Neil Turok On The Simplicity Of Nature Posted on Thursday, Apr 25, 2024 12:50PM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Joe Fassler at Lit Hub: Years ago, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, I found myself writing about flight. It started as just a few paragraphs, a bit of spontaneous fiction jotted down in a notebook: a man stood on the roof of a barn, wearing a pair of enormous wings bui … | Continue reading
Lucy Moore at Literary Review: After they were released from prison in Paris in the late autumn of 1794, both having narrowly escaped the guillotine, new bosom friends Rose de Beauharnais and Térézia Tallien found they had nothing to wear. Dressmakers and milliners had all but di … | Continue reading
Ella Creamer in The Guardian: ‘At a quarter to eleven on August 12, 2022, on a sunny Friday morning in upstate New York, I was attacked and almost killed by a young man with a knife,” begins Salman Rushdie’s new memoir. The book, titled Knife, reflects on the attack at the Chauta … | Continue reading
Robert Lea at Space.com: NASA’s interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacec … | Continue reading
From Persuasion: Kwame Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, Professor of Philosophy and Law and New York University, and the “Ethicist” columnist for The New York Times Magazine. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Kwame Anthony Appiah discuss why universit … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Ahmad Ibsais in Time Magazine: “Where is Ahmad?” The soldier called my name while we were stopped at the last Israeli checkpoint on the way from Ramallah to Jerusalem. I am a Palestinian American. But once I’m in my ancestral homeland, I’m not an American in the eyes of Israeli a … | Continue reading
Dana Smith in The New York Times: If you put a lab mouse on a diet, cutting the animal’s caloric intake by 30 to 40 percent, it will live, on average, about 30 percent longer. The calorie restriction, as the intervention is technically called, can’t be so extreme that the animal … | Continue reading
My Papa’s Waltz The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself. The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one k … | Continue reading
Michel Chaouli, Sergio Tenenbaum and Keren Gorodeisky at The Point: Kant’s views here are taken by many philosophers to be an impossible attempt to have it both ways. Kant seems to be arguing that evil is necessarily attributed to each of us, apparently rooted in human nature. An … | Continue reading
What if Dario Amodei Is Right About A.I.? Posted on Wednesday, Apr 24, 2024 12:30PM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Hannah Bhuiya at Artforum: Today, Le Samouraï is recognized as a foundational example of neo-noir, and as a spark that lit a fire under Scorsese, Mann, Tarantino, Jarmusch, Woo, Fincher, et al.—see Taxi Driver (1976), Thief (1981), Reservoir Dogs (1992), Ghost Dog (1999), The Kil … | Continue reading
Manan Kapoor in the Los Angeles Review of Books: IN OUT OF PLACE: A Memoir (1999), Edward Said recalls that after graduating from Princeton in June 1957, he was torn by “differing impulses”: he could pursue a fellowship from Harvard for graduate study or return to Cairo to work a … | Continue reading
Dan Falk in Quanta: In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wo … | Continue reading
Benjamin A. Schupmann at the Oxford University Press Blog: That a popular candidate could be disqualified from running and removed from the ballot might, at first glance, seem at odds with the very idea of democracy. For that reason, despite his evident role in instigating an ins … | Continue reading
Peter West in aeon: ‘Philosophical theories are much more like good stories than scientific explanations.’ This provocative remark comes from the paper ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’ (1953) by Margaret Macdonald. Macdonald was a figure at the institutional heart of Britis … | Continue reading
Lilly Tozer in Nature: How the brain processes visual information — and its perception of time — is heavily influenced by what we’re looking at, a study has found. In the experiment, participants perceived the amount of time they had spent looking at an image differently dependin … | Continue reading
The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings. I am taken with the hot animal of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs and have them move as I intend, though my knee, though my shoulder, though something is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead on the harbor beach:… | Continue reading
Jessica Flanigan in The Conversation: Taylor Swift isn’t just a billionaire songwriter and performer. She’s also a philosopher. As a Swiftie and a philosopher, I’ve found that this claim surprises Swifties and philosophers alike. But once her fans learn a bit more about philosoph … | Continue reading
Michael Levin in Noema: They are assembled from components that are networked together to process information. Electrical signals propagate throughout, controlling every aspect of their functioning. Being general problem-solvers, many of them have high IQs, but they routinely mak … | Continue reading
Yuval Noah Harari in Haaretz: In the coming days Israel will have to make historic policy decisions, ones that could shape its fate and the fate of the entire region for generations to come. Unfortunately, Benjamin Netanyahu and his political partners have repeatedly proven that … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Ed Simon at The Hedgehog Review: Facing west from his white clapboard Victorian house, surrounded by acres of skeletally bare oak, maple, and hickory reaching up from the snow-covered New Hampshire woods, Robert Frost might have gazed at the granitoid solidity of Ryan’s Hill whil … | Continue reading
Jackson Arn at The New Yorker: Imagine you’d been born in 1899. Imagine living through the invention of the Model T, the jet aircraft, the liquid-fuelled rocket, and the computer chip. Now imagine looking back on all this in 1965 and writing, as though with a shrug, “How slow wil … | Continue reading
Anni Albers’s Warp Families Posted on Tuesday, Apr 23, 2024 8:30AMTuesday, April 23, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
The House Slave The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass and in the slave quarters there is a rustling— children are bundled into aprons, cornbread and water gourds grabbed, a salt pork breakfast taken. I watch them driven into the vague before-dawn while their mistres … | Continue reading
Jonathan Weiner in MIT Technology Review: If high intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in our heads at the same time, then most of us are geniuses about aging a few times over. We think it will never come for us. We think it might come but it will stop before it … | 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 Michael Liss If you don’t like people, you hadn’t ought to be in politics at all, and Henry talked about the common people but I don’t think he liked them… —Harry S. Truman to Merle Miller, in Plain Speaking. Truman wasn’t the most diplomatic of men, particularly when he’d had … | Continue reading
Standing Under Without Understanding Horizon’s circle, beyond which you can see no further in any direction other than up, hems us in, but looking up you can see forever, or as far as lightspeed allows, or until more time passes or, more accurately, until it shifts again, now. Bu … | Continue reading
by David Kordahl In popular media, physics often comes up for one of two competing reasons. The first is to introduce a touch of mysticism without labeling it as such. Whether it’s Carl Sagan talking about our bones as stardust, or Lisa Randall suggesting some extra dimensions of … | Continue reading
Firelei Baez. Untitled (A Corrected Chart of Hispaniola with the Windward Passage), 2020. Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. An avid walker, I like making great rambling loops around my neighborhood. Along the way, I’ve noticed four Little Free Libraries that I must have probably strolled past, oblivious, a thousand times… each is cute in its own way; one built surrounded by bird … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt The barbarians have won. The barbarians and their arrogance have won, their shouted assertions offered up as commandments. No one can be right who disagrees with them. The barbarians and their death cult have won, their zombie god lording over us. The spirits of … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman Those of us employed in the city of Zurich got some extra time off last week. Every year, on the third Monday in April following the vernal equinox, the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs—the Central Committee of Zurich Guilds, also known by its German initialism … | Continue reading
by William Benzon I live in Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan. I have been photographing the irises in the Eleventh Street flower beds since 2011. So far I have uploaded 558 of those photos to Flickr. I took most of those photos in May or June. B … | Continue reading
Trout (I think) in a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol. | Continue reading
by Marie Snyder In the West, it feels like we have never lived outside of a system of pseudo-feudalism, a time without peasantry, slavery, or the working poor labouring for the benefit of Kings, land barons, or factory owners. For thousands of years, the exploitation of people ap … | Continue reading
by David Winner My history textbooks in junior high school in 1970s Virginia presented history pretty much as I understood it from what would have been the point of view of my parents, standard liberal white academics. America’s racial original sins would have been muted but not … | Continue reading
Douglas Hofstadter at Marcus on AI: I just received the very sad news about the passing of Dan Dennett, a lodestar in my life and in many thoughtful people’s lives. Dan was a deep thinker about what it is to be human. Quite early on, he arrived at what many would see as shocking … | Continue reading
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: Most popular accounts of evolution focus on the amazing adaptations of organisms to their environment. But, Dobson counters, “whilst there seems no end to evolution’s artistry, it is all too easy to be blinded by the pyrotechnics on disp … | Continue reading
Michelle Buckley and Paula Chakravartty in the Boston Review: In December, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a personal request from his friend and political ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: expedite the supply of Indian construction labor and other mig … | Continue reading
Brad East in The Hedgehog Review: The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, thou … | Continue reading
Rachel Dobkin in Newsweek: Comedian Bill Maher‘s “Kid ‘N Prey” segment on Friday went viral on social media after he criticized the child entertainment industry. On Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher reacted to the recently released documentary Quiet on Set: The … | Continue reading