by Tim Sommers The first time I tried to take a shower in Italy, I stubbed my toe, tripped, and smacked my face into the shower wall. In fact, I did that pretty much every time I took a shower there. Turns out it is not that uncommon there to have a 4-inch barrier that… | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If yo … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Colorscape, Celestun, Mexico. March 2025. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Brooks Riley in Art at First Sight: In the recent K-Drama Our Unwritten Seoul, a simple wooden chair emerges as the iconic stand-in (or sit-in) for a young farmer’s late grandfather, whose favorite chair it had once been. Broken and mended multiple times, patched together with ta … | Continue reading
Webb Wright in Quanta: To generate images, diffusion models use a process known as denoising. They convert an image into digital noise (an incoherent collection of pixels), then reassemble it. It’s like repeatedly putting a painting through a shredder until all you have left is a … | Continue reading
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Amanda Coakley in The Guardian: The trouble started with a dead cat. For years, the people of Seibersdorf had lived amicably alongside their most famous resident, more or less. True, there had been an incident when a neighbour complained about the smell of her horses. And yes, th … | Continue reading
Bob Holmes in Knowable Magazine: After a train carrying chemicals derailed and caught fire in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023, residents were exposed to carcinogens such as vinyl chloride, acrolein and dioxin. Since tumors are typically slow to develop, it could take decades to kno … | Continue reading
Edd Gent in Singularity Hub: Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the Human Genome Project produced a complete map of our … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Kostina at Aeon Magazine: By 1997, Moscow’s skyline was transformed when a vast golden dome, long absent, rose once again over the city. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour had returned. The dome-topped structure now standing along the Moskva River is a near-exact repli … | Continue reading
Stephanie Bastek and Jonathan Gould at The American Scholar: On June 5, 1975, on the seedy stage of CBGB on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, a band named Talking Heads took the stage for the first time. Unlike the Ramones, for whom they were opening, they weren’t sporting black … | Continue reading
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by Ashutosh Jogalekar After World War II ended, there began a running debate between American scientists and the American government about how to properly wield the fearsome nuclear power that America had discovered and unleashed. The government believed that this power could be … | Continue reading
by David Beer Lana Del Rey exists in a meticulously crafted world of her own. It’s a world apart. I purchased an invite to drop-by this summer, so that I might glimpse its finer details. Along with the crowd at the Anfield stadium in Liverpool, I was standing at its perimeter, ga … | Continue reading
If you talk about it, it’s not Tao If you name it, it’s something else What can’t be named is eternal Naming splits the eternal to smithereens ………………………….. —Lao Tzu, 6th Century BC Lao Tzu’s Lament At first I think, I’ve got it— Then I think, Oh no, that’s not it. I think, it’s m … | Continue reading
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Justin Jouvenal in The Washington Post: Dissenting — again — on the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, in its most high-profile case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson did not mince words. She had for months plainly criticized the opinions of her conservative colleagues, trading t … | Continue reading
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Even Though A = pi r squared even if a body continues to fall 32 feet per second per second which I hope it will continue to do nevertheless after careful calculation and by the grace of algebra I am persuaded that if truth is a number not only is it never in the back… | Continue reading
by Steve Szilagyi How would you act as a great ship slipped beneath the waves? Freeze? Panic? Leap into the sea? If you were a man, would you quietly help women and children into the lifeboats? We all wonder. Elbert Hubbard wondered too. In 1912, less than a month after the Titan … | Continue reading
by Philip Graham Ross Barkan is certainly having a moment. His third and most ambitious novel, Glass Century, set in New York and encompassing over fifty years of the city’s history, has recently been published and is enjoying a raucously enthusiastic critical reception. I wasn’t … | Continue reading
Sam Dresser at Psyche: I was intrigued to read about a proposed ‘unified framework’ for capturing how people see relationships. Researchers asked people from 19 world regions to rate the features of various types of relationships, ranging from siblings to leader and follower to f … | Continue reading
Benj Edwards at Ars Technica: Employers are drowning in AI-generated job applications, with LinkedIn now processing 11,000 submissions per minute—a 45 percent surge from last year, according to new data reported by The New York Times. Due to AI, the traditional hiring process has … | Continue reading
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Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: A few months ago, on the New York subway, I looked up at the woman sitting opposite me, and found my eyes drawn to her cap: “I don’t give a F**K,” read big white letters stitched into navy blue cotton. Three million New Yorkers ride the subway ev … | Continue reading
Smiriti Malapaty in Nature: A deep brain device that allowed a man with no limbs to play computer games is one of an increasing number of brain–computer interfaces (BCI) being trialled in people in China. The BCI system, developed by medical-technology company StairMed in Shangha … | Continue reading
Andrew Chow in Time Magazine: Moments before I hop into my first Waymo in Austin, Texas, the driverless car is already locked in a standoff with a human rival. I’ve hailed the car in a tricky triangular parking lot in the middle of a big intersection, hoping to hitch a ride downt … | Continue reading
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Lewis Hyde at Harper’s Magazine: Charles Darwin had no trouble discarding Adam and Eve, but that did not dispose of a problem he shared with Lyell: how to build a theory when a key element—the apparent infinity of time—defies comprehension. By my reading, several strategies arose … | Continue reading
Knives of the Poets The philosophers keep hammering, each to each. Editors choose scissors. Critics fancy the blunt: crowbars, mallets, and such. Poets like knives. It starts at about six in a fury of initials, hearts, and arrows jack-knifed into the flesh of trees (ash, sometime … | Continue reading
Thomas Meaney at The New Yorker: “You’re a born Fascist, one of the authentic ones,” the Italian writer Piero Gobetti wrote to his friend Curzio Malaparte in 1925, three years into Mussolini’s dictatorship. Gobetti, twenty-four and hailed as the most brilliant liberal writer of h … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray Today’s modest topic is the future of the West. Will it end in a bang, whimper or maybe just sort of muddle through in some zombie stagger? Whatever happens, a quarter of the way through the American Century, the standard of liberal democracy we hoisted as global i … | Continue reading
by Scott Samuelson One of my big regrets in life, the kind that tortures me at three in the morning, may not seem like a big deal when you first hear about it: I once said that I hated the Beach Boys. In the wake of Brian Wilson’s death, I want to apologize for that vicious… | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela One of the last of the traditional wood craftsmen in New England was born in the nineteen-fifties outside Boston, appropriately, historic home of many spindle turners and chair caners, lumber joiners and paint-stainers. His most vivid memories of the period invol … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook As the days get longer and warmer and more humid, and the early spring flowers start to bloom, and the flowering trees show their finest… there’s an anticipation in the air…Then suddenly one morning you hear it—the birdsong is back. After a winter of silence … | Continue reading
Colin Gorrie at Dead Language Society: No, this is no hound. It’s just a dog. But somehow, this word dog — a word that wasn’t even dignified enough to write down once in the entire history of English writing before the eleventh century — would come to be the normal English word f … | Continue reading
Amanda Gefter at Nautilus: His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of … | Continue reading
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Reed Schwartz at Asterisk: In 2023, Sam Altman embarked on a world tour, meeting with heads of state to discuss AI regulation. According to Time’s CEO of the Year Profile, he was also quietly promoting a more obscure cause — the ideas of the nineteenth-century political economist … | Continue reading
Max Lewis at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: If to err is human, then so too is to regret. At least if we follow Paddy McQueen in his recent book about the nature, normativity, and politics of regret. According to McQueen, regret is, roughly, a painful feeling of self-reproach … | Continue reading
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Marc Tracy at the NY Times: “Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them, … | Continue reading
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
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David Zahl in Plough: Some people have a gift for polemics. I am not one of them. Two of my personal favorites are Lauren Oyler and Martin Luther. Their takedowns, even when excoriating, are bathed in clarity and passion. But that club is a small one, and even if I possessed the … | Continue reading
by Richard Farr My sister and I live five thousand miles apart, but since we both reside in the early twenty-first century it’s easy to stay in touch. Of the many channels available to us we use WhatsApp messages mostly, with a call once a week or so. You might wonder then why we … | Continue reading