Nicole Johnson at Al Jazeera: A husband and wife, lying in their bedroom, their baby in her crib in the adjacent nursery. A typical family on a typical morning, minus the red bloodstains on the beige bedroom carpet and the pink and white striped wallpaper behind the crib. All thr … | Continue reading
Gary Marcus in The Road to AI We Can Trust: People may no longer believe that horses can do math, but they do want to believe that a new kind of “artificial general intelligence [AGI]”, capable of doing math, understanding human language, and so much more, is here or nearly here. … | Continue reading
From The Point Magazine: What does it mean for a number to exist? In the philosophy of mathematics, there are two general camps when it comes to numbers: there are the Platonists—or the “realists”—who think numbers somehow really exist, and there are the constructivists, who thin … | Continue reading
Kathleen Frydl in The Conversation: The United States may regard itself as a “leader of the free world,” but an index of development released in July 2022 places the country much farther down the list. In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development d … | Continue reading
Landscapes that Remind Me of My Children Utica is a pretty and quiet country When I was at the bus station my son would say to me, ‘mom, I am hungry’ and a man who was sweeping came up to me and told me to come and I went and he bought him a hamburger… | Continue reading
Amir Levine in The Washington Post: For humans, biologically speaking, soul mates are entirely real. But just like all relationships, soul mates can be complicated. Of course, there isn’t a scientifically agreed-upon definition for “soul mate.” But humans are in a small club in t … | Continue reading
Meilan Solly in The Smithsonian: At its height in the 1840s, the West African kingdom of Dahomey boasted an army so fierce that its enemies spoke of its “prodigious bravery.” This 6,000-strong force, known as the Agojie, raided villages under cover of darkness, took captives and … | Continue reading
Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar: There is no limit to human megalomania. One recent example – which went largely unnoticed during this torrid and neurotic summer – was a bizarre exchange between NASA Administrator Bill Nelson and the Chinese authorities. ‘We must be very concerned that … | Continue reading
John Burn-Murdoch in the FT (image © Bloomberg): Where would you rather live? A society where the rich are extraordinarily rich and the poor are very poor, or one where the rich are merely very well off but even those on the lowest incomes also enjoy a decent standard of living? … | Continue reading
Lucio Baccaro in Phenomenal World: On September 25, Italians will be called to elect a new Parliament. The snap election follows on the heels of the collapse of the government in late July and the resignation of former European Central Bank (ECB) President Mario Draghi. That the … | Continue reading
Robert Scott in the LA Review of Books: “IT IS EASIER to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.” I feel ambivalent about this familiar saying, not because I disagree with it, but because it has been overused to the point of losing its force, its … | Continue reading
A Modified Villanelle for My Childhood — with some help from Ahmad I wanna write lyrical, but all I got is magical. My book needs a poem talkin bout I remember when Something more autobiographical Mi familia wanted to assimilate, nothing radical, Each month was a struggle to pay … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian: When young Serge Diaghilev set out to save an art form, ballet was not his first choice. The law student from the unpromising city of Perm in the Urals had started the 20th century by wanting to be a composer, until he showed his music to Rimsky-Ko … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai at the NYT: The grand title of Andrea Wulf’s new book is wonderfully sneaky — at least that’s how I chose to read it, considering that “Magnificent Rebels” happens to recount plenty of unmagnificent squabbling among a coterie of extremely fallible humans. Wulf’s e … | Continue reading
From Daily Freeman: More here. | Continue reading
Michael Cavna in The Washington Post: Several decades ago, it took a stand-up comedian like Steven Wright to work in shades of the brilliantly surreal when he deadpanned: “It’s a small world. But I wouldn’t want to paint it.” Today, it takes a humorous NASA roboticist turned popu … | Continue reading
Stefan Collini in The Nation: The idea of an “avant-garde” tends to inspire complex emotions, oscillating between excitement at its glamour and scorn at its pretensions. The term carries an association of being daring, experimental, unconventional; the main body of practice or op … | Continue reading
Jonathan Day in The Conversation: As a medical entomologist who’s worked with mosquitoes for more than 40 years, I’m often asked why some people seem to be mosquito magnets while others are oblivious to these blood-feeding pests buzzing all around them. Most mosquito species, alo … | Continue reading
Shadi Hamid in First Things: The Middle East was ahead of its time—and certainly ahead of the West—on at least one thing: existential debates over culture, identity, and religion. During the heady, sometimes frightening days of the Arab Spring, the region was struggling over some … | Continue reading
David Frum in The Atlantic: In 2016, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump was a fool who could be baited with a tweet. This past Thursday night, in Philadelphia, Joe Biden upped the ante by asking, in effect: What idiot thing might the former president do if baited with a who … | Continue reading
Tim Hornyak in Nature: By 2050, nearly 7 out of 10 people in the world will live in cities, up from just over half in 2020. Urbanization is nothing new, but an effort is under way across many high-income countries to make their cities smarter, using data, instrumentation and more … | 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
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 Ashutosh Jogalekar It wasn’t very long ago that I was rather enamored with the New Atheist movement, of which the most prominent proponent was Richard Dawkins. I remember having marathon debates with a religious roommate of mine in graduate school about religion as the “root o … | Continue reading
Ambedo— n. a kind of melancholic trance in which you become completely absorbed in vivid sensory details . . . which lead to a dawning awareness of the fragility of life . . . —The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows Ambedo I am a boy, my brain’s transfixed, not seized like a spent eng … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers When I ask students what they were most interested in, or at least what they remember most, from their “Introduction to Ethics” or “Intro to Philosophy” class, it’s remarkable how many offer the same answer. It seems they all remember Robert Nozick’s “Experience Ma … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa In May of 2020 we lost John Conway [0]. We discussed some of his mathematical accomplishments here at 3QD. He was a true original. At the time, I deliberately avoided discussing Conway’s most famous work: the Game of Life. Like a 60s rock band, Conway had mixed … | Continue reading
Kon Trubkovich. The Antepenultimate End, 2019. Oil on canvas. More here and here. Thanks to Alia Raza for the introduction. | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley ‘Every situation in life, indeed every moment, is of infinite value, because it represents an entire eternity.’ –Johann Wolfgang von Goethe It seems we’re always tinkering with those eternities, not just to cherish their value or find their meaning, but to transf … | Continue reading
by David Oates I was trying to get at something about living in the Pacific Northwest, something about the past and the future merging, blending. The way a forest can be that and can stand for that, both reality and symbol. A walk in deep woods, its distant past present as soil u … | Continue reading
by Ethan Seavey My last night in the house on Euclid Avenue will go one of two ways: A. When I climb through a window in my bedroom (which will no longer be my bedroom tomorrow) and onto the flat roof outside in order to smoke the very last bowl of cannabis in my home… | Continue reading
by Eric Bies Jean-François Millet, a Frenchman, frowned beneath his full beard as he lay dying in Barbizon. It was 1875, and he was not to be confused with Claude Monet—not yet—who would later paint water lilies and haystacks but wasn’t, in 1875, rich and famous; on the contrary— … | Continue reading
Moonrise from my office window some days ago. | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth –Philip Larkin Wordsworth as the poet of loss and lack William Wordsworth’s poetry can seem all too familiar, what with all that wandering lonely as a cloud. But he is stranger than we often remember him. Ta … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. As with game theory, I also attended some courses in Berkeley in another relatively new subject for me, Psychology and Economics (later called Behavioral Economics). In particular I liked the course jointly t … | Continue reading
Charles Blattberg in The Hedgehog Review: Imagine someone told you that politics is a “great game,” that when citizens respect just principles, they do so “in much the same way that players have the shared end to execute a good and fair play of the game.” You would probably wonde … | Continue reading
Steven Strogatz in Quanta: Isaac Newton was not known for his generosity of spirit, and his disdain for his rivals was legendary. But in one letter to his competitor Gottfried Leibniz, now known as the Epistola Posterior, Newton comes off as nostalgic and almost friendly. In it, … | Continue reading
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Jaeyeon Yoo at Words Without Borders: JY: Right—I think we tend to assume that the best translation is the most understandable, but I found your postscript to delightfully complicate that assumption. You also wrote that there was a lot of English in the German original; I wondere … | Continue reading