Honeymoon Flight Below, the patchwork earth, dark hems of hedge, The long grey tapes of road that bind and loose Villages and fields in casual marriages: We bank above the small lough and farmhouse And the sure green world goes topsy-turvy As we climb out of our familiar landscap … | Continue reading
Erik Baker in the Boston Review: One of the courses I teach is called “Science, Activism, and Political Conflict,” and one of my ambitions with that course is to show students that both of these things—activism and political conflict—are normal in science, and in academic life mo … | Continue reading
Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist: An artificial intelligence system has proven it can save lives by warning physicians to check on patients whose heart test results indicate a high risk of dying. In a randomised clinical trial with almost 16,000 patients at two hospitals, the AI reduc … | Continue reading
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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability By Numbers: A Moloch Trap is, in simple terms, a zero-sum game. It explains a situation where participants compete for object or outcome X but make something else worse in the process. Everyone competes for X, but in doing so, everyone ends up wor … | Continue reading
Did the Occult Influence Karl Marx and Early Communism? Posted on Thursday, May 2, 2024 10:59AM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
KC Hoard at The Walrus: Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the d … | Continue reading
Jackson Arn at The New Yorker: Many other fine pieces in the Central Exhibition are textile-based: a dense, earthy slab of threads by the Colombian Olga de Amaral, who turns ninety-two this year; a selection of embroidered burlap pieces by the anonymous Chileans known as Arpiller … | Continue reading
Emily Joshu in Eating well: Chances are, if you have put on a few pounds, the cause is deeper than eating too much junk food or skipping one too many workouts. Chronic, low-grade inflammation that swells in the body is to blame for this gain. And the relationship is cyclical. Wei … | Continue reading
Refugee The day, Mubarak Ali Trailing his father Traversing the lanes of Tonk In Rajasthan Boarded the train for Karachi It rained heavily All that rain Mubarak Ali Hoarded in his tiny hands And carried with him He felt as if nowhere else The water would be as sweet Time passed M … | Continue reading
The Trans Haggadah Companion On this night ……….. I remember Nachshon ……….. who was not Moses who ………………….. walked into the Red Sea ………………….. and called for God ……………………………………….. to meet him there On this night ………….I am only a body and you ………………………………………….. are only a body On th … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in the New York Times: In some birding circles, people say that anyone who looks at birds is a birder — a kind, inclusive sentiment that overlooks the forces that create and shape subcultures. Anyone can dance, but not everyone would identify as a dancer, because the term … | Continue reading
Rahul Rao in Scientific American: Few computer science breakthroughs have done so much in so little time as the artificial intelligence design known as a transformer. A transformer is a form of deep learning—a machine model based on networks in the brain—that researchers at Googl … | Continue reading
Joseph E. Stiglitz at Literary Hub: The system that evolved in the last quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic came to be called neoliberalism. “Liberal” refers to being “free,” in this context, free of government intervention including regulations. The “n … | Continue reading
Daniel Bessner in Harper’s Magazine: In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that ha … | Continue reading
Adam Frank at Aeon Magazine: Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. After decades on the cultural margins, the question of life in the Universe beyond Earth is having its day in the sun. The next big multibillion-dollar space telescope (the successor to the James Webb) will … | Continue reading
About Searching for Alien Life with Dr. Adam Frank Posted on Wednesday, May 1, 2024 8:16AMWednesday, May 1, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Ed Simon at Poetry Magazine: Because the likelihood of Li Bai dying from simple infirmity in 762 isn’t as strange and beautiful as the traditional story of his demise—that he drowned in the Yangtze River while drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection—the apocryphal tale … | Continue reading
Cassandra Willyard in Nature: US drug regulators dropped a bombshell in November 2023 when they announced an investigation into one of the most celebrated cancer treatments to emerge in decades. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it was looking at whether a strategy t … | Continue reading
Elle Griffin at The Elysian: In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest. T … | Continue reading
John Pavlus in Quanta: Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is a favorite, and if she mentions “meaning” or “reasoning,” … | Continue reading
Yanis Varoufakis in Persuasion: If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous—indeed, markets and profits were ubi … | Continue reading
Andrea Capra at The Book Haven: It is today my belief that once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live. And aren’t the humanities ultimately for a good part connect … | Continue reading
Kamal Nahas in The Scientist: Transcription factors that tune the expression of multiple genes could be key players in regulating behavior, but scientists need to scout for them. Peter Hamilton, a neuroscientist at Virginia Commonwealth University, has contributed to this search … | Continue reading
Audrey Wasser at nonsite: What would it mean to subtract context from writing, in each and every sense of “context” that Derrida proposes here? And would this be a remotely helpful exercise for thinking about the relation between text and context in literary studies? It’s hard to … | Continue reading
Derrida : The Documentary Posted on Tuesday, Apr 30, 2024 8:23AMTuesday, April 30, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Mark Blacklock at Literary Review: Evidently, the time is ripe for a survey of the branch of cultural production concerned with the end of the world. And yet, as Lynskey points out, tales have been told about it for as long as we’ve been doing story. J G Ballard, whose work is gi … | Continue reading
Marlene Cimons in The Washington Post: Most of us think of inflammation as the redness and swelling that follow a wound, infection or injury, such as an ankle sprain, or from overdoing a sport, “tennis elbow,” for example. This is “acute” inflammation, a beneficial immune system … | Continue reading
The Association of Man and Women Whatever badness there was sometimes was not of us, but between us. Because there was goodness, which felt like a sure base. While badness felt only like incidents upon it. The badness was only the way you and I needed to behave, sometimes. Not wh … | 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, 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
by Barry Goldman Suppose a cop pulls you over for speeding. What do you think should happen? My guess is you think he should give you a warning and let you off without a ticket. Why? Well, because you will, no doubt, be polite, respectful and contrite (or at least you will attemp … | Continue reading
Compost wonderstuff of summer declination that’ll grow my beets and beans and other rations browner than the mere idea “earth”, archetypical as sacrifice, more wonderful than virgin birth more promising than the phantom wealth of nations more essential than human beings of highes … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal There is a meme on the internet that you probably know, the one that goes, “Men will do x instead of going to therapy.” Here are some examples I’ve just found on Twitter: “Men will memorize every spot on earth instead of going to therapy,” “men would rather work 100 … | Continue reading
by Rebecca Baumgartner The short stories in Kindergeschichten (Children’s Stories, 1969) by Swiss author Peter Bichsel are not actually for children. True, they are short, easy to read, and feel a bit like spare, minimalist fairy tales. But the moment you think you’ve grasped wha … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Self Portrait After Dark, Butaro, Rwanda, November 2023. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessary. Although Taiwan’s flourishing capitalist economy once allowed it to outgun … | Continue reading
by Jochen Szangolies If you spend any time in a place with public parks, gardens, or simple green areas fenced in squarely by concrete walkways, you’ll be familiar with the sight of trampled paths cutting across the grass, tracing a muddy connection through that which the street … | Continue reading
Clouds above Berlin this past Thursday. | Continue reading
by Barbara Fischkin It was the summer of 1961. I was six years old. My mother and I had arrived in Omaha the night before, flying out of what was still “Idlewild,” not JFK International Airport, as it is now named. We would visit relatives with roots in the same Eastern European … | Continue reading
Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader: In need of silence, I booked a room at a Trappist monastery. The following Friday, I snuck out of work early and headed south, not realizing that Ava, Missouri, was four hours away, down at the border of Arkansas. I sped down the intersta … | Continue reading
Anne J. Manning in The Harvard Gazette: The endangered bonobo, the great ape of the Central African rainforest, has a reputation for being a bit of a hippie. Known as more peaceful than their warring chimpanzee cousins, bonobos live in matriarchal societies, engage in recreationa … | Continue reading
Ian Berlin at CNN: I do not deny that there has been a shocking and upsetting rise in antisemitism over the last few months, including several instances of antisemitism right at Yale and in New Haven. Last fall, one professor’s post on X (formerly Twitter) appearing to praise Ham … | Continue reading
From Hume Texts Online: My family, however, was not rich, and being myself a younger brother, my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very slender. My father, who passed for a man of parts, died when I was an infant, leaving me, with an elder brother and … | Continue reading
Colin Jost’s set at the White House correspondents’ dinner Posted on Sunday, Apr 28, 2024 10:25AMSunday, April 28, 2024 by Azra Raza | Continue reading
Julie Cadman-Kim in MQR: In Dur e Aziz Amna’s gorgeous debut, American Fever, readers can expect to find all the hallmarks of a bumpy adolescence—destructive confidence, crippling self-doubt, steamy crushes, social gaffes, obsession with looks and style, and pervasive loneliness. … | Continue reading