What was behind the 1970s serial killer epidemic?

Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian: “Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.” Bundy was one of at least half a dozen serial killers active in Washington in 1974. Within a few years, the state would produce the similarly prolific Randall Woodfie … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Google Android’s calculator is (probably) the most widely used calculator in the world, and It’s also the most advanced

Andre Popovitch at Asterisk: Consider this straightforward calculation: (10100) + 1 – (10100) The answer, of course, is 1. But if you were to input it right now on your iPhone calculator, the answer you would get is 0. Android, however, gets it right. Why is there a difference? T … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Friday Poem

Customhouse Quay She’s out of sight behind the black Brasilia, Slav, I think, Ukranian, her soulful English, dark eyebrows, bewilderment. We migrate or drift to the antipodes from God knows where, clouds resembling barbed wire, or a Balinese shadow puppet play. We are proverbial … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

The Stein Paradox in Statistics

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@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

In London, theatergoers reenact storming of the U.S. Capitol

Karla Adam in The Washington Post: In a city well-known for political theater, the show at Stone Nest, a performance venue in the heart of London’s West End, took the concept to a new level. For the last month, audiences have been reenacting the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Ken Roth: The Law Is Not Enough to Stop War Crimes

Dunja Mijatovic and Ken Roth in the New York Times: Friday is the 30th anniversary of the deadliest massacre in Europe since World War II, when Bosnian Serb forces under Gen. Ratko Mladic overran an area meant to be protected by the United Nations. Soon after, they proceeded to e … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser

Paul Grimstad at The Current: In a 1989 interview with the Detroit Free Press, director Charlotte Zwerin worried that her documentary Thelonious Monk Straight, No Chaser, then newly out in general release after premiering the year before, would be labeled a “jazz film.” Zwerin ha … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Thelonious Monk Quartet Live In 66 Norway & Denmark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o59Nsw7wxU&list=RD5o59Nsw7wxU&start_radio=1&ab_channel=colibricrazy%28%C3%8DndigosAmino%C3%A1cidos%29 | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

The Guest of Emperors and Boarding House Keepers: A long-lost obituary of Mark Twain

Adele Gleason in Lapham’s Quarterly: 1910: Lahore As I knew him in the many summers he lived on estates joining ours in Elmira, N.Y., U.S.A., his wife’s birth place; the wonder of Mark Twain’s real personality increased. He reminded one of one of the many definitions of genius, a … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

CM Naim, a scholar and teacher who improvised to connect with students in America

Mehr Farooqi in The Indian Express: Last night, a friend called to give me the sad news of Naim sahib’s passing. He had not been too well since suffering a stroke a couple of years ago but after returning from rehab his spirit was as indomitable as ever. He relished writing and w … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Memories Without Brains

Matthew Sims at Aeon Magazine: During the COVID-19 pandemic, some people took up baking, others decided to get a dog; I chose to grow and observe slime mould. The study in my partner’s flat in Edinburgh became home to two cultures of Physarum polycephalum, an acellular slime moul … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Can Free Speech and the Federal Trade Commission Get Along?

by Ken MacVey Since 1914, the Federal Trade Commission ‘s mission has been to enforce civil antitrust and unfair competition/consumer protection laws. The question is whether this mission has been supplanted—whether the FTC under Trump 2 .0 is becoming the Federal Political Truth … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Pocket And The Archaeology Of Self

by Brooks Riley RIP Pocket (aka Read It Later) 2007-July 8, 2025 The recent announcement of Mozilla’s shutdown of the Pocket app caught me by surprise. It felt as if the rug was being pulled out from under me—the rug being a motley weave of all the online articles and stories I’v … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Chastity Unbelted

by Priya Malhotra Virtue wasn’t always gentle. In ancient Rome, virtus was a word of force and visibility. It came from the Latin word vir, meaning “man,” and encompassed ideals of military bravery, civic leadership, and public excellence. A virtuous man was someone who acted dec … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Former CIA officer Andrew Bustamante introduces the concept of the economy of secrets

Andrew Bustamante at Big Think: When you accept that other people have secrets, and they will always have secrets, you are preparing yourself for a much more predictable, much more successful future. Because once you accept that reality, you can start applying behaviors, practice … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

A reflection on the life of the mind in the era of artificial intelligence

Jeremy Shapiro at Persuasion: The Thinker just discovered, with a mix of awe and quiet dread, that ChatGPT—a machine—could write his latest policy memo better and faster than he could. He had asked it, on a whim, to summarize the security implications of EU strategic autonomy. In … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Azeem Azhar: What 72hrs in China taught me about the future of AI, EVs, and more

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@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

How Immigrants and Other ESL Students Make American English Their Own

Megan C. Reynolds at Literary Hub: I was born in the United States and therefore speak American English, because, aside from a brief few years in my childhood when my father assured me that my first language was Mandarin Chinese (my mother’s native tongue), I was raised in an Eng … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

André Aciman with John Turturro

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Thursday Poem

The Where in my Belly Scientists say my brain and heart are 73 percent water— they underestimate me. A small island—minis, I emerged among Minnesota’s northern lakes, the where of maanomin—wild rice in my belly. I am from boats and canoes and kayaks, from tribal ghosts who rise a … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

US–Iran Relations: 1953

Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily: How far back must we go to understand the roots of the long enmity between Iran and the United States? A good place to start is the Iran Hostage Crisis, sparked forty-six years ago after the US ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, sought protection and … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Museums With Smells

Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker: This past August, in a windowless room of the British Library, in London, Tasha Marks was enacting her own form of time travel. Marks is a scent designer who works with museums, heritage sites, and other cultural spaces to create odors that can … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Sticks and Stones and Spider Silk: The Remarkable Toolkits of Nest Building Birds

by David Greer Standing face to face with an Anna’s hummingbird hovering a foot or two from my nose, I felt a little mesmerized. Anna’s hummingbirds tend to have that effect on me. They’re otherworldly creatures, with a world of mystery packed into a body that weighs not much mor … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

I Wanted to Play Caliban

by Nils Peterson Freedom, high-day! High-day, freedom! Freedom, high-day, freedom! 1. One summer, roughly forty years ago, I set off to a Florida seaside town to participate in a three-week summer stock version of The Tempest. It was designed for academics who had something to do … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

This Week’s Photograph

Storm clouds rolled in just as the sun was setting in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star

Mark O’Connell in The Guardian: Jimmy Donaldson, the 27-year-old online content creator and entrepreneur known as MrBeast, is by any reasonable metric one of the most popular entertainers on the planet. His YouTube channel, to which he posts his increasingly elaborate and expensi … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

AI can help, or hurt, our thinking

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: I increasingly find people asking me “does AI damage your brain?” It’s a revealing question. Not because AI causes literal brain damage (it doesn’t) but because the question itself shows how deeply we fear what AI might do to our ability to thin … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

How Liquid Dampers in Skyscrapers Work

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@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Walt Whitman Would Have Hated This

Elisa New in the New York Times: In 1865, the poet Walt Whitman asked: O what shall I hang on the chamber walls? And what shall the pictures be that I hang on the walls, To adorn the burial-house of him I love? I have always loved these three lines from Whitman’s elegy “When Lila … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Shadow of a Doubt: How OCD came to haunt American life

Andrew Kay in Harper’s Magazine: “I want y’all to walk to the sign that represents the kind of OCD you most identify with,” announces the moderator, a young woman named Angie Bello who sits cross-legged on the carpet and whose service doodle, Sully, has docked his submarine snout … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Stress is wrecking your health: how can science help?

Lynne Peeples in Nature: George Slavich recalls the final hours he spent with his father. It was a laughter-packed day. His father even broke into the song ‘You Are My Sunshine’ over dinner. “His deep, booming, joyful voice filled the entire restaurant,” says Slavich. “I was semi … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Forbidden Manuals of Exorcism Magic

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@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Wednesday Poem

Gaza the Immortal City I walk through the city of the immortals, Burnt bodies, broken limbs and shreds of flesh hung down from their white bones, Like mummies they lie marinated in Pyramids amid pots and utensils, Sometimes I hear eerie sounds coming out of their hollow skeletons … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Gary Shteyngart on Channeling a Precocious Child Narrator

Gary Shteyngart and Jane Ciabattari at Lit Hub: Vera, the buzzy, brilliant and preternaturally observant ten-year-old central to Gary Shteyngart’s sardonic and profoundly relevant new novel, brings a fresh, necessary perspective to our evolving dystopian universe. Her anxieties a … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Artisanal Readers: On Jonathan Kramnick’s Criticism and Truth

by Christopher Hall It is now close to 20 years since I completed my Ph.D. in English, and, truth be told, I’m still not exactly sure what I accomplished in doing so. There was, of course, the mundane concern about what I was thinking in spending so many of what ought to have bee … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

A Love Letter to Vermeer

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine: Does anyone write love letters anymore? We send emails. Or worse, texts, emoji. Fast, short, disposable. Once, love letters were slow to make and slower to arrive. They were keepsakes, confessions, feelings made physical. They had form. They were … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Imagining, for Grown-Ups: On Perfect Parents

by Lei Wang I solemnly swear this is not a column complaining about my parents. But the first time I listened to this ten-minute meditation on Imagining Ideal Parents by the clinical psychologist and Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dan Brown, I cried the entire way through. Also the sec … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Catspeak

by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Why Illiberalism Explains Changes in Today’s Social Order

Marlene Laruelle in the Politics and Rights Review: Scholarship on populism has dominated the last two decades but is now retreating in the face of a new concept that seems better equipped to capture the current transformations in our society: that of illiberalism. Illiberalism e … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Book Review: “Is A River Alive?”

Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: Nature writer Robert Macfarlane will need little introduction, having authored a string of successful books on people, landscape, and language. I was impressed by his 2019 book Underland, so when Is a River Alive? was announced, I decide … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

David Deutsch: “There is only one interpretation of quantum mechanics”

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@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

The End of America’s Exorbitant Privilege

Desmond Lachman at Project Syndicate: When he was France’s finance minister in the 1960s, former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing famously complained about the “exorbitant privilege” that the dollar’s position as the world’s leading reserve currency conferred on the Unit … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Peter Thiel And The Antichrist

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@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Tuesday Poem

How Things Happen Rain comes when it will. It doesn’t care for us. It’s hitchhiking its way to the sea on a cloud. The sun is interested in its own fires. If light comes, so be it. Bees feel an itch on their legs only nectar can sooth. So many gifts from indifferent givers. We… | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Who Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Really Helps

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@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Moss Medicines: The Next Revolution in Biotech?

Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist: Moss is an often-overlooked, ancient plant that is far from insignificant. Among the first to colonize land, mosses greened the planet and transformed Earth’s climate, providing an oxygen-rich atmosphere that allowed animals to evolve.1 These har … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Jewish And Christian Thinking

Olga Litvak at The Hedgehog Review: From the Christian perspective, the hyphen is a sign of Jewish translatability; but the same sign, read, we might say, from right to left, also points to a more confrontational reality, that of Jewish resistance to being translated (elevated) i … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Nettie Jones’s Classic Novel

Harmony Holiday at Bookforum: Fish Tales, released this spring in a new edition and still pioneering decades after its first run, slices into the flesh of the novel of ideas with events and characters who loom so large they leave no room for indulgent ideological abstractions; th … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago