On Yasmine El Rashidi’s “Laughter in the Dark” and Egyptian Festival Rap

Peter Holslin in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Mahraganat (which means “festivals” in Arabic) is made primarily by self-taught young men from lower-class backgrounds, whose songs are considered brash, even vulgar, because they rap and sing openly about their lives with seldom … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 hours ago

In the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta: Breaking down food requires coordination across dozens of cell types and many tissues — from muscle cells and immune cells to blood and lymphatic vessels. Heading this effort is the gut’s very own network of nerve cells, known as the enteric nervous … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 hours ago

The Surprising Genius of Sewing Machines

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@3quarksdaily.com | 3 hours ago

Is OpenAI approaching AGI?

Tomas Pueyo, quoting Nathan Labenz in Uncharted Territories: I determined that GPT-4 was approaching human expert performance. Critically, it was also *totally amoral*. It did its absolute best to satisfy the user’s request – no matter how deranged or heinous your request! One ti … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 hours ago

Please Help Keep 3QD Running, Dear Reader!

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


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Theories of What Makes You, You

by Tim Sommers One time, this guy handed me a picture of him and said, ‘Here’s a picture of me when I was younger.’ Every picture is of you when you were younger. – Mitch Hedberg There’s synchronic identity, what makes you, you at a particular moment in time – say, now. And there … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

What are the odds?

by Jonathan Kujawa In 2016, here and here at 3QD, we talked about some of the inherent paradoxes in democratic voting [1]. We discussed Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, along with related results like the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem. They tell us that there is no way to convert t … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Monday Poem

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@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

The case for American scientific patriotism

by Ashutosh Jogalekar John von Neumann emigrated from Hungary in 1933 and settled in Princeton, NJ. During World War 2, he contributed a key idea to the design of the plutonium bomb at Los Alamos. After the war he became a highly sought-after government consultant and did importa … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Gerrymander Unbound

by Jerry Cayford A friend of mine covers his Facebook tracks. He follows groups from across the political spectrum so that no one can pigeonhole him. He has friends and former colleagues who, he figures, will be among the armed groups going door to door purging enemies, if our so … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Perceptions

Khalil Rabah. About The Museum, 2004. Mixed media installation; wooden box, glass, 11 olive trees, text; More here, here, and here. | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

What Art Can Do

by Christopher Horner Why do we value art? I am going to suggest that a large part of the answer is to do with its unique power to disclose and convey areas of our lives unavailable to us though other means. Art, on this account, is a kind of communication, and kind of act: somet … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Catspeak

by Brooks Riley | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Relentlessness

by O. Del Fabbro If a city could be an organism, then Kherson in Eastern Ukraine would be a sick body. For eight months, between March and November 2022, Kherson was occupied by Russian forces. Kidnapping, torture, and murder – in terms of violence and cruelty, Kherson’s citizens … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Monday Photo

At my brother Javed’s house in Karachi last night. | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Exile + the Full Moon

by Ethan Seavey  Exile is on my mind and there’s a large full moon above my head I cannot see through the clouds.  I am part of a family of three exiles who are doing it again, recovering after exile, and working hard to stay together. Our shared communities have dropped us for t … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

What is it like to be a crab?

Kristin Andrews in Aeon: Twenty-five years ago, the burgeoning science of consciousness studies was rife with promise. With cutting-edge neuroimaging tools leading to new research programmes, the neuroscientist Christof Koch was so optimistic, he bet a case of wine that we’d unco … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Sean Carroll on a feature of nature that is frequently misunderstood: quanta

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe: The basic issue is that people hear the phrase “quantum mechanics,” or even take a course in it, and come away with the impression that reality is somehow pixelized — made up of smallest possible units — rather than being ultimately smooth a … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

the Age-Old Tension Between Doing Good and Making Money

S. Mitra Kalita in Time Magazine: On Monday of last week, I joined women from around the world at the Reykjavík Global Forum in Iceland, to talk democracy, technology, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. Four days later, Sam Altman was suddenly fired from his role as … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Sunday Poem

Sudden Sketch Poem Gary’s sink has a shroud burlap the rub brush tinware plout leans on right side like a red woman’s hair the faucet leaks little lovedrops The teacup’s upsidedown with visions of green mountains and brown lousy Chinese mysterious up heights The frying pan’s stil … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Being a Journalist in Gaza

Youmna El Sayed at The Nation: Things in Gaza have been in constant deterioration. Every single day that passes, new crises are compounded over the crises that already exist. It’s been over 40 days of non-stop bombardment. I’ve been saying many times throughout my coverage that w … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Your Mind’s in the Hands of Everything: Letting go of Philip Roth

Hannah Gold in Harper’s Magazine: It is difficult to predict when one will spend the night at a hotel in Newark, let alone three, and uncommon to agree to such a scenario willingly. If you live there already, you stay home. If you’re there for a professional engagement, your boss … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

What the OpenAI drama means for AI progress — and safety

Nicola Jones in Nature: OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, California, was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization. In 2019, it shifted to an unusual capped-profit model, with a board explicitly not accountable to shareholders or investors, including Microsoft. In the … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Herbert Gold (1924 – 2023) Novelist

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@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Joss Ackland (1928 – 2023) Actor

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@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1929 – 2023) Historian

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@3quarksdaily.com | 1 day ago

Can We Imagine a World Without Work?

Rachel Fraser in Boston Review: In 1980 Frances Gabe applied for a patent for a self-cleaning house. The design was based on her own home, which she had worked on for more than a decade. Each room had a sprinkler system installed; at the push of a button, Gabe could send sudsy wa … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Insomniac Visions

Saul Nelson in Sidecar: Philip Guston didn’t sleep well. The first room in Tate Modern’s current retrospective is hung with two late images of insomnia: a painting, Legend (1977) and a print, Painter (1980). They show different stages of the same sickness. Legend has the painter … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Ethics has no foundation

Andrew Sepielli in Aeon: Many academic fields can be said to ‘study morality’. Of these, the philosophical sub-discipline of normative ethics studies morality in what is arguably the least alienated way. Rather than focusing on how people and societies think and talk about morali … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

The Funniest Boys on SNL Just Came Out With Their First Movie. It’s Hilarious

Dan Kois in Slate: Is it appropriate to call the three members of the sketch comedy group Please Don’t Destroy “boys”? They are grown men, in a sense, with jobs (Saturday Night Live writers) and, one assumes, growing 401(k)s. They’re in their mid-to-late 20s, six years into a car … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Cheers | Thanksgiving Food Fight

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@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Saturday Poem

American Myth I flew out of bradley snow sick & tired of lawyers      rocked back over erie’s shivering green gunk    saw the fat fingered river that cuts down american belly     coasts of nebraska chalk dust plains      & jagged white slung rocky & sierra nevada mountains this l … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

Q* – Clues to the Puzzle?

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@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

‘The Revolutionary Temper’ by Robert Darnton

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian: “The ancien regime”, as applied to 18th-century France, always sounds like such a solid proposition. It speaks of arbitrary power, stiffened with protocol, girded by gold, topped by a dusting of icing sugar (you could always spot a noble by their t … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

The Second World War In Diaries And Memoirs

Caroline Alexander at the New York Times: This format ensures an extraordinary — and bewildering — range of striking details. We learn that the bloated bodies of those who died in German U-boat attacks wash up along the coastline of Savannah, Ga.; that at the Treblinka death camp … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 2 days ago

The Busy Person’s Intro To LLMs

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@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

The Two Milan Kunderas

Alena Dvořáková at the Dublin Review of Books: The good Kundera – the best-known twentieth century Czech writer – has been ubiquitous, his work available in many languages. Meanwhile, the darker Kundera – a constant presence on the Czech scene, the Kundera of Laughable Loves and  … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Chatting With Joel Meyerowitz

Charlotte Kent and Joel Meyerowitz at The Brooklyn Rail: Charlotte Kent (Rail): Photography often gets discussed in terms of its stillness, of capturing or freezing a moment. But, in Where I Find Myself (2018) you wrote about watching Robert Frank and discovering photography’s mo … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

How an alliance between psychologists and advertisers at the turn of the 20th century taught us how to measure (and monetize) human attention

D. Graham Burnett at Asterisk: Our eyes are worth money. We know that, now. It has become a commonplace that our “attention economy” is functionally an eyeball economy. But how did eyeballs come to look like dollar signs? Let’s dig into what we might think of as the original Faus … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

The future is quantum: universities look to train engineers for an emerging industry

Sophia Chen in Nature: Many industries are betting that they will benefit from the anticipated quantum-computing revolution. Pharmaceutical companies and electric-vehicle manufacturers have begun to explore the use of quantum computers in chemistry simulations for drug discovery … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

You Can’t Fact Check Propaganda

Jonathan D. Teubner and Paul W. Gleason in The Hedgehog Review: As news of Hamas’s murderous October 7 surprise attack on Israel started to circulate in the global information space, so too did the propaganda. According to one estimate, the Israel-Hamas war sparked the highest vo … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Ilya Sutskever: The Exciting, Perilous Journey Toward AGI

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@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

The Miracle of Photography

Ed Simon in The Millions: More shadows than men, really; just silhouettes, might as well be smudges on the lens. Hard to notice at first, the two undifferentiated figures in the lower left-hand of the picture, at the corner of the Boulevard du Temple. A bootblack squats down and … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

You Are When You Eat

Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist: The rhythm of life is hardwired into our DNA. More than forty percent of the human genes that code for proteins sync transcription to a twenty-four-hour cycle.1 A small hub of neurons deep inside the brain acts as a timekeeper, translating visual … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 3 days ago

Kenneth Branagh and De-Poiroting Hercule Poirot

Frank Falisi at Crime Reads: Branagh’s Poirot films occupy an increasingly strange place in the increasingly weird ecosystem: the twenty-first century metroplex. Murder on the Orient Express (2017) entered an economy still starry on the possibilities of IP-mining, as top-grossing … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

The Crisis in Medicine: A Provocation

Akshay Pendyal in Persuasion: Modern biomedicine has, of course, delivered breakthrough treatments over the past century, treatments which have transformed the care of diseases which were once considered incurable. Aspirin for heart attacks. Insulin for diabetes. Potent antibioti … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Yuval Noah Harari: The return of wars, explained

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@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago

Can We Imagine a World Without Work?

Rachel Fraser in the Boston Review: Cleaning, like cooking, childbearing, and breastfeeding, is a paradigm case of reproductive labor. Reproductive labor is a special form of work. It doesn’t itself produce commodities (coffee pots, silicon chips); rather, it’s the form of work t … | Continue reading


@3quarksdaily.com | 4 days ago