All articles from 3 Quarks Daily
The Most Influential Guitarist You've Never Heard Of: Trini Lopez
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A Duel or a Duet: On Graham Greene
Yiyun Li at the Paris Review: Two moments in Graham Greene’s published life have often returned to me in the past twenty years. This may sound strange: an ideal reader should refrain from crossing the boundary between a writer’s work and his life. And yet it is inevitable: rarely does an author have
Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson sign letter calling for Israel boycott
Ella Creamer in The Guardian: Zadie Smith, Michael Rosen, Irvine Welsh and Jeanette Winterson are among more than 200 writers who have signed a letter calling for an “immediate and complete” boycott of Israel until the people of Gaza are given adequate food, water and aid. Hanif Kureishi, Brian Eno,
Are You Hesitating Over AI? If So, You Are Not Alone
by David Beer There was a prevailing idea, George Orwell wrote in a 1946 essay on the Common Toad, ‘that this is the age of machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.’ It was only a couple of years befo
ChatGPT and the Meaning of Life
Harvey Lederman at Shtetl-Optimized: For the last two and a half years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someda
On the Particular Joys of Etymological Detective Work
Martha Barnette at LitHub: But just how do scholars dig up those linguistic fossils and discover those brilliant pictures within? One way is to compare related words in languages arising from a common ancestor, which brings us to the hypothetical mother tongue scholars call Proto-Indo-European. The
The Peculiar Persistence of the AI Denialists
Yascha Mounk at his own Substack: Yes, every fashionable conference has some panel on AI. Yes, social media is overrun with hypemen trying to alert their readers to the latest “mind-blowing” improvements of Grok or ChatGPT. But even as the maturation of AI technologies provides the inescapable backg
Thursday Poem
Broken Images He is quick, thinking in clear iamages; I am slow, thinking in broken images. He becomes dull, trusting to his clear images; I become sharp, mistrusting my broken images. Trusting his images, he assumes their relevance; Mistrusting my images, I question their relevance. Assuming their
These genes can have the opposite effects depending on which parent they came from
Rachel Fieldhouse in Nature: The effect of a gene can vary greatly — and sometimes be the complete opposite — depending on whether it is inherited from the mother or the father. Some genetic variants can, for instance, increase a person’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes when inherited from the fa
An Icon In Waiting
Aaron Betsky at Architect Magazine: When I travel to China, I find big, bold buildings for the arts in almost every city I visit. Building cultural facilities that double as monuments, markers, or anchors for a community marks a certain stage in a country’s social and economic development. The Unite
This Week's Photograph
A climbing variety of roses intruding into the covered outdoor deck at the Hotel Löwenhof in Vahrn, South Tyrol. According to ChatGPT this variety is called Ballerina. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
The Woke Right
Jonathan Rauch at Persuasion: In November, James Lindsay—an independent scholar, author, and sometime prankster—decided to test his observation that the American right’s illiberalism and irrationalism have, bizarrely, converged with the woke left’s illiberalism and irrationalism. He grabbed verbiage
Memory as Coyote
by Nils Peterson Thesis: There’s the physical you sitting somewhere reading this, breathing the sweet air of the now you are in. Everything else of the you that is you is memory. Well, as we know, memory is a trickster, wily as Coyote in Native American stories. Notebooks help. Here’s a bit from one
Reflections on Soviet Amateur Photography
Zeynep Devrİm Gürsel at Public Books: SONY DSC “Just as any advanced comrade must have a watch, he shall also possess mastery of a photo camera.” So declared Anatoly Lunacharsky in 1926, in his role as the Soviet Union’s Commissar of Enlightenment. This programmatic statement was included in the ver
Conversation With Maya Lin
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The Passion of Pedro Almodóvar: A Self-Portrait in Seven Films
Amelia Anthony at the Los Angeles Review of Books: For many months, the only place in New York City still showing Pedro Almodóvar’s most recent film—his first English-language feature, The Room Next Door (2024)—was Lincoln Center. Like many of Almodóvar’s films, the film features a relationship betw
Marc Jacobs’s anti-politics, from faux nails to creative freedom
Robin Givhan in The Washington Post: Along the steps leading into the New York Public Library on the last day of June, a small crowd gathered to watch a parade of guests make their way inside for Marc Jacobs’s fashion show. The arrivals included fashion editors, stylists and friends — many of them w
Nobel Laureate Demis Hassabis: Future of AI, Simulating Reality, Physics and Video Games
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The real problems with America’s health
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You’re probably missing out on a golden age of storytelling
by Kyle Munkittrick Imagine you are in room of literati types in the early 2010s. These are smart, well-read, curious people. The books on their shelves are impressive, as are their movie collections. You notice classics, hits, and obscure artistic works on display. The conversation turns to favorit
How to Hide a Famine
Alex de Waal in the Boston Review: The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in the Gaza Strip.” These were the words of food insecurity experts at the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) mechanism earlier this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu replied,