by Jeroen van Baar In science, a good model describes one feature of the natural world well or solves one difficult problem. A great model, on the other hand, is often multipurpose. It serves as metaphor even where nobody expected it to. Take one keyword of our current society: b … | Continue reading
Lucy Schiller in the Columbia Journalism Review: There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Gibney in Nature: John Hopfield, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, is a true polymath. His career started with probing the physics of solid states during the field’s heyday in the 1950s before moving to the chemistry of haemoglobin in the late 19 … | Continue reading
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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion: The publication of new interviews with Donald Trump’s longstanding chief of staff John Kelly have been in the news since last week, and the Harris campaign has picked up on Kelly’s use of the word “fascist” to describe his former boss. This has rei … | Continue reading
David Katzenstein at Commonweal: In the brief introduction to Distant Journeys, a new collection of photography assembled from trips undertaken over nearly five decades and across six continents, David Katzenstein tells us that his “passion for discovery” began early. Perhaps it … | Continue reading
Dating in the Apocalypse Bunker You take the lamp with your last battery and meet me at the radios, where it’s quiet, and we can be alone. I like how the light dims and flickers, the way it plays across the steel. I like how we can’t see the sand in the air. You hold my… | Continue reading
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Diane Fieldes in R: Capitalism thwarts and stunts the creativity of human beings. It robs the mass of the population of control over their own labour, and therefore over production generally. It denies the vast majority of people creative expression in their daily work lives, and … | Continue reading
Lola Butcher in Undark Magazine: Like many surgeons, Marty Makary used to routinely treat appendicitis by removing the patient’s appendix, a procedure performed nearly 300,000 times a year in the U.S. That changed about a decade ago after he read a research study that found antib … | Continue reading
Rachel Ossip at n+1: New image-making technologies — whether the printing press, the camera, or satellite imaging — change our perception of the world, which in turn changes our behaviors. The question at hand is: What are these algorithmic images teaching us to see, say, and do? … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley 1. Reality isn’t what it used to be. Neither is fiction. Years ago, someone who worked for a daily soap opera production company told me that if a storyline included a wedding, the TV network and its stations would be inundated with wedding gifts for the fictional … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson There’s that list of religions from which we’re offered a choice. If none of them quite fit, at the bottom there’s None. Well that’s not for me either so I’ve taken to calling myself a Non-None. My religious feeling is not defined by any of the above, but it cert … | Continue reading
This is from Morgan Meis: An excerpt from the book can be found here. The book is published by Deep Vellum. It is a kind of horror story about academics in Germany and also about movies and about the supernatural, sort of, and also is just an excellent and sometimes scary and als … | Continue reading
Damion Searls at Literary Hub: In my late twenties, when I was interested in maybe becoming a translator but didn’t know how to go about doing such a thing, my mother suggested I try getting in touch with our old neighborhood friend Edie. I had read Dr. Seuss at her apartment on … | Continue reading
Ted Nordhaus and Adam Stein at the Breakthrough Institute: If last month’s announcement by Microsoft and Constellation Energy that they planned to restart Three Mile Island was a potent symbol of nuclear energy’s changing fortunes and importance to efforts to decarbonize the US e … | Continue reading
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Wendy Brown & Francis Wade in the Boston Review: Trump is symptom, not cause, of the “crisis of democracy.” Trump did not turn the nation in a hard-right direction, and if the liberal political establishment doesn’t ask what wind he caught in his sails, it will remain clueless ab … | Continue reading
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Elisa Gabbert in Georgia Review: I think this is important: memories and ideas happen in a place. An essay is a place for ideas; it has to feel like a place. It has to give one the feeling of entering a room. The architect Christopher Alexander has written that “the experience o … | Continue reading
Hannah Thomasy in The Scientist: To the casual observer, the motivations that drive insect behaviors may appear quite simple: An insect might leave the nest to find food, wander around to seek out potential mates, or move into the sun or shade to maintain an optimal body temperat … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian: In this exquisite book novelist Caleb Carr tells the story of the “shared existence” he enjoyed for 17 years with his beloved cat, Masha. At the time of writing she is gone, he is going, and all that remains is to explain how they made each other’s … | Continue reading
Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times: “Math is power” is the tag line of a new documentary, “Counted Out,” currently making the rounds at festivals and community screenings. (It will have a limited theatrical release next year.) The film explores the intersection of mathematics, … | Continue reading
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Sam Kahn at Persuasion: The 2024 election will be “decided by podcasts,” Bobby Kennedy predicted in 2023—and that may be the line for which he is best remembered. The election is still a coin toss, but Trump has had momentum recently and may well have sealed a win this weekend wi … | Continue reading
Josh Rothman at The New Yorker: In 1990, Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote “The Difference Engine,” an alternative-history novel, set in the nineteenth century, in which computers are built about a hundred years earlier than in reality, using quirky systems including gears, wheels, … | Continue reading
From PVcase: Harvard University reports engineering strategies, including solar radiation management, carbon dioxide removal, and ocean fertilization, that can help combat climate change. Many of these solutions are worth considering, especially when you think about the “widespre … | Continue reading
Jeffrey Mervis in Science: In their bid to become the next U.S. president, Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump have staked out fundamentally different positions on such divisive topics as reproductive rights, immigration, the economy, and the wars in the Middle Eas … | Continue reading
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My Son, My Executioner My son, my executioner, ….. I take you in my arms, Quiet and small and just astir, ….. And whom my body warms. Sweet death, small son, our instrument ….. Of immortality, Your cries and hunger document ….. Our bodily decay. We twenty-five and twenty-two, ….. … | Continue reading
Brian Klaas at Aeon Magazine: How can we make sense of social change when consequential shifts often arise from chaos? This is the untameable bane of social science, a field that tries to detect patterns and assert control over the most unruly, chaotic system that exists in the k … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next. –Henry Ward Beecher There are several long-running attempts to give AIs common sense. Or, at least, to build a useable database of “common sense” for AIs. MIT’s Media Lab shut down its “Open Mind Common … | Continue reading
by Azadeh Amirsadri It’s a warm June day in 1976. I am 17 years old and standing with my family and my 30-year-old husband’s family at the airport In Tehran. My mother, grandmother, and mother-in-law have red eyes and red nose tips from crying and trying hard not to cry in public … | Continue reading
Samia Halaby. Jllayq, 2000. More here , here, and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Nguyễn Bình at Literary Hub: By 1964, Vietnam had been bisected for a decade. Fierce fights between the US-backed South and the communist North had marred the country, and with US forces officially entering the war that August, it seemed things were only getting worse. From the W … | Continue reading
Stephanie M. Lee in The Chronicle of Higher Education: At first, it looked like a paradigm of science done right. A group of behavioral scientists had repeated the same experiments over and over in separate labs, following the same rigorous methods, and found that 86 percent of t … | Continue reading
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Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Imagine I went to a Hollywood studio with the following plot: It’s the year 2024. War is breaking out all over the world. Asia is threatened by communists; Europe, by fascists. Only America stands against these totalitarian empires, but its society is di … | Continue reading
Corey Robin in The New Yorker: The professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In another my … | Continue reading
Viviane Collier in Nautilus: Philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith has spent decades considering the mental life of animals. His pioneering work on octopus cognition has helped to frame the discussion about how we might think about intelligences other than our own. His recen … | Continue reading
Lynne Feeley at The Nation: In the afterword to Loving Sylvia Plath, a book detailing the abuse that Plath suffered at the hands of her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, the literary scholar Emily Van Duyne recounts that when she started the book, a friend told her that she had to ge … | Continue reading
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Sheila Heti at the Paris Review: I think what confuses me so much about those who have prescriptions for how to write is that they assume all humans experience the world the same way. For instance, that we all think “conflict” is the most interesting and gripping part of life, an … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar The visionary physicist and statesman Niels Bohr once succinctly distilled the essence of science as “the gradual removal of prejudices”. Among these prejudices, few are more prominent than the belief that nation-states can strengthen their security by keepi … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa Prime numbers are the atoms of arithmetic. Just as a water molecule can be broken into two hydrogen and one oxygen atoms, 12 can be broken into two 2s and a 3. Indeed, the defining feature of a prime number is that it cannot be factored into a nontrivial produc … | Continue reading
“Alone” imagine the atomic affinities of the world these clinging particles of stuff that look like chairs or moons, that look like things that laugh and love, this vast, maybe infinite web of motions, these packets of energy that mutter and reflect upon their own protons spinnin … | Continue reading
Lily Lynch in Sidecar: Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) – the indirect successor to Austria’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party – used to generate apocalyptic headlines. Its successes were once treated as major news stories on both sides of the Atlantic, especially … | Continue reading
Over at Frieze: Gary Indiana, the novelist, playwright and critic who rose to prominence in the art world as a writer for the Village Voice in the 1980s, has died aged 74. Born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire in 1950, Indiana briefly studied at the University of Californi … | Continue reading