All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
IBM has unveiled two unprecedentedly complex quantum computers
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in Nature: As a contender in the race to build an error-free quantum supercomputer, IBM has been taking a different tack than its most direct competitors. Now, the firm has u
Geoffrey Hinton: What Is Understanding?
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Amitav Ghosh: How visions of catastrophe shape the ‘climate solutions’ imposed by aid agencies
Amitav Ghosh at Equator: I came of age as a reader in the 1970s, when apocalyptic fiction was much in vogue because of intensifying nuclear anxieties. As a teenager, I devoured books set in the afterm
The Romantic Revolution in Politics & Morals – Isaiah Berlin
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Are All Animals Of Moral Concern?
Jeff Sebo at Aeon Magazine: You notice an ant struggling in a puddle of water. Their legs thrash as they fight to stay afloat. You could walk past, or you could take a moment to tip a leaf or a twig i
Are we doomed?
David Runciman in London Review of Books: People are living longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children. The evidence of what this combination can do to a society is growing around
Cell-Electronic Hybrid Chips Could Enable Surgery-Free Brain Implants
RJ Mackenzie in The Scientist: Brain implants can provide important insights into the nervous system and even relieve the symptoms of brain diseases. But getting implants into a patient’s head is an o
David Byrne’s Career of Earnest Alienation
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: If you spend enough time wandering around downtown Manhattan, the odds are that you’ll eventually encounter the musician David Byrne riding a bicycle. (He owns four
Wednesday Poem
On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, In New England It is what he does not know, Crossing the road under the elm trees, About the mechanism of my car, About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ab
Enabling Story Universes: A Conversation with William K Gillespie
by Philip Graham When William K Gillespie was a student in one of my fiction writing workshops at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s, he turned in a brilliant, 36-page (single spaced!) story
The Literature of Limits: The West (Part I)
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Every civilization eventually reaches the edge of its own understanding. The Enlightenment, which was basically a grand project of faith in reason, sought to replace the my
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Tom Cat: On duality, detachment, and life and death decisions
Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen at Longreads: When I arrived in Harlem, I felt anguished responsibility and resentment toward the cat. He could die, I perseverated. I had imagined Manhattan from the vantage p
What Is a Manifold?
Paulina Rowińska in Quanta: Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat
Who was Asherah – Wife of Yahweh?
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On Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Frankenstein
Tyler Dean at Artforum: GUILLERMO DEL TORO‘S new film adaptation of Frankenstein, 2025, hews closely to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel while weaving in design elements and plot points from its many cinemat
Sean Carroll: How Philosophers Corrected a Fundamental Error in Physics
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Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found
Kathryn Murphy at Literary Review: From the sparse scatter of documents testifying to the life of Vermeer, many of them forbiddingly brief or boring or purely legal, Graham-Dixon constructs a compelli
What Socialism Got Right
Kristen Ghodsee at The MIT Press Reader: Twenty years ago, in November of 2005, Duke University Press published my first book: “The Red Riviera: Gender, Tourism, and Postsocialism on the Black Sea.” P
How We’re Creating the Dumbest Generation in History
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The computers that run on human brain cells
David Adam in Nature: In a town on the shores of Lake Geneva sit clumps of living human brain cells for hire. These blobs, about the size of a grain of sand, can receive electrical signals and respond
Tuesday Poem
The Mountain and the River In my country there is a mountain. In my country there is a river. Come with me. Night climbs up to the mountain. Hunger goes down to the river. Come with me. Who are those
History as Self-Healing Mechanism
by Malcolm Murray The question of the day on everyone’s minds is whether AI is a boom or a bust. But if we lift our eyes ever so slightly from the question of the day and look at the bigger picture, t
Coffee In Cairo
by Eric Schenck In Arabic, the word kahwa means coffee. At least that’s how I learned it. The Egyptian dialect doesn’t seem to care about the letter qoff, and will leave the sound off just about every
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Self-portrait in Temple, Jogjakarta, Indonesia, October 2025. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life
Erik Baker at The Drift: Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading,
A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood
Paper by Joel Z. Leibo, Alexander Sasha Vezhnevets, William A. Cunningham, and Stanley M. Bileschi at Arxiv: The emergence of agentic Artificial Intelligence (AI) is set to trigger a “Cambrian explosi
James Watson died a couple of days ago, so here’s a rare interview with both Watson and Crick
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The Increasingly Complex Science of Political Identity
C. Brandon Ogbunu at Undark: Questions about voting patterns have long been the object of inquiry from thinkers across a breadth of fields, and especially in social science domains like political scie
The DNA Helix Changed How We Thought About Ourselves
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one of the most riveting dramas in the history of science, crammed with brilliant research, naked ambitio
The Past is a Foreign Country: And the New Ian McEwen Novel
by Leanne Ogasawara Which do you think is worse: a scenario in which every single email you ever wrote, (including all the drafts) and every last photo and video you ever took, are stored on the cloud
Corn Mush Latke Pie
by Barry Goldman It was more than 50 years ago that Mike and I invented Corn Mush Latke Pie. We were living in a flat on Margaret Street near 7 Mile and Woodward in Detroit. We paid 110 bucks a month
Poem by Jim Culleny
Rear View In reflection, the world’s not just a shifty place, but odd really, the unexpectedness of it, it’s sudden winds & wild humans shifting as I’ve aged, sliding from simply familiar to things wi
The world without hegemony
Manjeet S Pardesiis and Amitav Acharya in Aeon: The liberal international order or Pax Americana, the world order built by the United States after the Second World War, is coming to an end. Not surpri
A State-led Financial Empire
Johannes Petry in Phenomenal World: Having long prioritized domestic stability over the pursuit of a global role for the Renminbi (RMB), Beijing has recently accelerated its construction of a parallel
Boyhood
Yuri Slezkine in the new journal Equator: I grew up in Moscow, in a succession of communal apartments. The first book I learnt by heart (according to my father, who kept track and took pictures) was R
London Mayor Sadiq Khan: Zohran Mamdani’s Win Is a Victory for Hope
Sadiq Khan in Time Magazine: A couple of weeks before his election victory, Zohran Mamdani stood in front of a mosque in the Bronx. There, he gave the most personal speech of his campaign—a speech whi
The Essential Kate Atkinson
Sadie Stein in The New York Times: You know instantly when you’re in Kate Atkinson’s world. It’s dark, slightly Gothic, mordantly funny, keenly observed, highly textured and always full of surprises.
Sunday Poem
Amá Teaches Me How to Whistle She said, it’s facil, look up, kiss everything, hold the sun between your mouth, blow like this * * * * * **** **** * * * * **** **** after I told her I was a woman,
Canali, Aristocrats, Ant-Men: David Baron on Mars
by David Kordahl This article is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation with David Baron about his new book, The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century Ame
Lessons From Singapore: Always Building
by Eric Feigenbaum From a corner room in Singapore’s Peninsula hotel, I spent many nights staring out the windows, watch sparks fly silently from the nearby construction sites. Up on the 18th or 14th
Having lived in the United States for a few years, I have either struggled to understand democracy in practice or struggled to keep up with it
Wen Gao in The Common Reader: As a child, I imagined America as a truly democratic place where I could speak, disagree, and still listen. I even used to quote half seriously, “I disagree with what you
Notes from the near-future of AI
Eli Pariser at Second Thoughts: I attended The Curve, a conference of ~350 top AI lab leaders and scientists, safety activists and alarmists, political advisors and lobbyists, journalists, and civil s
Waymo engineer Vincent Vanhoucke on Self-driving cars
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Moon Duchin on the ‘Mathematical Quagmire’ of Gerrymandering
Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times: “Today I would say the whole world should be paying particular attention to this class of problem, which I’ll call the problem of democracy,” she noted in her pr
Is Humanistic Knowledge Useless? And so what if it is?
Baskin and Lipkin in The Point: Michael Lipkin I’m going to roll up my sleeves and attempt a dirty, but I think necessary, job. I’m going to try to defend the humanities, or at least humanities schola
The Hardest Part of Creating Conscious AI Might Be Convincing Ourselves It’s Real
David Cornell in Singularity Hub: As far back as 1980, the American philosopher John Searle distinguished between strong and weak AI. Weak AIs are merely useful machines or programs that help us solve
The Lime Works by Thomas Bernhard
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Jean Rollin, Poet of the Fantastique
Samm Deighan at The Current: French writer and director Jean Rollin is mostly remembered for a series of dreamlike vampire films he made beginning in the late 1960s: The Rape of the Vampire (1968), Th
Friday Poem
Grace As swimmers dare to lie face to sky and water bares them, as hawks rest upon air and air sustains them, so would I learn to attain freefall, and float into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace, knowing
Car Talk
Cynthia Zarin at the Paris Review: I learned to drive in the parking lot of what was then called the A&P supermarket, which marked the turnoff to a house my family owned then, by a cove and across fro
Danny Thompson, RIP
by Charles Siegel There can have been very few musicians who played such key roles, in so many different bands in so many different genres, as Danny Thompson. When he died at 86 in September, music l
Viewer Discretion is Advised
by Akim Reinahrdt Language: Ooh, a talkie! Strong Language: No shit Disturbing Images: Worse than a mirror? Nudity: Promises, promises Sexual Content: Awkward birds & bees talk? Sex: That’s not sex Su
Myths and Motivation
by Marie Snyder There are contradicting views and explanations of what dopamine is and does and how much we can intentionally affect it. However, the commonly heard notions of scrolling for dopamine h
What I learnt from the Soviet Adventure Library
Yuri Slezkine at Equator: These books were born in Western Europe and North America at the confluence of imperial expansion, mass literacy and the rise of the translation industry, popular periodicals
What is DNS? A computer engineer explains this foundational piece of the web – and why it’s the internet’s Achilles’ heel
Doug Jacobson in The Conversation: When millions of people suddenly couldn’t load familiar websites and apps during the Amazon Web Services, or AWS, outage on Oct. 20, 2025, the affected servers weren
A world without morality: John Mearsheimer, Christina Lamb, Kenneth Roth
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Will quantum be bigger than AI?
Zoe Kleinman in BBC: There’s an old adage among tech journalists like me – you can either explain quantum accurately, or in a way that people understand, but you can’t do both. That’s because quantum
The Mamdani Era Begins
Eric Lach in The New Yorker 100: t’s ancient history now, but when Zohran Mamdani first entertained the notion of running for mayor, he imagined himself running against Eric Adams. It was 2021, and Ad
‘Scamming became the new farming’: inside India’s cybercrime villages
Snigdha Poonam in The Guardian: On the surface, the town of Jamtara appeared no different from neighbouring districts. But, if you knew where to look, there were startling differences. In the middle o
Thursday Poem
Field Mouse Dangling from a Red-Tailed Hawk My first thought wasn’t the drama above but the bone-tired scientist I read about who held a mirror up to a mouse, just to watch his whiskers ……………………………………
A Less Than Pleasing Prospect: The Great Crash
by Michael Liss No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect than that which appears at the present time. In the domestic
Four Meditations On Roads And Pathways
by Mark R. DeLong 1. Regular snowmobile trails bored us kids in the closing years of the 1960s. They wound through the woods, dipping here and there just enough to stall my uncle’s boxy old Evinrude m
The B-52 Victory Museum in Hanoi: How the Big Stick in the Sky Failed
by Daniel Gauss When you walk through the gates to enter the B-52 Victory Museum in Hanoi, you immediately find the wreckage of what has been one of the most terrifying machines ever built: an America
This Week’s Photograph
Rowan tree, also known as the mountain ash and its bright treasure of berries. With its yellow-orange leaves, it looks particularly striking at this time of year. Photo taken during a walk last week t
The Anthony Bourdain Reader – undiscovered gems from the charismatic chef turned writer
Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian: Think Anthony Bourdain and a whole rush of TV memories flood back. There he is – in shows such as Parts Unknown and No Reservations – a gonzo gourmand trekking to backs
The Strategic Calculus of AI R&D Automation
Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Most AI research pursues incremental advances — efficiency gains, domain extensions, specific capabilities. Groups seeking transformation typically bet on conceptual brea
China and the US: Francis Fukuyama interviews Dan Wang
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What Mamdani Learned from His Mother’s Films
Amardeep Singh at the Pittsburgh Review of Books: Zohran Mamdani, as most readers know by now, is the son of a filmmaker, Mira Nair. His parents met while she was working on Mississippi Masala (1992);
Tutivillus Is Watching You
Amelia Soth at JSTOR Daily: Of all the sins that might damn your soul for eternity, mumbling is probably pretty far down the list. Still, in medieval Europe, there was a demon for that: Tutivillus, wh
Jubilation and historic wins: US election night 2025 – in pictures
From The Guardian: More here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Francis Bacon – A Tainted Talent
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How Mayor Mamdani Can Write New York’s Next Chapter
Editorial Board in The New York Times: Mr. Mamdani, who campaigned on sweeping promises, can build a more positive legacy by focusing on tangible accomplishments. He should take notes from successful
Joanna Walsh’s History Of Amateur Creativity On The Internet
Katie Kadue at Bookforum: LONG BEFORE ELON “I am become meme” Musk sought to dismantle the federal government under the aegis of a dog meme, there were LOLcats. Founded by two software developers in 2
Wenesday Poem
Via Dolorosa The sun has barely roused itself when I hear screams over the coffee pot, but a glance out the window thaws my dread. Just three teens raging at the warm horizon. I know that cry—the one
An Embodied Mathematics
by Herbert Harris Is mathematics created or discovered? For over two thousand years, that question has puzzled philosophers and mathematicians alike. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates encourages an uneducated
Evolution and Creationism in the age of Trump
by Paul Braterman Throughout most of the UK (Northern Ireland is a partial exception) evolution is regarded as established science, and no politician would make belief in separate creation part of the
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Michael Caine and Shirley MacLaine in “Gambit”
Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria: “Go ahead, tell the end, but please don’t tell the beginning!” begs the movie poster for the 1966 film Gambit. Why would the filmmakers prefer to blow the ending rat
The Last Breath of the Himalayas: Can We Stop the Collapse?
Kavita Bhardwaj at The Revelator: When forests are cleared, wetlands drained, and slopes destabilized, entire ecosystems lose their balance. Floods, landslides, and erosion then hit both communities a
Derek Muller explains “The Selfish Gene” and more
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Yascha Mounk: How social media destroyed the freedoms of city life
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: You remember the scene: A camera at a Coldplay concert is showing audience members enjoying the show, with lead singer Chris Martin making a few friendly comments abo
Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Of International Espionage And White-Cheddar Crime
Lisa Borst at The Baffler: In a 1990 review of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, John Leonard described the book as “unbuttoned, as though the author-god had gone to a ballgame.” Vineland is maybe my persona
The Dangerous Dead in Society
John Blair at LitHub: How can whole societies come to believe that the dead walk among them? Understanding that requires moving beyond theoretical approaches and engaging with tangible human communiti
We need Freud’s forgotten concept to understand our political crisis
From iai: We associate Freud with the repression of thoughts and feelings. But he also described a subtler defense: recognizing an uncomfortable truth, yet acting as if it didn’t matter—a phenomenon h
The Mystery of Transformation in Nature
Elizabeth Sbovoda in Undark: Who isn’t obsessed with metamorphosis? From the children’s classic “The Very Hungry Caterpillar,” who gorges himself to fuel his dramatic shape-shift, to legless tadpoles
CONSPIRACY | contrapoints
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Tuesday Poem
A Drink of Water She came every morning to draw water like an old bat staggering up the field: The pump’s whooping cough, the bucket clatter And slow diminuendo as it filled, Announced her. I recall H
Lingua Trumpii Imperii
by Rafaël Newman In June 1932, half a year before Adolf Hitler was sworn in as German Chancellor, Victor Klemperer watched Nazis on a newsreel marching through the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. A profes
The Song Is You: Random Thoughts on My Mother and the American Songbook
by Angela Starita When my mother was a teenager in the early 1940s, a NY-area radio station ran a weekly contest, asking listeners to vote for their favorite singer among two: Crosby or Sinatra? How p
Perceptions
Anushka Rostomji. Waq Waq Tree, 2023, of the Flesh and Foliage Series. Charcoal and pencil on paper. More here and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
The Dogged, Irrational Persistence of Literary Fiction
Gerald Howard in the New York Times: I remember the vogue in the ’60s and ’70s for critical essays predicting the imminent “death of the novel.” In Wilfrid Sheed’s mordant portrait of the protagonist
Why the race to scale up AI pretraining is NOT over
Lynette Bye at Transformer: It’s not that the AI companies are growing their computing power slowly — surprise at the lack of compute put into new training reflects how aggressively they’ve scaled unt
Stephen Asma on the Virtue Industrial Complex: License to Scold
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The China Tech Canon
Afra Wang at Asterisk: In 1987, Lei Jun 雷军 was a 21-year-old student in Wuhan University’s computer science program. The book that had set his imagination alight was Fire in the Valley 硅谷之火, which chr
Why Does Light Exist?
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The Visionary Company of Kathryn Davis
Alex Andriesse at the Paris Review: A few years after I first read The Thin Place, I found myself interviewing Davis for an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, which I was editing at the time
Dead and Alive by Zadie Smith – essays for an age of anxiety
Houman Barekat in The Guardian: In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, wi
Cinema’s Greatest Anatomist: David Cronenberg
Travis Alexander at Aeon Magazine: ‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ That’s a quote often, though wrongly, attributed to Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961). But it
The World’s Greatest Feminist Experiment Was Not Where You’d Think
Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: In 1990, when Julia Ioffe was 7 years old, her family left a collapsing Soviet Union for suburban Maryland. Her new classmates never let her forget that she was
Resistance and Resistance
by Katalin Balog “…eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a
American Heartbreak: The ‘Urban Design Studio’ in Jersey City
by William Benzon Jersey City is a medium-size city on the West bank of the Hudson River across from Lower Manhattan. Up through the middle of the 20th century it was a port and a railroad hub but tha
Poem by Jim Culleny
Brevity I need a good poem lifespan-short, one I can shoe-horn between instants which in that pinch says so much I’ll understand long and short by the depth of calluses built upon my brain— but it’s n
The Clash of Civilizationalisms
Hans Kundnani and Srirupa Roy in The Ideas Letter: During the past decade, there has been what might be called a global civilizational turn as states around the world have increasingly imagined themse
The role of universities in a democratic society
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Mexico’s Big Green State
Jose Maria Valenzuela in Phenomenal World: At Claudia Sheinbaum’s first State of Affairs speech, the President announced the passage of fourteen new energy sector laws after only eleven months in offi
The world without hegemony
Manjeet S Pardesi and Amitav Acharya in Aeon: The liberal international order or Pax Americana, the world order built by the United States after the Second World War, is coming to an end. Not surprisi
Alison Knowles (1933 – 2025) Fluxus Artist
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Anthony Jackson (1952 – 2025) Bassist
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Israel Must Reckon With What It Wrought in Gaza
Michael Gross in The New York Times: In talks leading up to the cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel, President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “You’re going to be remembered
Does eating more protein burn more calories?
Peter Attia in peterattiamd.com: When it comes to fat loss, most of us need all the help we can get. With the modern American lifestyle being largely sedentary and characterized by easy access to high
Jack DeJohnette (1942 – 2025) Jazz Drummer
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Bottom’s Dream and Memory’s Attic
by Nils Peterson At my senior center we have a Shakespeare class led by marvelous young woman, actor, playwright, professional clown. Her main method is to assign us parts and have us read the text ou
Cooking, Eating and the Defense of Agency in the Age of AI
by Dwight Furrow We have slid almost imperceptibly and, to be honest, gratefully, into a world that offers to think, plan, and decide on our behalf. Calendars propose our meetings; feeds anticipate ou
Sunday Poem
Hour Children This hour, children. Rubble children. Falling beneath children falling children. Afternoon children with shadows for swings. Evening children with cold for pillows. Moon in the yew tree
Edgar Allan Poe: A Life
Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist: Next to an abiding interest in biology, I also have a penchant for the gothic, and a version of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe naturally can be found
Signs of introspection in large language models
From the website of Anthropic: Have you ever asked an AI model what’s on its mind? Or to explain how it came up with its responses? Models will sometimes answer questions like these, but it’s hard to
A Song by Rafay Rashid: “Silver Hairs”
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Mourning and Melancholia in Las Vegas
Isaac Ariail Reed at The Hedgehog Review: As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction,
The Evolution of Ghosts
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Carlo Rovelli’s Radical Perspective on Reality
Zack Savitsky in Quanta Magazine: Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads,
On The Last Days Of Gene Hackman
Joy Williams at Harper’s Magazine: Gene Hackman was Popeye Doyle, the Reverend Scott, Lex Luthor, Royal Tenenbaum. He was Little Bill Daggett and John Herod. He was a senator and a president. He was H
The silicon cell
Mitch Leslie in Science: A human cell swarms with trillions of molecules, including some 42 million proteins and a plethora of carbohydrates, lipids, and nucleic acids. Crowded with organelles and oth
Friday Poem
Morning Song of a Fan a flock of black birds bursts across the gray sky above a late fall dawn, then splits in two like a pair of receivers heading for opposite sidelines I’m not much of a defender th
The Simplest Argument For Veganism
Bentham’s Bulldog at Bentham’s Newsletter: Imagine that you found out that your friend raised his own chickens. One day, he invited you into his house and you saw how he treated them. Dozens of chicke
The Christopher Knight Problem
by Christopher Hall Some time ago – I can’t remember if it was before, during, or after the pandemic – I read Michael Finkel’s The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermi
Close Reading Carl Sagan
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
Ballrooms And Tunnels: Bucket Lists Of The Old And Rich
by Brooks Riley If Wolfgang Porsche, 82, chairman of the supervisory board of Porsche AG, is able to live in a historic landmark villa on the Kapuzinerberg, a forested mountain in Salzburg, he owes a
The Psychology of “Portnoy”: On the Making of Philip Roth’s Groundbreaking Novel
Steven J. Zipperstein at Literary Hub: Already in 1967, the same year When She Was Good came out, the first samples of Portnoy’s Complaint were issued in wide-circulation magazines like Esquire and Sp
Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve weather forecasting
Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers: The potential for AI to improve weather forecasting and climate modelling (which also takes a long time and uses a lot of energy) has been known for severa
Marcus du Sautoy: Why “art versus maths” is all wrong
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Jonathan Lethem On His Stories
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Rethinking nuclear
Edward A. Friedman at the Oxford University Press blog: As someone who has spent decades studying the evolution of nuclear energy, I’ve seen its emergence as a promising transformative technology, its
Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us
Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker: The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our
The Best New TV Shows of October 2025
Judy Berman in Time Magazine: Horror is ubiquitous on TV at this time of year, and those of us who love a good scare—myself very much included—usually look forward to it. Unfortunately, October 2025’s
Classic Jonathan Lethem
Justin St. Clair at the LARB: IN THESE PROFOUNDLY unsettling times, literary criticism can seem a little frivolous. We’re no longer slouching toward some imagined autocratic future; we’re midway throu
How Does Daylight Saving Time Affect Circadian Rhythm?
Shelby Bradford in The Scientist: As countries around the world begin to turn their clocks back an hour, some people may rejoice at the extra time in bed while others might mourn the loss of evening l
Untitled
Lockdown Drill As we practice being silent and invisible, a sophomore says, Would you take a bullet for me, Mrs. Garcia? …….. In this corner of darkened classroom, teens under furniture, his inquiry s
What Does a Constitutional Crisis Look Like?
by Ken MacVey When promoting her new book in September, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated in an interview as quoted in Politico : “I think the Constitution is alive and well.” She went on
State Medical Boards Should Trust Each Other
by Kyle Munkittrick During covid, amid the maelstrom that was American healthcare, a miracle happened. State medical boards suspended their cross-state licensure restrictions. No special legislation r