Emma Fridy in Louisville Review: Born out of necessity, America’s Black labor movements have left an indelible mark upon the social fabric of our country. For hundreds of years Black activists have poured blood, sweat, and tears into organizing the American labor force for better … | Continue reading
Border I’m going to move ahead. Behind me my whole family is calling, My child is pulling my sari-end, My husband stands blocking the door, But I will go. There’s nothing ahead but a river. I will cross. I know how to swim, but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross. There’s … | Continue reading
by Kyle Munkittrick When I think about AI, I think about poor Queen Elizabeth. Imagine being her: you have access to Shakespeare — in his prime! You get to see a private showing of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the height of the players’ skill and the Bard’s craft. And then… that’ … | Continue reading
by Kevin Lively The re-election of Donald Trump has prompted a spectrum of reactions among those who are . . . unenthusiastic . . . at this outcome. One common reaction I’ve observed among progressive friends and those who enthusiastically rather than grudgingly vote Democrat is … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Self Portrait, Kigali, January 17, 2016. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Before the election, I wrote a whole bunch of posts about why it was a bad idea to elect Donald Trump. But sadly, America elected him anyway. After he won, I wrote a post outlining a best-case scenario for Trump’s second term. The optimistic scenario was … | Continue reading
Michael Inzlicht at Speak Now, Regret Later: In the winter of 2015, I stood before the largest gathering of social psychologists in the world to accept one of the field’s highest honours. My collaborators and I were being celebrated for our theory about willpower—a theory I’d spe … | Continue reading
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Laura Kiniry in Smithsonian Magazine: When the Cold War ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, it greatly reduced the threat of global nuclear war. But on January 25, 1995, that threat once again came front and center when Russian officers mistook a Norwegian rocket … | Continue reading
Emma Stoye in Nature: https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-025-00269-y/assets/4JsOv5ttJO/mito-h2b-vasp-rgb-1024x1024.webm Powerhouses of the cell. This video of a human bone-cancer cell shows its three nuclei (blue —probably the result of failed cell divisions), actin cytoskel … | Continue reading
Sojourner Truth in LFJ: I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman? …Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause C … | Continue reading
by Malcolm Murray As someone who thinks about AI day-in and day-out, it is always fascinating to see which events in the AI space break out of the AI bubble and into the attention of the wider public. ChatGPT in November 2022 was of course one. The podcast-creating ability of Goo … | Continue reading
by Rachel Robison-Greene In the past decade, we have witnessed the fallout from the largely unrestricted spread of bullshit on the internet. People have died or have become seriously ill as result of following bad medical advice that they heard on social media. A recent Healthlin … | Continue reading
“lacrimae rerum, “ (the tears of things) …………………………………….. —Lucretius Everything Cries Steel’s tears are rust, trees weep tears of falling leaves, clouds weep and mourn their loss sacrificing their billows to the earth as rain, the earth weeps its carbon into sky, the sun weeps it … | Continue reading
Cédric Durand in Sidecar: In Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1930), set in Vienna on the eve of the First World War, the army general Stumm von Bordwehr asks, ‘How can those directly involved in what’s happening know beforehand whether it will turn out to be a great eve … | Continue reading
Henry Wismayer in Noema: On a tawny hillside in central Tuscany, in a compound just 20 miles west of Siena’s medieval piazzas, Francesco Cannata was drilling for energy. Looming behind him was a red and white derrick, 80 feet tall, surrounded by trucks and heavy machinery. For th … | Continue reading
Kate Mackenzie , Tim Sahay, and Lara Merling over at Polycrisis: The United States will be a source of chaos and volatility for the next several years. The first month of 2025 has set the scene. Events so far have included imperial gangsterism against both a poor Latin American c … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: In “Open Socrates,” Agnes Callard suggests that self-improvement, at least as we usually understand the term, isn’t so much a matter of willpower, but of ideas. It’s not that we are weak-willed creatures, who know what “the good” is and then … | Continue reading
From ASLAH: The 2025 Black History Month theme, African Americans and Labor, focuses on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree, skilled, and unskilled, vocational and voluntary – intersect with the collective experiences of Black people … | Continue reading
No Method of Self-knowledge Seeking a method invariably implies desire to attain a result which is what we want. We follow authority – if not of a person, then of a system, an ideology, because we want a result that will be satisfactory, and give us security. We really do not wan … | Continue reading
by Mark R. DeLong We humans grasp and use things. We dwell among things. We devise new things. As a result of being so pervasive and common in experience, things qua things are practically invisible to us. For the most part, we tend to see them as things outside of us, not as som … | Continue reading
by Eric Feigenbaum Like the Montagues and Capulets, the owners of Zam Zam and Victory restaurants – adjacent to one another on Singapore’s North Bridge Road – have been at war for roughly a century. A one-time partnership turned bad led to two families operating restaurants with … | Continue reading
Matthew Wills at JSTOR Daily: “There can be few workplaces quite as zany as a wrestling ring,” writes sociologist Gregory Hollin in his study of “precarious workers, post-truth politics, and inauthentic activism” in the professional wrestling entertainment business. While warfare … | Continue reading
Solomon Adams at Quanta: Calculus is a powerful mathematical tool. But for hundreds of years after its invention in the 17th century, it stood on a shaky foundation. Its core concepts were rooted in intuition and informal arguments, rather than precise, formal definitions. Two sc … | Continue reading
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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader: I used to love to pray. Making myself small, I felt a calm expanse, a largeness, surrounding me. Kneeling was a letting go, giving in to gravity so there was no longer any distance to fall. I echoed the novenas my grandmother made, trusti … | Continue reading
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I Have This Way of Being I have this, and this isn’t a mouth full of the names of odd flowers I’ve grown in secret. I know none of these by name but have this garden now, and pastel somethings… | Continue reading
Caitlín Doherty at Harper’s Magazine: Davos is an archetypal Swiss mountain town. With its smattering of church spires rising above a low skyline of blocky, pastel-colored condominiums and its pyramidal structure of councils (large, small, and school), for fifty-one weeks of the … | Continue reading
J.D. Daniels at The Paris Review: My father wanted to be a gym teacher before his life drove him down another path. The ghost of his ambition has played a part in how much the gym and my gym teachers have meant to me. Two examples: One. Have you read J. G. Ballard’s 1968 short st … | Continue reading
Thomas Westerholm in Newsweek: Older adults whose cholesterol levels change over time might be tied to a greater risk of dementia, according to a new study. Researchers from Monash University in Australia published a study in Neurology conducted on nearly 10,000 participants with … | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Although mice with two dads have been born before, scientists used a completely different strategy in this study, which also provided insights into a reproductive mystery. In a process called “imprinting,” some genes in embryos are switched on or of … | Continue reading
by David Kordahl In the fallow days of late December, I watched many holiday movies with my kids. The choices weren’t adventurous: Rudolph, Elf, The Polar Express. Between viewings of Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, and Home Alone 3, The Grinch played no fewer than ei … | Continue reading
by Angela Starita Beauty supply shops are a mostly extinct category of small business. My father owned one in Jersey City, NJ, and I’d think of him every time I went to one on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. It’s the right kind of street for a beauty supply store: a busy, rundown shop … | Continue reading
David Enrich in the New York Times: After a financial crisis torpedoed the U.S. economy in 2008, the public clamored for accountability. Millions had lost their homes and livelihoods. Crimes had been committed. Surely, the bankers, brokers and investors who had precipitated and p … | Continue reading
Graham Farmelo in Nature: ‘Big Steve,’ his students called him. Steven Weinberg was not physically imposing, but was an intellectually dominant and much-revered figure in the scientific community and on the public stage. One of the most distinguished theoretical physicists of the … | Continue reading
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Dario Amodei, CEO Anthropic, at his own website: A few weeks ago I made the case for stronger US export controls on chips to China. Since then DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company, has managed to — at least in some respects — come close to the performance of US frontier AI models at lo … | Continue reading
Veronique Greenwood in Harvard Magazine: One story David Mooney tells starts with a slug. “This slug does a really good job of creating a mucus that allows it to stick really tightly, so predators can’t just peel it off and eat it,” he says. The mucus, a marvelous material, turns … | Continue reading
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Sammi Caramela in Vice: Did you know your gut microbiome can impact various aspects of your health—including your mental and emotional well-being? A healthier biome means a healthier you, and according to professionals, all it takes is a few simple lifestyle changes. Cleveland Cl … | Continue reading
Luna Moth Pale green and pressed against the window screen, shot through with field, you watch nighttime’s corners curl with four white eyes, your under-self unfurled to my one room of word—kettle, counter, knife block. Having lived one of your life’s six nights, you leave a limp … | Continue reading
Alexander Stern at The Hedgehog Review: But the problem with advice is not conceptual. Atwood’s disappointed acolytes were hoping not for a kind of guidance that is analytically impossible but for one that is merely in severe decline. The German philosopher and critic Walter Benj … | Continue reading
Scott Spillman at The New Yorker: The second hour of “Gone with the Wind,” the bold, almost brazenly romantic Civil War epic that won ten Academy Awards, is largely a portrait of hell. “The skies rained death,” the screen reads. General William Tecumseh Sherman and his Union Army … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman January 16 is the anniversary of the death of Margarete Susman (1872-1966), the German-born Jewish philosopher and poet who survived the Third Reich in Swiss refuge and is buried in Zurich. To mark the occasion this year, Martin Kudla, a lecturer in Jewish intell … | Continue reading
Partially frozen stream in the mountains of South Tyrol. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now. | Continue reading
Dennis Duncan in The Guardian: Of all the great intellectuals of the Renaissance, Pico della Mirandola is surely the most personally captivating. “He wins one on,” as the Victorian essayist Walter Pater put it, his life having “some touch of sweetness in it”. An Italian aristocra … | Continue reading
Max Kozlov in Nature: Ten months on from the shocking discovery that a virus usually carried by wild birds can readily infect cows, at least 68 people in North America have become ill from the pathogen and one person has died. Although many of the infections have been mild, emerg … | Continue reading