All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
Justin Smith-Ruiu writes a philosopher’s guide to psychedelics
Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian: This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cit
World’s oldest person had a young microbiome and ‘exceptional genome’
James Woodford at New Scientist: Between 17 January 2023 and 19 August 2024, María Branyas Morera, of Spain, was officially the world’s oldest person, until she died aged 117 years and 168 days. To un
Ezra Klein talk to political theorist Corey Robin about Trump
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Dawson City: Frozen Time
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Global call for international red lines to prevent unacceptable AI risks signed by Nobel Laureates, other prominent figures
From the website of AI Red Lines: AI holds immense potential to advance human wellbeing, yet its current trajectory presents unprecedented dangers. AI could soon far surpass human capabilities and esc
Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season
Hannah Gold at Bookforum: In a 1996 interview with The Paris Review, the reporter and novelist John Gregory Dunne was asked why he chose to classify his 1974 book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, as
Nicholas Boggs on James Baldwin
Donovan Hohn and Nicholas Boggs at Lapham’s Quarterly: This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The
Thursday Poem
Before the Coming of the White Man —The Beaver’s Song I follow the river In quest of a young beaver. Up the river I go Through the cut willow path I go In quest of a young beaver. —The Bear’s Song A f
The great university shake-up: four charts show how global higher education is changing
Dan Garisto in Nature: If the 264 million students enrolled in higher education around the globe were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. Some 53% of its citizens would identi
“How Long?” – King Abdullah’s Fiery Speech on Gaza at UN General Assembly
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Fathers and Sons: Disease and Hubris
by Mark Harvey The late Robert F. Kennedy, who ran for President in 1968, could be considered a great man and even more commendably, a good man. It wasn’t always so. As a young ambitious lawyer he ser
Eye on the Ball
by Alizah Holstein Today an electrician came to visit. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had arms like sausage links that were fairly covered in tattoos. One of the tattoos was a date: January some
This Week’s Photograph
Two ceramic swans my wife bought cheaply at a flea market somewhere. They might be tea-light holders. Or something like that. I like them. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating n
Why we should treat caffeine like the brain-altering drug it is
Jonathan Simone at Psyche: When it comes to caffeine, we often speak about ‘needing our fix’ but I’ve yet to hear of an intervention staged for the friend who drinks three double espressos before noon
World’s first AI-designed viruses a step towards AI-generated life
Katie Kavanagh in Nature: AI models have already been used to generate DNA sequences, single proteins and multi-component complexes2. But designing a whole genome is much more challenging owing to com
How drawing has accelerated human progress
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Why every country needs to master the Electric Tech Stack
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: The other day I gave a talk at a conference in Canada about industrial policy. When we came to the inevitable question of which specific industries Canada should target, I ha
Darwin’s Unexpected Final Obsession
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A Philosophy Of Technology
Yuk Hui speaks with Daniel Birnbaum at Artforum: DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Many people I know are reading your recent book Post-Europe [2024] right now. It challenges us to participate in the creation of a new
Wednesday Poem
My Native Costume When you come to visit, said a teacher from the suburban school, don’t forget to wear your native costume. But I’m a lawyer. I said. My native costume is a pinstriped suit. You know,
Quantum Physics and Phenomenology
Steven French at Aeon Magazine: This question forms the basis of what came to be known as the ‘measurement problem’. One influential answer emerged from the mind of one of the greatest mathematicians
Bedside Manners: Can empathy be taught in medicine?
Rachel Pearson in Harper’s Magazine: Snow fell all day while a baby was dying. I cannot remember if it was a boy or a girl, so imagine a girl. This was years ago now. The baby had pneumonia. A few wee
What researchers suspect may be fueling cancer among millennials
From The Washington Post: Gary Patti leaned in to study the rows of plastic tanks, where dozens of translucent zebrafish flickered through chemically treated water. Each tank contained a different sub
C.P. Snow Blind
by Steve Szilagyi Henry James once observed that Robert Louis Stevenson “wrote with a kind of gallantry — as if language were a pretty woman.” C.P. Snow (1905–1980) did not write like that. Pretty did
Seeking Shelter from the Storm; or, Erasing the Prints of the Heir
by TJ Price F-1: blueprint The house, then, and its rooms. Viewed from the outside, it is nothing extraordinary: situated at the top of a hill, its single-level structure is unassuming. The front lawn
The Sun Beats Down, Under A Dark Sky
by Dilip D’Souza The Hanle Dark Sky Reserve is a spectacular spot in Ladakh, in the north of India. It’s surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and at 14000 feet, it’s well above the treeline. So the mo
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Review of “What We Can Know” by Ian McEwan – the limits of liberalism
Kevin Power in The Guardian: The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It
Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same
Blaise Agüera y Arcas at The MIT Press Reader: In 1994, a strange, pixelated machine came to life on a computer screen. It read a string of instructions, copied them, and built a clone of itself — jus
Sabine Hossenfelder: “They kicked me out!”
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Why Authoritarians Fear Common Knowledge
Steven Pinker at Persuasion: “The Emperor’s New Clothes” dramatizes two features of common knowledge that make it not just a mind-blowing logical concept but a key to understanding human social life.
Foundations of Liberal Equality – Ronald Dworkin
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The Growing Response to Changes in Federal Vaccine Policy
Armour, Mai-Duc, Maxmen, and Allen in Undark Magazine: States and medical societies that long worked in concert with the CDC are breaking with federal recommendations, saying they no longer have faith
What drove the rise of civilizations? A decades-long quest points to warfare
Laura Spinney in Nature: When Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico in 1519, he found monarchs, cities, roads, markets, schools, astronomers, law courts and much else that also existed
Tuesday Poem
Manic Screaming We should make all spiritual talk ………….. Simple today: God is trying to sell you something, …… But you don’t want to buy. ….That is what your suffering is: ………Your fantastic haggling,
Death In The Magnetic Age
Sam Kriss at The Point: On the 30th of March, 1981, John Hinckley brought us into the world we all live in today. He did it by firing a .22 “Devastator” round into the chest of the president of the Un
Nepal’s Violent Gen Z Uprising
Kapil Komireddi at The New Yorker: By September 10th, Nepal had descended into a state of lawlessness, a country without a government or authority. The only national institution that survived—and that
Common Knowledge, a Parable
by John Allen Paulos A bit of information is common knowledge among a group of people if all parties know it, know that the others know it, know that the others know they know it, and so on. It is muc
How (Not) to Choose Your (Intellectual) Heroes
by David J. Lobina One of the most disappointing aspects of modern life is seeing peers in academia, and intellectuals in general, share their personal and private selves on social media. Now, it is n
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Departure. December 2024. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Justin Smith-Ruiu is dead serious about what we might learn from altered states
Emily Eakin in the New York Times: Nearly everyone struggled during the pandemic, but Justin Smith-Ruiu’s struggle took a particularly disturbing form. An American philosopher who teaches at the Unive
Claims of pure bloodlines? Ancestral homelands? DNA science says no
Alvin Powell in The Harvard Gazette: Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands. More tha
A conversation between Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani
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In Search of Arab Jews
Samuel Hayim Brody in the Boston Review: Mizrahi, a Hebrew word meaning “Eastern,” is used in the State of Israel to refer to Jews from Muslim-majority countries. Confusingly, it has widely come to re
The Mystery Of A Lost Flemish Masterpiece
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Can plants get cancer, and how do they defend themselves against disease?
Connick et al in ABC News Australia: Cancer is one of the most common causes of death in people, and case numbers are rising. At current rates, about one in two Australians can expect a cancer diagnos
Embassies and Consulates
Heman Chong at Cabinet Magazine: The first door was in Tokyo, in the Roppongi district. He said he discovered it in a state of boredom, or more exactly, in that mental state that walking in Tokyo is p
The Devil is in the Digital: Pakistan’s Blasphemy Economy
Afiya Zia in LSE: The genealogy of blasphemy laws in Pakistan is not merely a story of legal prohibitions but of a shifting moral economy traversing colonial governance, post-colonial authoritarianism
A Brief History of Sentimentality
Lucy Hughes-Hallett at Literary Review: Mount’s argument in this erudite, immensely entertaining book is that to be warm and witless (if by ‘witless’ one means devoid of irony, flippancy and cool) is
Bad Boys: A Theory of History
by Richard Farr Terrified people from ethnic minorities being threatened, rounded up, and beaten by heavily armed men in uniforms or not-quite-uniforms: we have seen these images before. In the US, th
My Smart Home Forgot the World
by Peter Topolewski Imagine you could you travel back in time with your phone. Imagine you presented your phone to the first stranger you encountered. Didn’t dilly dally at all but straightaway showed
Poem by Jim Culleny
Alternate Paradise ……. All poems hint death though some strive not to mention it decked as they are in bright intentions to make it moot, but it can’t be helped, it looms over every word no matter how
The Cares of State
Catherine Nicholson in New York Review of Books: Nan Z. Da spent the first six and a half years of her life in the People’s Republic of China. She was born in the 1980s, during a period known as Gaige
Morality Plays
Chetan Bhatt in The Ideas Letter: Across the West, the far right represents a fully transformative ambition: the desire to profoundly change the social, political, and cultural dimensions of European
The Belt and Road 2.0
Tim Sahay interviews Mathias Larsen in Phenomenal World: TIM SAHAY: China’s total dominance in green technologies has provoked anxiety in many countries among policymakers, analysts, and captains of i
How modern life makes us sick – and what to do about it
Alex Curmi in The Guardian: One of the central ideas in the field of evolutionary psychology is that of “evolutionary mismatch”. Put simply, we evolved in a very different environment from the one in
Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival: Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard.
Nina Pasquini in Harvrad Magazine: He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemp
Sunday Poem
American Sermon I am uniquely privileged to be alive or so they say. I have asked others who are unsure, especially the man with three kids who’s being foreclosed next month. One daughter says she isn
Three Keys of Friendship, with Aristotle as Guide
by Gary Borjesson The happiest, most fulfilled moments of my life have been when I was completely aware of being alive, with all the hope, pain, and sorrow that entails for any mortal being. —Jenny Od
If Climate Change Is As Bad As Activists Say, They Should Campaign For Geoengineering
by Thomas R. Wells Many climate activists claim to believe that climate change is an existential threat to humanity if not the entire biosphere. This is the justification for groups like Extinction Re
How Guillermo del Toro Conjured a ‘Frankenstein’ Monster Unlike Any Before
Maya Salam at the New York Times: Guillermo del Toro has been shaping his vision for Victor Frankenstein’s monster since he was 11 years old, when Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 Gothic novel became his B
How should ‘mirror life’ research be restricted? Debate heats up
Mark Peplow in Nature: Many of the molecules in our bodies are ‘chiral’ — that is, they take one of two mirror-image forms, like right-handed and left-handed gloves. Proteins are built from left-hande
Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence?
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Steven Pinker on How Common Knowledge Builds and Weakens Societies
Yascha Mounk and Steven Pinker at Yascha Mounk’s Substack: Yascha Mounk: I love your work. I have read many of your books. In the new book, you suggest that a deceptively straightforward concept—commo
Kiran Desai’s Long-Awaited Return
Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times: Almost 20 years in the making, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai, is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes and chilly optimi
Gaudi’s Barcelona
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The Sagrada Família Takes Its Final Shape
D. T. Max at the New Yorker: The Sagrada Família is an immense, unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882 on what was once outlying farmland and is now the city’s center. When I last visited the b
Breaking Down the Ending of Netflix’s Glitzy Indian Dramedy Ba***ds of Bollywood
Isadora Wandermuram in Time Magazine: At its core, The Ba***ds of Bollywood is a razor-sharp look at the dazzling yet treacherous world of Hindi cinema, told through the eyes of Aasmaan Singh (Lakshya
Tipsy bats and perfect pasta: Ig Nobels celebrate ‘improbable’ research
Chris Simmas in Nature: The Ig Nobels were founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Previous winners have included the discovery that orgasm can be
Friday Poem
Poem to Remember in a Hard Time Lyme Regis. Low tide. Small boats, masts hugger-mugger, slump in the mud flats. Gray sky, gray water slopping against the jetty – maybe rain to come. The formal hous
The Gospel According to GPT: Promise and Peril of Religious AI
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad In recent years chatbots powered by large language models have been slowing moving to the pulpit. Tools like QuranGPT, Gita GPT, Buddhabot, MagisteriumAI, and AI Jesus ha
Legaldegook
by Barry Goldman The term legaldegook appears to have been coined by Bryan A. Garner. He is the author of several books on language in general and legal language in particular. Garner co-wrote a book
Lower Interest Rates Are the Right Policy for the Wrong Reasons
Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli at Project Syndicate: As its September meeting approaches, the US Federal Reserve is once again coming under political pressure to lower rates. President Donald Trump
Mustafa Suleyman: Seemingly Conscious AI Is Coming
Mustafa Suleyman at Project Syndicate: My life’s mission has been to create safe, beneficial AI that will make the world a better place. But recently, I’ve been increasingly concerned about people sta
Why Do Wind Turbines Have Three Blades?
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On Afghanistan: Failure Is the Best Form of Success
Joshua Craze at Triple Canopy: An omnipresent feature of liberal chronicles of the occupation is a fixation on how much was wasted: the $2.13 trillion spent and the 176,000 people who died. Surveying
Dr Paul Collins on ‘Discovering the Sumerians’
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Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Adam Thirlwell in London Review of Books: I love Gertrude Stein but I find it very difficult to think about the way I love her, to be precise about what’s so charming and also valuable in her writing
Superorganism—or Family Business?
Michael Ghiselin in American Scientist: One of the most striking features of insect societies is that they contain “neuter castes” of organisms that do not reproduce (worker bees, for example). That c
Sylvia Plath’s Prose
Meg Schoerke at the Hudson Review: Although Sylvia Plath is best known for the cutting lyricism of Ariel (1965) and for her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), her career goal as a writer was
Thursday Poem
Hackberries The trees are our neighbors …………………………. -Meg Wade Gentrification comes, finally, even for the trees in our neighborhood. Our old neighbors were trash trees—diseased, they said. Coughed mo
Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief
Seamus Perry at Literary Review: Edward FitzGerald long remembered the heavenly spectacle of his younger contemporary Alfred Tennyson at Cambridge. ‘At that time he looked something like the Hyperion
The Radical Power of Political Love
by Rachel Robison-Greene In 1961, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an address before the annual meeting of the Fellowship of the Concerned. In the speech, he defended non-violence, arguing that
Nine Reasons To Read The Classics
by Eric Schenck One of my New Year’s resolutions was to read one of the “classics of fiction” each month this year. I’m happy to report that I’m on pace to succeed. While I won’t tell you which books
This Week’s Photograph
Just a leaf I saw lying on the sidewalk. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
What Makes Abraham Verghese Such a Great Storyteller?
Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader: After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few m
The Electrotech Revolution
Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers: Most of the discussion on the move from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy is about tackling climate change. Quite rightly: that was the main reason I got i
Scott Aaronson: How Much Math Is Knowable?
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Greg Grandin on Latin America, the United States, and the Creation of Social-Democratic Modernity
Alexander Aviña at Public Books: One of the leading historians of the Americas of our age, professor Greg Grandin is one of those rare scholars who has managed to attract the attention of academic and
A Swamp-Rat Slaughter On The Bayou
Nathaniel Rich at Harper’s Magazine: The rules of the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo are simple: From the strike of midnight on a Friday morning in February, your kill crew has forty hours to shoot as many sw
Baby Steps Is a Hiking Game That Trolls ‘Slightly Problematic’ Men
Megan Farokhmanesh in Wired: Game developer Bennett Foddy was watching a Greek myth unfold in front of him. A playtester for his latest project, Baby Steps, was struggling to navigate the game’s lead—
Seaweed Farming
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Wednesday Poem
The Such Thing As the Ridiculous Question Where are you from??? …….. When I say ancestors, let’s be clear: …….. I mean slaves. I’m talkin’ Tennessee …….. cotton & Louisiana suga. I mean grave dirt. I
Pauline Kael, Steven Spielberg, and a Romantic Film Criticism
Adrian Schober at Film Quarterly: While often citing American critic and screenwriter James Agee as a model for her emotional and intellectual engagement with the cinema, Kael claimed that she “was mo
The Lucas Museum and the Question of Narrative Art
Leo Braudy at the LARB: Among the earliest forms of visual imagery are, of course, the cave paintings of Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, which often feature images of animals, hunting scenes, dan
Sweetening the Bitter Lesson: An Argument for a More Natural AI
by Ali Minai As AI insinuates itself into our world and our lives with unprecedented speed, it’s important to ask: What sort of thing are we creating, and is this the best way to create it? What we ar
The Ecosystems of W.S. Merwin
by Laurie Sheck 1.In the garden of the Maui home where the poet W.S. Merwin lived for the last forty years of his life, writing and translating poems, and restoring deforested land into a flourishing
Catspeak
by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Nostalgia for a food culture that no longer exists
Mahfud Ikhwan at Words Without Borders: I rarely eat fruit. But because I’ve been taken in by healthy living campaigns, I occasionally find myself buying a half kilo of pears or apples or grapes. Why
What Exactly Are A.I. Companies Trying to Build? Here’s a Guide
Cade Metz and Karen Weise in the New York Times: As the tech industry spends and spends, turning farmland into data centers and A.I. researchers into some of the most highly paid workers in the countr
Max Tegmark argues AI now belongs inside physics—and that consciousness will be next
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China is quietly saving the world from climate change
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: There are two ways to decarbonize: 1) degrowth, and 2) green energy. None of the proponents of degrowth are asking China to stop growing its economy1, and it wouldn’t matter
The Archaeology of Shamanism with Dr Manvir Singh
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Bigas Luna’s Mediterranean Diet
Gonzalo M. Pavés at The Current: Bigas Luna was one of Spanish cinema’s most original directors. Drawing on early experiences in the visual arts, video, and interior design, Luna forged a unique filmo
A New Device Pulls Water From Thin Air—Even in Death Valley
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: It’s easy to take safe drinking water for granted. In most developed countries, access to safe water takes a simple flip of a kitchen tap or a run to the grocery store.
Could a Swarm of Space Mirrors Replace Much of Europe’s Solar and Wind by 2050?
Edd Gent in Singularity Hub: The idea of beaming solar power down from space might sound like science fiction, but it’s being taken seriously by a growing number of governments. A new analysis shows i
Tuesday Poem
Invocation Architect of icebergs, snowflakes, crystals, rainbows, sand grains, dust motes, atoms. Mason whose tools are glaciers, rain, rivers, ocean. Chemist who made blood of seawater, bone of miner
On Shamanism: The Timeless Religion
Marta Figlerowicz at the Paris Review: Shamanism defines religion as a yin-yang battle between its “shamanic” and “institutional” elements. The chaotic forces of individual prophecy, possession, and i
Basic Consequences: On Information And Agency
by Jochen Szangolies The principal argument of the previous column was that without the possibility of making genuine choices, no AI will ever be capable of originating anything truly novel (a line of
At what age are you officially “old” and why? Or, I got eye blooows. Do you?
by Bonnie McCune When my grandson was about two, I heard him stirring from his nap and went to his bedroom to get him up. He saw me at the door and clambered to his feet, clinging to the rail of his c
Disappearing Tales: Walter Benjamin on the Novel
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The Art of Mungo Thomson
Jan Tumlir at Artforum: Clever is a term that is sometimes used to describe Thomson by his detractors. In art, it carries a decidedly unflattering tone. Yet the cleverness on offer here opens every “o
Review of “A Splintering” by Dur e Aziz Amna – a woman’s ambitions in Pakistan
Mirza Waheed in The Guardian: I admired Dur e Aziz Amna’s precise and lyrical first novel, American Fever; the protagonist – an exchange student from Pakistan to rural Oregon – staying with me long af
Horses: A 4,000-Year Genetic Journey Across the World
David Chaffetz at the Asian Review of Books: Some myths take longer to die than others. For students of equine history, the passion that these animals inspire in their owners and breeders often act as
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on AI
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Friedrich Engels Predicted Modern Gentrification 150 Years Ago
P.E. Moskowitz at Literary Hub: In Urban Fortunes, their foundational work on the economies of cities, urban theorists John Logan and Harvey Molotch argue that the people running American cities no lo
Arvo Pärt: The Holy Minimalist Who Defied The Soviets
Ian Thomson at The New Statesman: Arvo Pärt, the pre-eminent religious composer of our time, was born in 1935 in Estonia, before its Soviet occupation. His music suggests the contemplative devotion an
From Soundwaves to Brainwaves: The Transformative Power of Music
Iris Kulbatski in The Scientist: Life begins with music. The human body provides the basic musical elements for the soundtrack to fetal development. The rhythmic pulsing of mom’s heartbeat, the rise a
In the loop: odd rings of DNA in tumors
Elie Dolgin in Science: Mischel’s first curious observation had to do with how quickly glioblastomas adapted to treatment. Within a week or two, tumors that had once bristled with extra copies of the
If Everyone Reads it, Everyone Doesn’t Die?
by Malcolm Murray “A clearly written and compelling account of the existential risks that highly advanced AI could pose to humanity.” — Ben Bernanke “Humans are lucky to have Yudkowsky and Soares in o
Little Cousin Bernie Swears He Can Fly Like Buck Rogers — The Memoir of a Free-Range Professor Continues
by Barbara Fischkin Eight weeks have passed since I wrote about my Cousin Bernie—and how, posthumously, he adds to my own memories of him. As readers may remember from my last offering, Cousin Bernie’
Poem by Jim Culleny
Conversation Boat: ……… —Your slope is russet and graceful; seems soft. Land: ……… —It is. I see it echoes the grace of your gunnels, stem to stern. Boat: ……… —We approach your still grace, having been
Giorgio Armani (1934 – 2025) Fashion Designer
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Robert Davies (1944 – 2025) Founder of Supertramp
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Robert Grosvenor (1937 – 2025) Sculptor
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The Smoker
Ottessa Moshfegh in The Paris Review: This one time, my dad bought me a house in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a two-story fake Colonial with yellow aluminum siding on Hawkins Street. We bought it
Trump Is Shutting Down the War On Cancer
Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times: When America declared war on cancer more than 50 years ago, there was a misguided assumption outside the scientific community that it would be only a matter of y
Sunday Poem
White Corn Boy* I am the White Corn Boy. I walk in sight of my home. I walk in plain sight of my home. I walk in the straight path which is towards my home. I walk to the entrance of my home. I arrive
A Conversation with Natalie Bakopoulos
by Philip Graham Archipelago, the third novel by Natalie Bakopoulos, ranges among the Cycladic Islands of Greece, the coast of Croatia, and crosses the borders of various Balkan states until finally—t
The War Room Is Still a Playground: The Politics of Fragile Egos and Mishandled Emotion
by Daniel Gauss There are more than 50 armed conflicts going on in the world right now. In fact, depending on how you define “armed conflict,” the number from the most trustworthy sources ranges from
Lessons From Singapore: Incubating Excellence
by Eric Feigenbaum In 2016, my then-wife and I took our one and three-year-old children from Los Angeles to Bali, Indonesia. It took 21 hours of flight time with one stop in Tokyo to refuel and anothe
Mark Blyth on Writing, Thinking, and Why AI Can’t Save You
Catherine E. De Vries at Respect the Marble: Mark Blyth is not the kind of academic who waits to be summoned. His sharp insights, delivered in a no-nonsense Scottish accent, are difficult to ignore. H
Scott Alexander reviews “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies”
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: Most people in AI safety (including me) are uncertain and confused and looking for least-bad incremental solutions. We think AI will probably be an exciting and tr
Do you know how escalators really work?
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America, where everything gets dialed up to 11
Corey Robin at his own website: We can’t just have a country where people, being people, get mad and rowdy every once in a while and shout at or beat each other up. No, we have to live a country where
Is Mathematics Invented or Discovered?
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What Are Drugs For?
Emmeline Clein at The Nation: A woman gnaws at her nails: one hand in her mouth, the other clutching the shaft of a mop, which serves as one bar of a prison cell composed of cleaning products. It’s an
The Sally Mann Way
Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times: “We are all Sally Mann now,” one might think, gazing at the social-media streams that expose so many children. And yet none of us are Sally Mann. She is the art
The Front Page: What do we make of our fear of porn?
Lillian Fishman in The Point: I’m sure it’s my interest in knowing what’s normal as much as my interest in porn that led me, a few months ago, to pick up a copy of Porn, by Polly Barton. Subtitled “an
Friday Poem
Writing often it is the only thing between you and impossibility. no drink, no woman’s love, no wealth can match it. nothing can save you except writing. it keeps the walls from failing, the hordes fr
One Community’s Experiment With a Phone-Free Childhood
Charlotte Alter in Time Magazine: Molly Moscatiello, age 7, started riding her bike to first grade last year. There’s a crosswalk with no crossing guard, “and I had to look both ways like five times,”
Captain Head
by Rafaël Newman At the University of Toronto one winter term in the mid-1980s I took an undergraduate course on classical philology. The instructor was Hugh Mason, a British-born Marxist who once rep
Captive of the Narrative
by Akim Reinhardt The wealthy and powerful have always used the narrative to their advantage. The narrative defines them as superior in some way, and thus deserving of their power and wealth. In ancie