All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
Michal Urbaniak (1943 – 2025) Jazz Musician
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Brigitte Bardot (1934 – 2025) Actor, Singer, Animal Rights Activist
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Sunday Poem
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse mu
Bribes, Pardons, and Presidential Immunity
by Ken MacVey Donald Trump has creatively explored ways to monetize the presidency. These include launching the $TRUMP crypto business a few days before resuming office on January 20, 2025 or using Tr
Why Ghosting Feels More Violent Than Direct Cruelty
by Priya Malhotra Cruelty, at least the old-fashioned kind, has a shape. It announces itself. It arrives with words you can quote later, replay, contest, reject. Even when it stings, it offers a surfa
Park Chan-wook and the Funny Thing About Stomach-Churning Horror
Robert Ito in The New York Times: Park Chan-wook is one of Asia’s most famous directors, an auteur beloved as much for his complex, often critical visions of his home country of South Korea as for sce
To see America’s greatest living painter, you’ll have to cross the pond
Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post: Kerry James Marshall is contemporary art’s great engine tinkerer. He wants to know how things work. In the 1990s, when his contemporaries were making slight, cer
Transformation without Taxation
César Morales Oyarvide in Phenomenal World: In his famous 1918 essay “The Crisis of the Tax State,” Joseph Schumpeter captured the essence of fiscal sociology, arguing that “The spirit of a people, it
The Pattiverse
James Wolcott in Sidecar: 2025 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Patti Smith’s debut album Horses, with Robert Mapplethorpe’s black and white cover portrait of the artist posed with her jacket slung o
The Makers of Modern China
Zheng Xiaoqiong in Equator: Introduction by Kaiser Kuo I first encountered Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing in a collection of Chinese worker poetry skillfully translated by Eleanor Goodman (2016). What stru
The new anthology of stories inspired by Alfred Hitchcock
M. Keith Booker at the Los Angeles Review of Books: EDITOR MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI has recently made something of a specialty of compiling collections of stories inspired by the work of his favorite writers,
The rise of AI denialism
Louis Rosenberg at Big Think: Over the past few months, we’ve seen a surge of skepticism around the phenomenon currently referred to as the “AI boom.” The shift began when OpenAI released GPT-5 this s
Mark Blyth: What’s driving the economy right now?
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On twenty-first-century performative morality
Yoanna Koleva at The Hedgehog Review: Tragedies, wars, and scandals are transformed into Instagram moments. The instant horror strikes—a terror attack, a catastrophe—social-media platforms erupt with
Nicholas of Cusa
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Interviewing Jeff Koons
Joachim Pissarro interviews Jeff Koons at The Brooklyn Rail: Rail: I’d like to spin the thread of porcelain and ceramic as a material culture that runs throughout your works. Koons: My grandparents ha
Satie’s Spell
Jeremy Denk at the NYRB: Erik Satie was the truest bad boy of musical modernism in the hypercompetitive market of Paris before World War I, crammed with aspiring bad boys. He took up pieties and profa
Taste Values Craft
by Kyle Munkittrick Silicon Valley has rediscovered ‘taste.’ Maybe it was Jony Ive at Stripe Sessions. Maybe it’s Substack aesthetes like Henry Oliver and David Hoang. Maybe it’s everyone trying to fi
Earthrise Before Footprints: Review of Robert Kurson’s “Rocket Men”
by Ashutosh Jogalekar We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. —T. S. Eliot Robert Kurson closes
Getting to Mars (for Real)
Olivia Farrar in Harvard Magazine: The race to send humans to Mars is underway. That’s the sense conveyed by certain politicians and wealthy entrepreneurs, who have spoken broadly about creating a Red
The Magic Ponies of AI Advocacy
by Dwight Furrow Let’s grant, for the sake of argument, the relatively short-range ambition that organizes much of rhetoric about artificial intelligence. That ambition is called artificial general in
Lina Khan Speaks About Anti-Trust to the Harvard Kennedy School
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Malcolm Cowley and the Ascent of American Fiction
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The Ultimate Best Books of 2025 List
Emily Temple at Literary Hub: I have arrived to present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all (or at least many) of the Best Of lists on the internet and c
The View from Hanoi
Brock Eldon at Salmagundi: At dawn Hanoi is already awake. Motorbikes swarm beneath balconies before the light has quite broken, a mechanical chorus that carries the city into motion. From the window
You and “You”: How delegation is quietly turning into replacement
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad at Digital Dopplegangers: With the arrival of AI agents, systems designed not merely to assist but to act, adapt, and persist, the line between delegation and substitution is
Mexico: A History
Edward Shawcross at Literary Review: In Mexico City on 27 September 1842, a man was delivering an unusual eulogy. Fixing his eyes on what he called ‘the mutilated remains of an illustrious leader of i
Sean Carroll’s Holiday Message, 2025
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Christmas Creep Has Left Us Confused
Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader: Weeks ago, the sweet family across the street put up their festive holiday lights. The house on the corner followed, then three more houses, all before I had
Congratulations to 3QD’s Own Rachel Robison-Greene!
Rachel is one of the winners of the American Philosophical Association’s 2025 Public Philosophy Op-Ed Contest for one of her essays here at 3QD. There is more information about that and other APA priz
A Child’s Christmas in New Jersey
A Remembering by Nils Peterson Christmas Eve began with a carol sing at the big Presbyterian Church on Crescent Avenue which many of the rich town people attended. More cathedral than church. My broth
The Grand Apprentice
by Ed Simon Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty. —2 Corinthians 3:17 If God does not exist, then everything is permitted. —Attributed to Fyodor Dostoevsk
This Week’s Photograph
A glass ashtray turned the weak winter sunlight from the window into this rainbow on a wooden cutting board on our kitchen counter. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
This Meal Might Bring You to Tears
Kristen French in Nautilus: Most of us would say we taste food with our tongues. Charles Spence has spent decades showing that we eat with our eyes, our ears, our fingertips, even our emotions. An exp
Single Injection Transforms the Immune System Into a Cancer-Killing Machine
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: With just a single injection, a new treatment transforms immune cells in cancer patients into efficient tumor-killing machines. Now equipped with homing beacons, the cel
From ‘Mona’s Eyes’ to ‘Theo of Golden’: This Year’s Surprise Hit Novels
From The New York Times: When Allen Levi, a musician who had written scores of songs over his career, began writing his first novel, his plan was to finish it and stick it in a drawer. “I just wanted
One Battle After Another: Paul Thomas Anderson’s thrillingly helter-skelter counterculture caper
Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: One of the great creative bromances has flowered again: Paul Thomas Anderson and Thomas Pynchon. Having adapted Pynchon’s Inherent Vice for the screen in 2014, Anderson
The Bible says little about Jesus’ childhood – but that didn’t stop medieval Christians from enjoying tales of him as holy ‘rascal’
Mary Dzon in The Conversation: After its account of Jesus’ birth, the Bible is almost entirely silent on his childhood. Yet legends about Jesus’ early years circulated widely in the Middle Ages – the
Waymo hits 2,000 vehicles while human drivers lose 6.9% pay
Daniel Abreu Marques at The AV Market Strategist: Waymo’s co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana made a striking prediction this week: “You’re going to start seeing our cars in a lot of cities. If you think about ou
Yuval Noah Harari: Why advanced societies fall for mass delusion
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As British as Fish and Chips
Dan Gardner at PastPresentFuture: This has been a year in which terrible ideas buried and forgotten rose from the dead and ate many brains. Tariffs-on-everything. Vaccines are poison. Fascism. Anti-Se
Wednesday Poem
Christmas Mail Cards in each mailbox, angel, manger, star and lamb, as the rural carrier, driving the snowy roads, hears from her bundles the plaintive bleating of sheep, the shuffle of sandals, the c
The Midas Machine
by Katalin Balog In a recent bestseller, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argue that artificial superintelligence (ASI), if it is ever built, will wipe out humanity. Unsurprisingly, this idea has got
Creationism in the classroom: does it matter? Kitzmiller 20 years on
by Paul Braterman Last Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the day on which Judge John Jones III handed down his decisive ruling, in the case of Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, that Intelli
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
The Harder Truths of True Crime
Phil Christman at The Hedgehog Review: John J. Lennon is, at the moment, probably this country’s foremost imprisoned journalist. This title won’t be taken from him any time soon, not because there are
The Chinese finance whizz whose DeepSeek AI model stunned the world
Elizabeth Gibney in Nature: In January this year, an announcement from China rocked the world of artificial intelligence. The firm DeepSeek released its powerful but cheap R1 model out of the blue — i
Demis Hassabis on the future of intelligence
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The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich
David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, and Matthew Goldstein in the New York Times: One evening in early 1976, a bushy-haired Jeffrey Epstein showed up for an event at an art gallery in M
On the Life & Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer
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Terrence Malick’s Disciples: Why the auteur is the most influential director in Hollywood
Bilge Ebiri in The Yale Review: In the winter of 2024, the photographer and filmmaker RaMell Ross released Nickel Boys, a masterful adaptation of a novel by Colson Whitehead. In a fragmentary, impress
Turning Point: How the GOP consensus on Israel cracked
Andrew Cockburn in Harper’s Magazine: On a cool evening in October, six weeks after Charlie Kirk was assassinated in full view of thousands at Utah Valley University, I joined a sea of young people li
2025: The Year of Demented Painting
Rachel Wetzler at Artforum: If nothing else, 2025 was a good year for demented painting. This might have been obvious to anyone who saw Laura Owens’s maximalist fantasia at Matthew Marks in Chelsea th
Mandeville: Philosopher Of Pride
Andrea Branchi at Aeon Magazine: In 1714, and in an enlarged edition in 1723, Mandeville published the prose volume that made him infamous: The Fable of the Bees: Or, Private Vices, Public Benefits. T
Tuesday Poem
It Was Beginning Winter It was beginning winter, An in-between time, The landscape still partly brown: The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind, Above the blue snow. It was beginning winter, The l
Should We Replace Elections with Lotteries?
by Tim Sommers “I’d rather entrust the government to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory,” William Buckley once said, “than to the faculty of Harvard University.” If we can p
A Few Poems About Snow
by Christopher Hall “This business of a poet,” said Imlac, “is to examine, not the individual, but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of th
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Underbelly Color and Shadows. Santiago, Chile, Nov, 2017. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
A threnody for the dictionary
Joseph Epstein at Commentary: How many times during the past month have you gone to the dictionary, or if not the dictionary then to your computer, to look up a word? I go to mine with some frequency.
Presenting the Case That the Future Will Be Unrecognizable
Steve Newman at Second Thoughts: Here’s a threshold AI may be approaching: it may soon be the first technology to be more adaptable than we are. It’s not there yet, but you can see it coming – the ran
Yes: The Most Ambitious Band in Rock History
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Scott Aaronson: How Close Are We to Fault-Tolerant Quantum Computing?
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How Willie Nelson Sees America
Alex Abramovich at The New Yorker: When Willie Nelson performs in and around New York, he parks his bus in Weehawken, New Jersey. While the band sleeps at a hotel in midtown Manhattan, he stays on boa
Raja Shehadeh Believes Israelis and Palestinians Can Still Find Peace
David Marchese in the New York Times: The writer, lawyer and human rights activist Raja Shehadeh, who is 74, has spent most of his life living in Ramallah, a city in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Th
Metabolism is the next frontier in cancer treatment: What if we change what a tumor can eat?
Siddhartha Mukherjee in Stat 10: In oncology we return, again and again, to first principles. The cell is our unit of life and of medicine. When a normal cell becomes malignant, it does not merely div
Steely Dan
Philip Clark at the NYRB: As a teenager, growing up in New Jersey during the 1960s, the pianist Donald Fagen routinely took a bus into Manhattan to hear his jazz heroes in the flesh. The ecstatic impr
Scientists Just Developed a Lasting Vaccine to Prevent Deadly Allergic Reactions
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: ‘Tis the season for overindulgence. But for people with allergies, holiday feasting can be strewn with landmines. Over three million people worldwide tiptoe around a foo
Flattery Machines
by Sherman J. Clark There is no other way of guarding oneself from flatterers except letting men understand that to tell you the truth does not offend you. —Machiavelli A friend recently described to
Confessions of a Bad Buddhist
by Lei Wang Lately I have the feeling that everything is speaking to me. This is concerning, not least because there is a family tendency towards mild schizophrenia. As a delinquent intellectual, I ha
Poem by Jim Culleny
Two Hands First time I saw Escher’s two hands drawing themselves I thought, how cool this picture is in its absurd beauty, then much later, as in now, it comes to me as I give my cognition another cha
Joe Ely (1947 – 2025) Singer, Guitarist, Songwriter
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Sunday Poem
Girl with a Blue Scarf She sits against the porridge-coloured wall watchful and suspicious, with the look of a frightened fawn, her oval face and Slavic eyes wary beneath her ragged crow-black fringe,
Rob Reiner (1947 – 2025) Actor and Filmmaker
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Peter Arnett (1934 – 2025) Journalist and War Correspondent
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Zakir Hussain Meets Berklee
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Joan Didion and Kurt Vonnegut Had Something to Say. We Have It on Tape
From The New York Times: Tom Wolfe was a fast talker. Eudora Welty had a musical Southern drawl. Kurt Vonnegut’s jokes got belly laughs. Each of these authors once spoke to audiences at the 92nd Stree
Beyond Victims and Monsters: Review of “Slow Poison” by Mahmood Mamdani
by Azra Raza In June 1976, an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris was hijacked by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine along with two German radicals, diverted to Entebbe,
The Great Lost Beatle Album
by Steve Szilagyi The appetite for Beatles product cannot be sated. Last month, Apple Corps Ltd. released Anthology 4, a new compilation in The Beatles Anthology series, as part of a broader thirtieth
Trump’s Lies: The Contempt Is The Point
by Laurence Peterson If you have to argue, you’ve already lost. —Unknown There is so much about the Trump regime that is troublingly peculiar: the base cruelty, the arrogant racism and sexism, the eva
On Amitava Kumar’s “The Social Life of Indian Trains”
Eshan Sharma at The Wire: Amitava Kumar has long occupied a distinctive place in contemporary English writing. His work resists easy classification, blurring the boundaries between fiction, memoir, re
AI is transforming the economy — understanding its impact requires both data and imagination
Daniel Björkegren in Nature: How will artificial intelligence reshape the global economy? Some economists predict only a small boost — around a 0.9% increase in gross domestic product over the next te
A Tour of London in the 1700s
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After Ruining a Treasured Water Resource, Iran Is Drying Up
Fred Pearce at Yale Environment 360: More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U.S. — Iran’s greatest current existential cris
The Architects of AI Are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year
From Time Magazine: Jensen Huang needs a moment. The CEO of Nvidia enters a cavernous studio at the company’s Bay Area headquarters and hunches over a table, his head bowed. At 62, the world’s eighth
Newly discovered link between traumatic brain injury in children and epigenetic changes
From The Conversation: A newly discovered biological signal in the blood could help health care teams and researchers better understand how children respond to brain injuries at the cellular level, ac
Friday Poem
The Children of the Poor What shall I give my children? who are poor, Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land, Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand No velvet and no velvety velour; But who have b
The Origin of Speech and the First Poets
by Carol A Westbrook Who can remember back to the first poets, The greatest ones,…so lofty and disdainful of renown They left us not a name to know them by —Howard Nemerov, The Makers In this poem, Ho
Vasco, and a supernova discovered
by Dilip D’Souza On a stargazing trip between September 19 and September 23 this year, I spied a supernova. Well, not quite. I took plenty of photographs of a spectacular night sky through the four ni
Franco is still dead, the 50th year edition, Part II: Of His Crimes
by David J. Lobina ‘…a los gritos de «¡Viva España!» «¡Viva La Legión!» muere a nuestros pies lo más florido de nuestra compañías…’ —Franco, Diario de una Bandera [i] In these times in which the term
Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find
Karthik Tadepalli at Asterisk: The most widely endorsed reason productivity growth has faltered is that we are running out of good ideas. As this narrative has it, the many scientific and technology a
String Theory Inspires a Brilliant, Baffling New Math Proof
Joseph Howlett at Quanta: In August, a team of mathematicians posted a paper claiming to solve a major problem in algebraic geometry — using entirely alien techniques. It instantly captivated the fiel
Irving Finkel On Ancient Civilizations
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The Collaboration that Built Modern AI: Geoff Hinton & Jeff Dean in Conversation with Jordan Jacobs
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What is it Like to Be an Addict?
Kevin J. Harrelson at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: It is a rare book that combines rigorous argument, scientific fluency, and broad accessibility, but Owen Flanagan has managed that trifecta in h
Our Political Parties Have Trapped Us: Here’s one change that will break their hold
Danielle Allen at Persuasion: One side fears the shredding of safety nets, federal programs, and commitments to inclusion and honest history. The other side fears the destruction of traditional family
Missing History
Bill Cheng at VQR: Melon Floyd was born out in the Salts, 1881, in the border country between Winnemucca and Susanville—before they recorded Black voices on acetate, before his knife-throwing contest
Thursday Poem
The Haw Lantern The wintry haw is burning out of season, crab of the thorn, a small light for small people, wanting no more from them but that they keep the wick of self-respect from dying out, not ha
Gertrude Stein’s Preparations for the Afterlife
Evan Kindley in The New Republic: Gertrude Stein had no doubt that she was a genius. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once boasted. “Think of the Bible and Homer think of S
We don’t have a hundred biases, we have the wrong model
Jason Collins in Work in Progress: From the time of Aristotle through to the 1500s, the dominant model of the universe had the sun, planets, and stars orbiting around the Earth. This simple model, how
The American South And Me: Clifftop
by Mike Bendzela In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville’s effusive review of the Massachusetts writer’s collection of short tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, Melville utters, under a cloak of a
Living Free or as Evolution’s Arrow?
by Peter Topolewski Before the violence in the movie Bugonia moves center screen—and the narrative takes a not completely unexpected left turn—it’s made clear Teddy’s paranoia and consuming conspiraci
This Week’s Photograph
Car in a parking lot with frost on the ground. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
‘Murder Hornets’ Might Strike Terror in Humans, but These Frogs Can Eat Them for Lunch
Mary Randolph in Smithsonian Magazine: For a mouse several times its size, a sting from the “murder hornet” is deadly. For a colony of honeybees, the insects are catastrophic. The hornet even ignited
China Is Going Big in the Race to Harness Fusion Energy
Raymond Zhong, Chris Buckley, Keith Bradsher, and Harry Stevens in the New York Times: On a leafy campus in eastern China, crews are working day and night to finish a mammoth round structure with two
Mathematicians discover a strange new infinity
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US health insurance premiums rose nearly 3x the rate of worker earnings over the past 25 years
Vivian Ho and Salpy Kanimian in The Conversation: Some of the premium increases can be attributed to an increase in hospital outpatient visits and coverage of GLP-1 drugs. But research, including our
How an antiviral defense mechanism may lead to Alzheimer’s
From Phys.Org: One of the main proteins that contributes to Alzheimer’s disease is called phospho-tau (p-tau). When p-tau gets too many phosphate groups attached to it (a process called hyperphosphory
Notes on American Fascism: Harold Brodkey’s prophecy
Colin Marshall in The Point: Topical though its title may sound, Harold Brodkey’s 1992 essay “Notes on American Fascism” probably couldn’t be published today. Reading it, one can almost hear the inevi
Wednesday Poem
Foreign Heart The redneck bartender yells out “Like the singer guy in Spanish?” This intercepts all eyes from the Army-Navy Game. So what am I doing there, Upstate, besides the beer. “Laundry across t
Inferior Men: Donald Trump and the I Ching
by Mark Harvey The dark power at first held so high a place that it could wound all who were on the side of good and of the light. But in the end it perishes of its own darkness… —I Ching, #36, Ming Y
One, Another; Other, Alone: the Fiction of Andrés Barba
by TJ Price I came to Andrés Barba as I come to many authors—via recommendation. A very good friend was the first to mention Barba’s work—specifically, Such Small Hands—during the course of a fun back
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
What Happens When Gen Z Encounters Catullus’s Filthiest Poem?
Rachel DeWoskin at Literary Hub: In this moment of especially rabid book banning, my high school senior has been translating Catullus in her Advanced Track (AT) Latin class. Catullus’s poems disappear
New Discoveries in the Archaeology of the Ancient Americas
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Why Is Ice Slippery? A New Hypothesis
Paulina Rowińska at Quanta: The reason we can gracefully glide on an ice-skating rink or clumsily slip on an icy sidewalk is that the surface of ice is coated by a thin watery layer. Scientists genera
Google DeepMind robotics lab tour with Hannah Fry
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Lessons of the Masters
Lyndall Gordon at The Hudson Review: If you’re eccentric, you’re all right.” This is how Humphrey Carpenter, biographer of W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Benjamin Britten, explained the British character
How Tax Havens Undermine the Rule of Law by Providing the Rule of Law
Nikhil Kalyanpur at The Price of Power: Historically, economic elites pushed for stronger courts, better property rights, and even elections. There was an underlying logic: elites are fundamentally af
The Tune of Things
Christian Wiman at Harper’s Magazine: A 1980 case study from England depicts a young man with an IQ of 126, excellent performance in his university classes, normal social skills, and basically no brai
Khan in the Dark
Peter Bach in CounterPunch: The persistent rumours that imprisoned Pakistani politician Imran Khan is dead have been crackling away like Lahore firecrackers these past few weeks. They feel less like r
AI Chatbots Choose Friends Just Like Humans Do
Edd Gent in Singularity Hub: As AI wheedles its way into our lives, how it behaves socially is becoming a pressing question. A new study suggests AI models build social networks in much the same way a
Tuesday Poem
Le Chien I remember late one night in Paris speaking at length to a dog in English about the future of American culture. No wonder she kept cocking her head as I went on about “summer movies” and the
Are You 729 Times Happier than Donald Trump?
by Scott Samuelson When I turned fifty, I went through the usual crisis of facing that my life was—so to speak—more than half drunk. After moping a while, one of the more productive things I started t
The Cleaning Crew Part I: After Death
by Thomas Fernandes In the natural world, predation may mark the end of life, but it doesn’t signal the end of ecological interactions. The hunt, with all its challenges and shifting interactions, is
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. First Snow. Dec 14, 2025. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
In Malaysia, Muslim Trans Women Find Their Own Paths
Gréta Tímea Biró at Sapiens: Dora and I walked through the quiet nighttime streets of Chow Kit, a downtown neighborhood in Kuala Lumpur. [1] Pungent food smells mingled with the sweet scent of fruit a
The Doppelgänger who wants a Doppelgänger
Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad at Digital Dopplegangers: Most current digital doppelgängers, for all practical purposes, are automatons i.e., their behavior is relatively fixed with relatively well defined
Creativity in Science – Ernest Nagel (1968)
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Paul Giamatti & Stephen Asma talk about Writing, Acting, and the Untamed Imagination
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The “Satiric, Terrifying” Legacy Of Poet Weldon Kees
Dana Gioia at The Book Haven: I first discovered the poetry of Weldon Kees in 1976—fifty years ago—while working a summer job in Minneapolis. I came across a selection of his poems in a library anthol
China leads research in 90% of crucial technologies — a dramatic shift this century
Xiaoying You in Nature: The ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker evaluated high-quality research on 74 current and emerging technologies this year, up from the 64 technologies it analysed last year. Chi
Frank Gehry: The Liberator
Martin Filler at the NYRB: The great liberator of late-twentieth-century architecture, Gehry was a latter-day Alexander who sliced through the Gordian Knot formed by an exhausted Modernism intertwined
The Root Causes of Senseless Violence
Ivana Hughes in Common Dreams: I write this from the front of a Columbia classroom in which about 60 first-year college students are taking the final exam for Frontiers of Science. Yes, it’s a Sunday,
You’re Probably Not Addicted to Social Media
Kristen French in Nautilus: Social media can be tough to ignore these days. There is so much of it, and it’s so accessible, right there glowing on the phones in our pockets and purses. Many of us find
The United States Is Tearing the West Apart
by Bill Murray One Monday in 1883 Southeast Asia woke to “the firing of heavy guns” heard from Batavia to Alice Springs to Singapore, and maybe as far as Mauritius, near Africa. “So violent are the ex
Mercy
by Andrea Scrima Sette Opere di Misericordia, the famous altarpiece by Caravaggio commissioned in 1607 by the charitable Confraternità del Pia Monte della Misericordia in Naples, where it still hangs
Poem by Jim Culleny
Until the Night Drops Fog lifting off of the river Frogs in a chorus of croaks Moon lit up —just a sliver A fire that the unknown has stoked Chuck Berry singing Johnny be Good his guitar lighting fire
Donald McIntyre (1934 – 2025) Operatic Bass-Baritone
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Socialism After AI
Evgeny Morozov in The Ideas Letter: Artificial intelligence has produced a rare kind of popular curiosity. Not only among investors and founders, but among people who open a browser, type a question,
Can machines suffer?
Conor Purcelli in Aeon: Across northern Europe and Canada during the 19th and 20th centuries, workers roamed coastlines and pack ice, beating infant seals to death with clubs. White ice was smeared re
Between Capitalism and the State-System
Quentin Bruneau in Phenomenal World: How should we explain periods of profound global transformation? Scholars have long viewed socio-political change as a reflection of property relations and technol
The new political theology
Arthur Goldhammer in Eurozine: Is Charlie Kirk’s assassination-turned-martyrdom unofficially disestablishing the US constitutional clause against the government forming a national religion? And how as
Joseph Byrd (1937 – 2025) Experimental Composer and Musician
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Phil Upchurch (1941 – 2025) Guitarist
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Kerala Has Abolished Extreme Poverty
Vijay Prashad in Scheerpost: On 1 November 2025, the south-western Indian state of Kerala – home to 34 million people – was declared free from extreme poverty by Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. Keral
May I Explain the “May I Meet You?” Meme?
Katie Baker in The Ringer: The way the fabled investor Bill Ackman sees it, he was born to move markets. It’s right there in the name: BILL-ionaire ACK-tivist MAN, as the 59-year-old always loves poin
Sunday Poem
The Case of Courage No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live tak
Putting the “Art” into Artificial Intelligence, or Banksy on Steroids
by Malcolm Murray As I discussed AI with my cabdriver on a recent trip to Vienna, I was reminded of the fact that the German word for AI is Künstliche Intelligenz. This shares an etymological root wit
The Barren Midwife: On Socratic Method and Psychotherapeutic Art
by Gary Borjesson I’ve rarely regretted holding my tongue during a session. I’ve rarely regretted drawing out what’s on a patient’s mind instead of offering some (apparently) juicy insight or interpre
The Literature of Limits: The Buddhist Horizon (Part II)
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In the previous article of this series I started with the exploration of the concept that every civilization eventually arrives at the edge of its own knowing. It was not m
A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood
Paper by Joel Z. Leibo, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, William A. Cunningham, and Stanley M. Bileschi: The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosion” of ne
Australia’s world-first social media ban is a ‘natural experiment’ for scientists
Rachel Fieldhouse & Mohana Basu in Nature: For Susan Sawyer, a physician-researcher specializing in adolescent health at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, the start of