All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
27 Notes On Growing Old(er)
Ian Leslie in The Ruffian: Will Storr, author and fellow Substacker, recently wrote about his “midlife identity crisis”. I was struck, while reading it, at how rare it is for people – men in particular – to admit that growing older can be tough. In the second half of life, we’re all expected to say
The Perils of Social Atrophy
Sarah Stein Lubrano at The Ideas Letter: Governments, social scientists, public health officials, and others have grown concerned about a possible “loneliness epidemic.” They paint a picture that looks a bit like this: old people staring wistfully out the window, young men growing radicalized online
GPT-5: Everything Announced at OpenAI's Summer Update in 12 Minutes
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This Week's Photograph
A climbing variety of roses intruding into the covered outdoor deck at the Hotel Löwenhof in Vahrn, South Tyrol. According to ChatGPT this variety is called Ballerina. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Joel Shapiro on Sculptural Tradition
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'They hold hands, they embrace, they kiss': The woman who changed our view of chimps – and human beings
Myles Burke in BBC News: On 14 July 1960, 65 years ago this week, a young English woman with no formal scientific background or qualifications stepped off a boat at the Gombe Stream Game Reserve in Tanzania to begin what would become a pioneering study of wild chimpanzees. Her discoveries would not
At 17, Hannah Cairo Solved a Major Math Mystery
Kevin Hartnett in Quanta: It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long. Yet a paper posted on February 10(opens a new tab) left the math world by turns stunned, delighted
Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson sign letter calling for Israel boycott
Ella Creamer in The Guardian: Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson are among more than 200 writers who have signed a letter calling for an “immediate and complete” boycott of Israel until the people of Gaza are given adequate food, water and aid. Hanif Kureishi, Brian Eno,
The Real City of the Future
Charles T. Rubin at the New Atlantis: What makes Gibson’s portrait of great cities thought-provoking is that, despite all this change, he imagines them persisting at all, in some ways operating no worse than the worst that can be found today. This situation becomes all the more thought-provoking whe
On the Particular Joys of Etymological Detective Work
Martha Barnette at LitHub: But just how do scholars dig up those linguistic fossils and discover those brilliant pictures within? One way is to compare related words in languages arising from a common ancestor, which brings us to the hypothetical mother tongue scholars call Proto-Indo-European. The
Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games
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The real problems with America’s health
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New clues emerge on how foods spark anaphylaxis
Laura Sanders in ScienceNews: Severe allergic reactions can be swift and deadly. Two new studies of mice, published August 7 in Science, reveal a key step in this terrifying cascade. What’s more, these findings hint at a drug to prevent it. Anaphylaxis is a life-threatening allergic reaction commonl
No, Reconsidered
by Priya Malhotra The first time many of us learn the word “no,” it’s not in the context of refusal—it’s in discipline. A toddler reaches for the stovetop: “No.” She throws a block: “No.” In these earliest exchanges, no is a limit set by someone else, a redirection of will. It’s a stop sign held by
You’re probably missing out on a golden age of storytelling
by Kyle Munkittrick Imagine you are in room of literati types in the early 2010s. These are smart, well-read, curious people. The books on their shelves are impressive, as are their movie collections. You notice classics, hits, and obscure artistic works on display. The conversation turns to favorit
Sunday Poem
Like an American Princes Rubbing the Buddha’s Golden Belly in a Chinese Restaurant, the pig-tailed Girl claps her hands and drops The flimsy fortune, already As forgotten as the cookie Crumbs her father brushed From her cheek with the calloused Thumb of a busman’s Hard-earned holiday, And then she s
An Icon In Waiting
Aaron Betsky at Architect Magazine: When I travel to China, I find big, bold buildings for the arts in almost every city I visit. Building cultural facilities that double as monuments, markers, or anchors for a community marks a certain stage in a country’s social and economic development. The Unite
Friday Poem
Waking With Nils The ancient mariner lies in his bed not quite Nils yet. He’s still a sea otter floating on his back looking at the moon – the remains of an abalone dusting his stomach content as if he were Nils after a good martini. The restless ocean billows about him, but he rides high as a cork
Eddie Palmieri (1936 – 2025) Pianist And Latin Jazz Innovator
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Jane Morgan (1924 – 2025) Singer
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Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel at Public Books: SONY DSC “Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the ver
ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life
Harvey Lederman at Shtetl-Optimized: For the last two and a half years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someda
The Passive Trickster: Katie Kitamura’s anti-expressive fiction
Lidija Haas in Harper's Magazine: One third of the way into Katie Kitamura’s 2017 novel, A Separation, its narrator asks an elderly Greek woman to demonstrate a traditional funeral lamentation. This woman is a professional mourner (a “weeper”) who ululates on behalf of the region’s bereaved, people
Conversation With Maya Lin
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The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films
Amelia Anthony at the Los Angeles Review of Books: For many months, the only place in New York City still showing Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film—his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door (2024)—was Lincoln Center. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, the film features a relationship betw
Yellowjackets
by Claire Chambers Recently I’ve noticed that a new wave of state-of-the-nation – or, more accurately, ‘state‑of‑the‑world’ – novels tend to arrive clad in yellow dust jackets while bearing short, even one‑word, titles. I’m thinking of books like Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, a
Are You Hesitating Over AI? If So, You Are Not Alone
by David Beer There was a prevailing idea, George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay on the Common Toad, ‘that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.’ It was only a couple of years befo
How to Hide a Famine
Alex de Waal in the Boston Review: The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” These were the words of food insecurity experts at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism earlier this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied,
Memory as Coyote
by Nils Peterson Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one
How Yard Sales Could Explain the Rise of Billionaires and Challenge Libertarian Thinking
by Ken MacVey By many measures wealth inequality in the US and globally has increased significantly over the last several decades. The number of billionaires has increased at a staggering rate. Since 1987, Forbes has systematically verified and counted the global number of billionaires. In 1987, For
Marc Jacobs’s anti-politics, from faux nails to creative freedom
Robin Givhan in The Washington Post: Along the steps leading into the New York Public Library on the last day of June, a small crowd gathered to watch a parade of guests make their way inside for Marc Jacobs’s fashion show. The arrivals included fashion editors, stylists and friends — many of them w
James A. Lovell Jr. (1928 – 2025) Astronaut
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GPT-5: It Just Does Stuff
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: I have had early access to GPT-51, and I wanted to give you some impressions of what it is and what it means. But the answer to the first question everyone will have is: Yes, this is a big deal. I asked GPT-5 to show you why by pasting this intro paragraph, exactly
A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene
Yiyun Li at the Paris Review: Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have
Thursday Poem
Broken Images He is quick, thinking in clear iamages; I am slow, thinking in broken images. He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images; I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images. Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance; Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance. Assuming their
Wollheim and Berlin: A ‘Sublime’ Friendship
Lesley Chamberlain at the Dublin Review of Books: They were indeed potentially quite incompatible. Isaiah Berlin, born in 1909, was fourteen years older than Richard Wollheim, and, coming into the world either side of the First World War, the two men had their roots in different centuries. Though th
The Woke Right
Jonathan Rauch at Persuasion: In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster—decided to test his observation that the American right’s illiberalism and irrationalism have, bizarrely, converged with the woke left’s illiberalism and irrationalism. He grabbed verbiage
The Most Influential Guitarist You've Never Heard Of: Trini Lopez
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The Peculiar Persistence of the AI Denialists
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Yes, every fashionable conference has some panel on AI. Yes, social media is overrun with hypemen trying to alert their readers to the latest “mind-blowing” improvements of Grok or ChatGPT. But even as the maturation of AI technologies provides the inescapable backg
These genes can have the opposite effects depending on which parent they came from
Rachel Fieldhouse in Nature: The effect of a gene can vary greatly — and sometimes be the complete opposite — depending on whether it is inherited from the mother or the father. Some genetic variants can, for instance, increase a person’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes when inherited from the fa