanity. It could offer a pathway for us to transcend the biological limitations that have constrained human potential, and enable unimaginable new forms of intellige … | Continue reading
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John Timmer at Ars Technica: It’s no secret that “driving while black” is a real phenomenon. Study after study has shown that minority drivers are ticketed at a higher rate, and data from speed cameras suggests that it’s not because they commit traffic violations more frequently. … | Continue reading
Reed McConnell at Cabinet Magazine: Wilhelm Rumpf is a naughty boy, and Schoolmaster Heinzerling isn’t having it. When Dr. Heinzerling walks into his classroom one morning to find Rumpf holding forth in an uncanny imitation of his own peculiar manner of address, he sentences him … | Continue reading
Jerry Saltz at The Vulture: Square foot for square foot, the Frick has the densest concentration of masterpieces in America, installed alongside decorative objects in gloriously stuffy interiors. The art historian Bernard Berenson once sniffed that the Frick, founded by the moral … | Continue reading
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Dana Stevens in Slate: What does it mean for a television show to be cinematic? It certainly doesn’t have to mean that the series in question is about the movie business, though that happens to be the case with The Studio, the new Apple TV+ comedy starring Seth Rogen and co-creat … | Continue reading
Bryan Walsh in Vox: I was an English major in college, and my favorite poet was the first-generation Romantic William Wordsworth. For one thing, there’s the name, the best example of nominative determinism in the annals of English literature. But what I most love about Wordsworth … | Continue reading
Away geography is [not] destiny wandering holding a backpack with a device beeping, amidst the traffic even a heartbeat is useless, following an arrow on the Google map desire steps in with mustard twilights of a Northern winter, breathless for an early renewal; poppies are still … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal Some weeks ago I made a note to myself on my phone: Describe the artistic encounter—the aesthetic experience, its effect on the reader I made this note because I wanted to try something different in my writing. In most of my essays, without ever articulating this id … | Continue reading
by Barbara Fischkin Part One: Before Mari Saved Us This is the back story: Maria Angeles Garcia, known to us as “Mari,” was a godsend to our family. In part two, which I plan to publish in May, readers will find out more about how this young, single mother from a small village in … | Continue reading
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David McLoghlin at Poetry Magazine: At the start of the last class, Breyten took a magnum of red wine out of a tote bag and plonked it on the table among our normal-sized bottles. It was a Bordeaux, I like to think. The bottle was hilariously large, as if it had priapism, and he … | Continue reading
Daisy Hildyard in The Guardian: The Dream Hotel is Laila Lalami’s fifth novel – earlier works received nominations for the Booker, Pulitzer and National book awards – and has been longlisted for the Women’s prize. Her 2020 nonfiction book, Conditional Citizens, draws on her exper … | Continue reading
Natalie Hammond at LitHub: If you watch clips of his last appearance as Ziggy, at his infamous concert at the Hammersmith Odeon, you can see these rapid- fire changes in action. As Bowie starts “Ziggy Stardust,” he’s wearing a black diamond-shaped jumpsuit with shots of blue and … | Continue reading
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: Over the past two weeks, first Google and then OpenAI rolled out their multimodal image generation abilities. This is a big deal. Previously, when a Large Language Model AI generated an image, it wasn’t really the LLM doing the work. Instead, th … | Continue reading
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Casey Mock at After Babel: Meta’s governmental strategy and influence is now clearer than ever, thanks to Sarah Wynn Williams’s recently published memoir, Careless People. In her account of the culture of callousness, greed, unaccountability, and nepotism among Meta’s leadership … | Continue reading
Interview by Michiaki Matsushima in WIRED: WIRED: In the late ’90s, when the internet began to spread, there was a discourse that this would bring about world peace. It was thought that with more information reaching more people, everyone would know the truth, mutual understandin … | Continue reading
Maggie Doherty in Harper’s Magazine: On the morning of February 2, 2023, I exited the subway at 57th Street to find the air growing colder. It had been a warm winter. But the first proper cold front was moving in, and I already felt underdressed. I propelled myself toward the war … | Continue reading
Stages As every flower fades and as all youth Departs, so life at every stage, So every virtue, so our grasp of truth, Blooms in its day and may not last forever. Since life may summon us at every age Be ready, heart, for parting, new endeavor, Be ready bravely and without remors … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman One day many years ago my wife got stuck in the shower. She doesn’t know exactly how it happened, but that’s the gist. She finished taking a shower, pushed on the door to get out, and it wouldn’t open. She jiggled the door, and she banged on the door, and she pus … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene These days, there is a common unpleasant routine in the lives of well-informed, civic-minded individuals. They wake up in the morning, check the news, and are immediately bombarded with stories about events in the world that elicit strong negative emotion … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Found “Imaginary Being” (after Jorge Luis Borges). March 2025. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Laura Miller at Slate: Every so often an eye-opening work of social criticism becomes a surprise bestseller. In 1979, everyone was talking about Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1987, it was Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Last year, Jonathan … | Continue reading
Matt Ridley at Literary Hub: In all animals mating is a deal: one sex donates a few million sperm, the other a handful of eggs, the merger between which—unless a predator intervenes—will result in a brood of young. Win-win for the parents, genetically speaking. But there are few … | Continue reading
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Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman in Aeon: With roughly 35 million people, Kerala, which sits along India’s southwestern tip on the Indian Ocean, is among the smaller Indian states, though it is densely populated. In the 1970s, Kerala’s average income was about two-thirds of the In … | Continue reading
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Tom Lutz at the LARB: ACHMED ABDULLAH was, during the early decades of the previous century, a playwright with successes on Broadway and the West End, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, an author of dozens of books, and a writer of adventure and fantasy stories for the pulps, inclu … | Continue reading
Oscar Schwartz in The Drift: As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently … | Continue reading
Ashley Smart in Undark: In the summer of 2022, Abdel Abdellaoui was set to give a keynote at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. But when he learned he’d be sharing a speaker roster with Emil Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui announced on Twitter th … | Continue reading
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
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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
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Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
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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