Carl Zimmer in the New York Times: In early February 2020, China locked down more than 50 million people, hoping to hinder the spread of a new coronavirus. No one knew at the time exactly how it was spreading, but Lidia Morawska, an expert on air quality at Queensland University … | Continue reading
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Nicholas Carr at After Babel: Self-expression is good, we tell ourselves, and it’s good to hear what others have to say. The more we’re able to converse, to share our thoughts, opinions, and experiences, the better we’ll understand one another and the more harmonious society will … | Continue reading
What is There, Where is Nothing? The two interpretations of time (the measure of “when” with regard to events Aristotle wanted; the entity that runs even when nothing happens, according to Newton), can be repeated for space. This is what we speak of when we ask “when?” Space is w … | Continue reading
Laura Tran in The Scientist: Micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) are everywhere—from the air we breathe to the food we eat—but their impact on human health is not entirely clear. While cell culture and animal studies hint at potential harm, understanding what this means for people is … | Continue reading
From National Education Association: Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955) Born during Reconstruction to parents who had been enslaved, Mary McLeod Bethune grew up walking five miles to a Presbyterian mission school where a teacher noticed her dedication and recommended her for a colle … | Continue reading
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J. M. Tyree at the New England Review: Celebrating film anniversaries always seems ephemeral, but when a film has been part of your life for three decades, there are good reasons to pause, rewind, review, and reassess both the film and your memories of it. You notice new things. … | Continue reading
Nicholas Carr at The New Atlantis: With its emphasis on media’s formative role in a society’s development, “Minerva’s Owl” would come to be seen as a founding document — maybe the founding document — of the academic discipline of media studies that emerged in the second half of t … | Continue reading
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by Derek Neal I read the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams and immediately thought of Camus’ The Stranger. Here is how Handke begins: The Sunday edition of the Kärntner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G township), … | Continue reading
by Barbara Fischkin The place where I learned the most about diversity, equity and inclusion was not at my liberal summer camp in New York’s Catskills mountains—but at a pig farm in northern Kansas. To be fair, if it wasn’t for camp, I never would have pitched a tent under the bi … | Continue reading
Fourteenth way of looking at a blackbird? Photo taken last week in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Rishi Dastidar in The Guardian: Santanu Bhattacharya turned heads with his 2023 debut novel One Small Voice, which intertwines the personal fallout after a boy watches a mob burn a Muslim man with a panoramic survey of how modern Indian society is changing – buckling, almost – wi … | Continue reading
Azeem Azhar at Exponential View: OpenAI released yet another add-on on to its growing suite of AI tools: DeepResearch. The product, which shares its name with Google Gemini’s Deep Research tool, also does near the exact same thing. For a given research question it will formulate … | Continue reading
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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Yascha Mounk: I’ve read a lot of your work and have been in conversation with you for a long time. You’re somebody who approaches the growth and influence of what some people call wokeness, what I call the identity synthesis, what you and your re … | Continue reading
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Helen Pearson in Nature: Adrian Ward had been driving confidently around Austin, Texas, for nine years — until last November, when he started getting lost. Ward’s phone had been acting up, and Apple maps had stopped working. Suddenly, Ward couldn’t even find his way to the home o … | Continue reading
By Goth Grammarist: Cleaver was born into and lived in a segregated world and didn’t question it. Once segregation was made illegal*, he realizes the world he was in, writing “Prior to 1954, we lived in an atmosphere of novocain. Negroes found it necessary, in order to maintain w … | Continue reading
Sean Nam at The Baffler: When the French crime film Classe tous risques—the English title, The Big Risk, fails to capture the pun on insurance policies and travel accommodations—premiered in Paris in March 1960, it was undercut by no less a modern heretic than Jean-Luc Godard, wh … | Continue reading
THE ORIGIN OF LIGHT For a thousand years, the nature of light was a source of debate, a question that split the learned, who wondered if sight originated as a beam coming in from outside-the sun-or as a substance generated inside, a stuff we shoot out, to bathe the world and its … | Continue reading
Peter Harrison at Aeon Magazine: Leaving aside these associations with Western triumphalism, Huxley’s version of history, in which supernaturalism is engaged in an enduring struggle with naturalism, suffers from two fatal flaws. First, past historical actors, and indeed many non- … | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells Many environmentalists find the climate change policy problem baffling. The core mechanism of how certain molecules create a greenhouse warming effect on the earth is extremely clear (and has been known for over a century). Evidence that human activities are re … | Continue reading
by Philip Graham A conversation between Christine Sneed and Philip Graham Since 2010 Christine Sneed, winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction (among other awards), has published six acclaimed books: the story collections Portraits of a Few People I’ve Made Cry, The Virgi … | Continue reading
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Prashant Keshavmurthy in the Asian Review of Books: Fifteen years into his marriage, Noor Mohammad Ganju has never seen his wife naked. He lusts after her but sex, when she occasionally obliges him, is reduced by veils—literal and symbolic—to tedious and unimaginative coupling in … | Continue reading
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I’ve been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI’s o1 was launched. These two threads … | Continue reading
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Jessica Swoboda at Commonweal: Reading a Rachel Cusk novel is like watching a recording of your everyday life, with all your subtly unflattering habits, traits, and actions. A conversation with your seatmate on a plane reveals that you manipulate your family like items on an Exce … | Continue reading
Matt Lutz at Persuasion: Left-wing activists benefit from a framework where “center left” just means “whatever the left says, but less,” because this gives them the power to alter what it means to be on the center left just by advocating for more extreme views. If the left gets m … | Continue reading
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Ritchie Robertson at Literary Review: Why Austrian literature? Sebald was not Austrian, though his south German birthplace, Wertach, was within walking distance of the Austrian border. Austrian literature appealed to his feeling for marginality. Its major writers, from Franz Gril … | Continue reading
Nina Agrawal in The New York Times: Every day, billions of cells in our body divide or die off. It’s all part of the intricate processes that keep blood flowing from our heart, food moving through our gut and our skin regenerating. Once in a while, though, something goes awry, an … | Continue reading
Emma Fridy in Louisville Review: Born out of necessity, America’s Black labor movements have left an indelible mark upon the social fabric of our country. For hundreds of years Black activists have poured blood, sweat, and tears into organizing the American labor force for better … | Continue reading
Border I’m going to move ahead. Behind me my whole family is calling, My child is pulling my sari-end, My husband stands blocking the door, But I will go. There’s nothing ahead but a river. I will cross. I know how to swim, but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross. There’s … | Continue reading
by Kyle Munkittrick When I think about AI, I think about poor Queen Elizabeth. Imagine being her: you have access to Shakespeare — in his prime! You get to see a private showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the height of the players’ skill and the Bard’s craft. And then… that’ … | Continue reading
by Kevin Lively The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Self Portrait, Kigali, January 17, 2016. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Before the election, I wrote a whole bunch of posts about why it was a bad idea to elect Donald Trump. But sadly, America elected him anyway. After he won, I wrote a post outlining a best-case scenario for Trump’s second term. The optimistic scenario was … | Continue reading
Michael Inzlicht at Speak Now, Regret Later: In the winter of 2015, I stood before the largest gathering of social psychologists in the world to accept one of the field’s highest honours. My collaborators and I were being celebrated for our theory about willpower—a theory I’d spe … | Continue reading
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Laura Kiniry in Smithsonian Magazine: When the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear war. But on January 25, 1995, that threat once again came front and center when Russian officers mistook a Norwegian rocket … | Continue reading
Emma Stoye in Nature: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/assets/4JsOv5ttJO/mito-h2b-vasp-rgb-1024x1024.webm Powerhouses of the cell. This video of a human bone-cancer cell shows its three nuclei (blue —probably the result of failed cell divisions), actin cytoskel … | Continue reading
Sojourner Truth in LFJ: I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? …Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause C … | Continue reading
by Malcolm Murray As someone who thinks about AI day-in and day-out, it is always fascinating to see which events in the AI space break out of the AI bubble and into the attention of the wider public. ChatGPT in November 2022 was of course one. The podcast-creating ability of Goo … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthlin … | Continue reading
“lacrimae rerum, “ (the tears of things) …………………………………….. —Lucretius Everything Cries Steel’s tears are rust, trees weep tears of falling leaves, clouds weep and mourn their loss sacrificing their billows to the earth as rain, the earth weeps its carbon into sky, the sun weeps it … | Continue reading