Naming Like a blur of rain on the real world. And no one denies the great utility For comptrollers of imperial households, For quartermaster-sergeants, For grocer’s assistants, For museum curators; For taxonomists and schoolboys, Pundits and critics. And if the name becomes the t … | Continue reading
Stephanie Ross in Psyche: Consider the many different purposes that can be served by conversation. Of course, we speak with others – and to ourselves! – to impart information. But we also exchange words to ask questions, forge connections, vent emotions, change attitudes, gain st … | Continue reading
Stuart Ritchie in Science Fictions: Six years ago, the psychologist Michael Inzlicht told Slate magazine that “meta-analyses are fucked”. It’s always stuck with me – the clash between that statement and how we’re meant to feel about meta-analyses. They’re supposed to be the highe … | Continue reading
Aida Amoako in JSTOR Daily: In the past, hosts like Johnny Carson and Jay Leno avoided taking partisan stances so they wouldn’t alienate half their viewers. Letterman and his successor, Conan O’Brien, did the same for the most part. In more recent years, journalists have discusse … | Continue reading
Akin Adeṣọkan at The Current: Birago Diop was a brilliant high-school student in Senegal. During his final exam, he made the unusual mistake of misconjugating a French verb, an error that was to prove fateful for his career. With a wry, self-deprecating smile past the camera, Dio … | Continue reading
Laura Marris at The Paris Review: The Plague was not an easy book to write. Camus was ill when he began it, then trapped by the borders keeping him in Nazi-occupied France. Aside from these difficulties, there was the pressure of authentically speaking up about the violence of Wo … | Continue reading
Lessons “What’s a patriot, Dad? Hey, Dad! ‘Earth to Dad— Earth to Dad!’ Get your nose out of the newspaper! Help me with my homework! What’s a patriot, Dad?” “Well, I guess, a person who loves the land. Although some people act as if a patriot’s a man who hates another land.” “He … | Continue reading
Steven Strogatz in Quanta Magazine: Why do we sleep anyway? We spend about a third of our lives asleep, so it seems like it must be pretty important. But there’s still so much about it that we don’t understand. One thing that sleep researchers are pretty sure of is that every sys … | Continue reading
Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist: In the last decades, science has taught us that the mammalian brain isn’t always entirely awake or asleep. Dolphins can swim with one hemisphere asleep while the other is alert, and some neurons in sleep-deprived rats can “switch off” while t … | Continue reading
Sabine Hossenfelder in The Guardian: Imagine you go to a zoology conference. The first speaker talks about her 3D model of a 12-legged purple spider that lives in the Arctic. There’s no evidence it exists, she admits, but it’s a testable hypothesis, and she argues that a mission … | Continue reading
Iris Berent in the Los Angeles Times: Parenting can make you wonder about human nature. If you have kids, you might have noticed their differences early on. When my infant son first heard music, his eyes grew big, and his gaze got intense. My infant daughter was clearly the peopl … | Continue reading
Zoha Tunio in Undark: The southwestern province of Balochistan and the southern province of Sindh have been the worst hit, with more than 500,000 people currently living in shelters. Across the country more than 750,000 livestock have died and over 3 million acres of agricultural … | Continue reading
Jane Hu and other writers at n+1: AT EVERY JOB I’ve ever had in fashion there’s always a certain brand or designer or aesthetic that gets adopted by everyone, no matter their taste or preference, for good reason: it’s good. For the job I most recently worked, I still see it the s … | Continue reading
Salley Vickers at Literary Review: There is a well-attested connection between being a good doctor and being a good writer (think Keats). Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, published in 2014, achieved unlikely but deserved success, and among his many praiseworthy qualities is … | Continue reading
Mohammed Hanif in The New Yorker: We have tried, in various ways, to convey to the world the scale of destruction caused by recent floods in Pakistan, because, apparently, a third of the country underwater and thirty-three million lives upended doesn’t cut it. Pakistan’s climate … | Continue reading
Jonathan Guyer in Vox: It was not an isolated incident of police violence in Iran. But the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody last week has captured the country’s attention. Amini was visiting the capital of Tehran, coming from the Kurdish province in the country’ … | Continue reading
Moonlit Apples At the top of the house the apples are laid in rows, And the skylight lets the moonlight in, and those Apples are deep-sea apples of green. There goes A cloud on the moon in the autumn night. A mouse in the wainscot scratches, and scratches, and then There is no so … | 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 you will get the added benefit of not seeing any distracting ads. Thank you! NEW POSTS BELOW | Continue reading
Editor’s Note: Frans de Waal’s new book, Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist, has generated some controversy and misunderstanding. He will address these issues in a series of short essays which will be published at 3QD and can all be seen in one place here. More … | Continue reading
by David J. Lobina A central property of human thought is the ability to combine two propositions (or thoughts) into complex mental representations, an exemplified by the so-called compound sentences from language, such as the triangle is yellow AND/OR the square is blue, where e … | Continue reading
“ A colossal weariness and also disgust at the thought that it takes a lot of hatred, a lot of zeal, to push a knife deep into someone’s eye. It is beyond the edge of human cruelty. And only an intact ideology, not available to disprove in any way, could bring you to the point.”… | Continue reading
by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog) What does the word “utopia” mean to the battle-scarred denizens of the twenty-first century? A shockingly unscientific survey of the nine or ten people I buttonholed last week suggests that the key connotations of the word are: ideal, per … | Continue reading
By Andrea Scrima It’s said that European societies are always about assimilation, and that’s almost true, but not entirely. Minority cultures alter the dominant culture in subtle ways. My twenty-one-year-old son speaks with a Turkish-inflected accent he shares with most boys his … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Public Garden Water Feature, Boston. June 2022. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Varun Gauri Effective altruism is having a moment. Books in the field are getting prominent reviews, the Effective Altruism Global conference took place in Washington DC this past weekend, and the movement now has the backing of at least a couple tech billionaires. Not bad for … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey There are a number of videos circulating on the web that show angry white people screaming at Mexicans and Mexican-Americans to “Go back to where you came from!” It takes a special brand of stupid for, say, a Texan living in a town with a name like Llano located in … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela How would you account for the following weird experience? Do you have a handy explanation, or do you dismiss it outright? When I was twelve, Dad used to drop me off in the twilight in front of the parish across town to serve Mass, usually a Wednesday before dawn, … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook The intermittent taps on the roof roused me from a deep sleep, and then I remembered the acorns. The acorns had begun dropping. It was the first week of September, the days were still warm, and the leaves were still green. The leaves wouldn’t turn colors and … | Continue reading
Flowers outside the Music School in Brixen, South Tyrol. | Continue reading
by David S. Greer John Keats can be forgiven for overlooking the spiders in his ode “To Autumn”. Who can blame him for accentuating the positive, given the health issues that eventually overcame him, barely 25, in his rude room by the foot of the Spanish Steps? My sometime island … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. The international academic conference circuit—for an amusing account of such circuits, one may read the British writer David Lodge’s novel Small World, which is second in his trilogy of campus novels, the fir … | Continue reading
Joanna Williams in Spiked: The word ‘bravery’ is applied all too liberally nowadays. A posh actress tells the world she is non-binary and wants to be called ‘they / them’? How brave! An ageing television presenter comes out as gay? So brave! Footballers kneel for Black Lives Matt … | Continue reading
Your Data is Political Your presence rises from scavenging: pages and words and webs and signs. You’ve become a target but without the old spy store gadgets. I’d like to know what you know, not just your count. I click on you, then you click back, precious darling surface. We add … | Continue reading
Donna Dennis in The Paris Review: Ted and I saw one another off and on for about five years. In the spring of 1970, we lived together on Saint Mark’s Place in the East Village, until June, when Ted went to teach a course in Buffalo. I moved into the artists Rudy Burckhardt and Yv … | Continue reading
Benj Edwards in Ars Technica: The arrival of widely available image synthesis models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has provoked an intense online battle between artists who view AI-assisted artwork as a form of theft (more on that below) and artists who enthusiastically … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Pioneer Works: Of Euclid’s five postulates, which form the basis of Euclidean geometry, the fifth is the most controversial. Called the Parallel Postulate, it’s a pretty basic idea. Take a flat piece of paper, draw a line segment and then draw two lines that are p … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten: Janus (pseudonym by request) works at AI alignment startup Conjecture. Their hobby, which is suspiciously similar to their work, is getting GPT-3 to do interesting things. For example, with the right prompts, you can get stories where the char … | Continue reading
Nick Young in Psyche: As you read this article, time will seem to pass. Right now, you are reading these words, but now you are reading these ones. What was present just an instant ago seems to have already slipped into the past. You will carry this feeling with you – as objects … | Continue reading
David M. Higgins talks to Ajit George in LA Review of Books: JOURNEYS THROUGH THE RADIANT CITADEL is the first Dungeons & Dragons product of its kind in the game’s nearly 50-year history written entirely by authors of color. In addition to the 16 Black and Brown writers who contr … | Continue reading
From a conservative but unorthodox side of the spectrum, Chris Griswold in American Compass: Aristotle uses the term “civic friendship” to describe the bonds that emerge from a sense of common purpose in a shared political project. “Citizens are civic friends,” the Aristotelian p … | Continue reading