Architecture and Light

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by Mike Bendzela

How did a marsupial end up in one of our hen house nesting boxes? That is the question, and as it sounds like the set-up to a joke, I’ll just say, “Because the hens egged her on!”

It is the tradition in (probably) all American dialects to drop the initial “o” and say “a ‘possum” instead of “an opossum” which is a bit of a mouthful. From now on I’ll drop the apostrophe used to indicate the omitted letter.

Speaking of mouthfuls: Possums have 50 teeth, more than any other mammal in this country, including a whopping ten upper incisors. Mess with a possum and she’ll let her jaw hang open so you can get a load of all those sharp teeth. She will not attack you, though, bless her heart.

I discovered the possum one evening when I went out to shut in the hens for the night and noticed the birds all hanging out in their fenced-in run; usually by dusk they’re all inside the house on their perches; but this time they were just standing there looking at me as I entered the gate. If birds could be said to exhibit body language — upright, stationary, alert — then they might have been saying to me, “We’re not setting claw in there!”

So I looked inside the house to see what was the matter: There was the possum, holding her ground inside a nesting box that had been cleared of eggs. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

In the past few months, I have been reading about the personalities present in Young Bosnia for a forthcoming essay. The group was not formalized by any means, made up of decentralized cells of 3-5 people, and a scattered array of political influences. But in Gavrilo Princip—its most famous member and who would ultimately kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand—you see a distillation of the temperament that made them.

The Austro-Hungarian press after the assassination was eager to assign outside influences to the group. Princip and his co-conspirators were said to be molded by dark forces not of their making. Instead, a profile by psychoanalyst Martin Pappenheim reads the opposite. In the last year of Princip’s life, while kept in solitary confinement in Bohemia, Pappenheim conducted multiple interviews.

What we find is an absolutist mindset bred from the poor, difficult, and rural soil that these young men were raised. Six of Princip’s siblings died in infancy. The assassination was a violent act from the periphery, as if its spirits were tortured for centuries, and the real shock was that it actually reached modern Europe at all. The fact that it did was happenstance. Princip initially thought the moment was forever lost until he saw Archduke Franz Ferdinand while loitering in front of a delicatessen. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

My orchids bloom after the winter solstice, in December, the shortest day of the year.  The days begin to get longer after this, and soon it’s early spring.  Orchids, like all plants, are highly dependent on light.  They eat light, water, and carbon dioxide, to make sugar. In fact, every single molecule of sugar on this earth was made by a plant.

As the days get longer and the sunlight increases, plant life gets richer, allowing the plants to get on with living—growth, reproduction; nectar and pollen production; fighting off predators and attackers.  In other words, the plants goes on to do everything that we non-plants do, with the exception that plants don’t move, they are rooted in place.

Because of this, plants have evolved a very complex lifestyle that is different from ours; they have to reach for as much sunlight as they can get, and they have an amazing ability to synthesize complex molecules that are needed for these  processes, including communication with other plants of their species, attracting pollinators, and warding off predators.

Orchids are epiphytes, they grow on other plants in the wild, though we can also grow them in pots in greenhouses. Orchids are selective for their epiphytes host– they don’t prefer all plants. Furthermore, they don’t bloom every year, and it’s not easy to tell when they are going to bloom, but if they do bloom that year, it’s usually in the winter, and with other plants of the same species. Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

We are fortunate to live in an equitable society, with high levels of trust and excellent administrative transparency. Many old diseases have been eradicated, and most people live healthily to old age. However, our utopia has been suffering for a long time from a peculiar and cruel illness, about which after a century of research the following is now known with moral certainty.

Everyone has a one in five chance of falling victim to this disease. No genetic or lifestyle factors predict it in any way, and it is undetectable until you are exactly thirty years of age. At that point, there are two days during which it is symptomless but detectable with advanced medical equipment, after which it is irreversibly fatal and kills rapidly. There is no cure except one: during these crucial two days, tissue from the vital organs of one healthy peer can save with certainty the lives of five diseased people. However, the required procedure inevitably kills the donor.

A few decades ago, a voluntary association was formed. If you sign up, you commit to reporting to a hospital when you turn thirty, together with thousands of peers who have turned thirty on the same day. You get tested. If you are healthy, there is now a 5% chance that you will be randomly selected as a donor, which means you will die. If you have the disease, you will be saved. For both groups, the procedure is painless. You can decide whether you want to be informed of your predicament at any point, but you cannot opt out after entering the hospital.

This ‘5-to-1’-scheme reduces every participant’s chance of dying at thirty from 20% to 4%. This being an enlightened age, by now almost everyone has realized this is the sensible thing to do. The healthy participants who die as donors are not remembered as murder victims, nor praised as heroes, but mourned as casualties of the disease itself – their deaths regarded as equally indiscriminate and senseless, but fortunately fewer in number than they were in the past. Read more »

by TJ Price

In last month’s column, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which is to follow, in four weeks’ time. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that this would be the conclusion; the story rather took on a life of its own and went to some surprising places.) To those of you who have followed along thus far, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.

Please be advised that—in this second instalment, as in the first—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.

3.
I hadn’t made up my mind about the play yet, or what I was going to do there, or how I was going to talk to Iris about what happened with Ricky. That night completely blotted out any other thought in my life for weeks on end. I was distracted, quick to anger, unhappy. I posted increasingly dire lyrics from bands I loved on my LiveJournal. My online musings had lapsed from using self-harm as a metaphor to pondering its actuality. (This was a lie: I’d already experimented with inflicting physical pain on myself to dull the pain of emotions, and it hadn’t worked.)

Despite this, a friend of mine—and another RA in the building—noticed I had been acting strangely. I’d even skipped some classes, and some meetings of the student actors’ guild, and she’d become a little concerned. Amanda ran into me after I’d left the cafeteria one day, and walked alongside me as we returned to the dorm. She invited me up to her room, to talk about what was on my mind, which I accepted, but without actual plans to divulge what had happened to me. I was a guy, I thought. What had happened was my fault, because I hadn’t been clear enough in my intentions. Whether I knew it or not, I had internalized all of my guilt and shame (and anger) about the encounter, and turned it all on myself. The depression I felt wasn’t related to that, though, I said. It was related more to how I felt about another guy in my immediate social circle, Colin, who was a year older than me and permanently affixed to his high school girlfriend, who was also a member of our social circle. 

I wanted to be Colin’s brother, I think. I had attached to him in an unhealthy fashion, and I think he’d started to notice. Worse, his girlfriend had too. Worse still, I had convinced myself I was in love with his girlfriend, because of the feelings I had for Colin, and that confused things even further. This is what came out, when I started talking to Amanda. She was a patient listener, and knew just when to insert the right questions. She was also an actress, and a damn good one, though she had no need to lie to me. When I got to the part about the play, and what a difficult time I was having trying to decide whether or not to drop out, I hesitated.

You can tell me anything, Amanda said, supportively. I won’t tell anyone. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

What is it about ants? No, I mean it. In all my writing over the years, ants have been a frequent and nearly beloved subject. Some, when set down in a maze and faced with a choice, tend to turn left. Some have walked on stilts while compatriots have had their legs (sadly) trimmed. The late great myrmecologist, EO Wilson, described a charming experiment in which a live ant, smeared with pheromones only exuded at death, was promptly ferried – frantically waggling limbs notwithstanding – by his mates from the nest and dumped outside.

All in the service of science, and all just fascinating – fANTscinating, I can’t resist – to me.

And over the last few days I’ve been reading about … well, it’s like this. Out in the Arizonan desert, some large harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) left their nests and stood still. I don’t mean this happened all of a sudden, nor am I suggesting this is unusual behaviour for these ants. But a researcher from the Smithsonian Institute, observing these ants one morning, found them doing just this. (“The First Cleaner Ant? A Novel Partnership in the Arizona Desert“, Mark W Moffett, Ecology and Evolution, 12 April 2026.)

Why would these members of an otherwise frenetically active family of animals cease movement? No, they hadn’t dropped dead … but hold that thought.

This particular stillness, because several members of a much smaller “undescribed” species in the genus Dorymyrmex, known as cone ants, climb onto these unmoving ant Goliaths and … groom them. For which favour, the harvesters stand there with their jaws helpfully wide open. I should say, ant Amazons, because the harvesters that leave their nests and roam about are workers, and worker ants are always female. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Early motion-picture film and x-ray film were often made from cellulose nitrate, also called nitrocellulose — a highly flammable plastic created by chemically treating cellulose with nitric acid. Heat, pressure or friction can set it off. Under the wrong conditions, two sheets of nitrocellulose lying atop one another long enough can decompose and ignite. Poof.

Among its virtues, nitrocellulose produces exquisite images. On the other hand, it has been responsible for some of history’s most horrifying mass-casualty events.

The most famous was the Bazar de la Charité fire, which took place in Paris in 1897.

The Bazar was one of the city’s largest annual charity fêtes, organized by society ladies and held at a novel location each year. In 1897, it was held in a large wooden warehouse whose interior had been decorated to resemble a medieval street. Among the attractions was a demonstration of projected motion pictures. A hot projector lamp ignited the nitrate film. The fire spread rapidly across the flammable decorations and through the wooden structure. Exits were poorly marked. A rough total of 126 people died.

Accounts of the disaster rarely fail to mention that many of the victims were upper-class women trapped in the voluminous fashions of the day. It was one of the first disasters in which dental records were used to identify the dead.

This movie-disaster has inspired at least four disaster movies, most recently the well-reviewed 2019 Netflix series Le Bazar de la Charité (Fire of Destiny). Today, a magnificent expiatory chapel, Notre-Dame-de-Consolation, stands on the site of the tragedy.

Less well known are the events that took place at the Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, Ohio, on the morning of May 15, 1929. There was fire and panic. But no dental records were required to identify the dead. Many of the corpses were unmarked; some were found seated in chairs with magazines open on their laps, seemingly dozing. Read more »

NOTE: The following is an experimental writing collaboration between ChatGPT  and S. Abbas Raza. Appended below this essay you can find the full conversation which resulted in its production.

by ChatGPT 5.5 and  S. Abbas Raza

Every spring, as reliably as pollen, universities summon the unusually successful to advise the temporarily credentialed.

The students sit in their gowns, the parents dab at their eyes, the faculty sweat beneath medieval hats, and then out comes the commencement speaker: a former president, a Supreme Court justice, a Nobel laureate, a billionaire founder, an astronaut, a beloved actor, a comedian of genius, a world-famous athlete, a general, a novelist, a person who once failed spectacularly but only in the first act of what became a best-selling memoir.

A few days ago, I watched Conan O’Brien give a commencement speech at Harvard. It was, as one would expect, very funny. It was also humane, self-deprecating, politically pointed, and unexpectedly moving. Conan is almost unfairly good at this sort of thing. He has the rare ability to make cleverness seem like a form of kindness. If a university must bring in a famous person to say ceremonial things to young people in robes, it could do much worse.

And yet, while watching him, a heretical thought occurred to me: what exactly are these graduates supposed to do with Conan O’Brien’s life?

Not his advice, perhaps. Advice can be detached from its source and carried away like a sandwich wrapped in foil. But still, the authority of a commencement speech depends partly on the life of the speaker. The message is not simply “Here are some useful thoughts.” It is also, silently, “Observe: I have lived in such a way that a university now wishes to place me before you as an example.”

But Conan O’Brien’s life is not an example. It is a weather event.

He is brilliant, strange, disciplined, lucky, original, resilient, and apparently capable of turning humiliation into professionally useful material. He went to Harvard, wrote for the Lampoon, wrote for Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, hosted late-night television, lost late-night television, survived the loss, reinvented himself, and became, in the process, even more beloved. This is admirable. It is also about as useful as being told to model your career on the migratory path of a comet. Read more »

Moonrise above the massif called Plose. Photo taken from Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Bill Murray

1

One of the most memorable images from Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine was that 40-mile traffic jam of tanks, armored vehicles and supply trucks headed south from Belarus, backed up on the M07 highway in a futile lunge toward Kyiv.

Ukrainian civilians took down road signs, used tractors to tow abandoned vehicles over to their own army, gave Russian troops bad directions and guided them onto roads that turned to mud. Where they sat for a week or more.

Today, Russian tanks rarely approach the front lines. For this war, at least for now, the battle tank has become obsolete. We now compare the evolution of warfare not to the storming of Iraq 35 years ago, but to 35 months ago.

Ukraine deployed some 3.5 million drones in 2025. Their projected capacity this year is seven million. Drone swarms, now under intense development, are coming next, before ethical concerns have been thoroughly vetted.

Racing toward deployment, too, are autonomous fighting systems, in which military judgments involving life and death can be made by artificial intelligence instead of people. AI is already creeping onto the battlefield.

Against the backdrop of this sort of accelerated change, NATO’s requirement for unanimous agreement across 32 countries before commitment to action looks downright quaint. So it’s time to consider what might work better. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Thomas Fernandes

A common sensational science fact that used to be mentioned is that matter is mostly empty space. Crazy right?!

It comes from a real observation that at the atomic level, there are only a few very tiny electrons to occupy the vast distance between nuclei, leaving most of the space technically empty.

Physicists tend to find this framing annoying. They would object that the wave function of an electron occupies all this supposedly empty space continuously, as a probability function. And the Pauli exclusion principle would repel anything trying to enter it anyway. Duh.

But I never found the correction satisfying either. It replaces one intuitive but incomplete picture with an impenetrable explanation.

Unless I did the math myself or followed along (and sometimes even then), I need to understand by visualizing, usually through analogies. The one I thought of in this case is a wheel. Take a wheel with a single spoke. Most of the interior is empty. Now spin it fast. To your eyes it looks full, a solid disc. And not just to your eyes, throw a tennis ball at it and it will bounce back. For all practical purposes, as far as anything interacting with it can tell, it is a completely filled circle. Not more emptiness.

I thought the analogy was good and wanted to see how far it could go. How much of quantum mechanics can particles depicted as infinitely-fast-tiny-spinning-wheels (quantum wheels) actually explain? Here is my attempt to understand quantum mechanics and explain it using wheels. Read more »

A collage essay by River Lerner

Look #1: I am nine, it is a Sunday, and I am sitting in the back of a college classroom amidst children slightly older and significantly smarter. The theory professor sits before us at the piano, his hands obscured by a cloak of black wood. Intervals and chords stain the air with their harmonics. He looks at each of us expectantly.

We all know how this game goes, though for all I can tell, it’s strictly guesswork. A mystery why some answers please while others don’t. Though most classmates struggle somewhat with the pitch identification exercise, none are as chronically challenged as I am. There was recent murmuration of holding me back a year.

This day is different. From the far end of the room, even lacking the necessary eyeglasses prescription I’d wait another few years for, I find myself able to peer over my teacher’s shoulder at his long fingers caressing the keys. Each note speaks its name aloud to me as it is played, almost nakedly. Was it always this easy? Am I allowed this knowledge? Who or what am I cheating?

Read more »

Sughra Raza. Found Playground Art, Essex Junction, VT. May, 2026.

Digital photograph.

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Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…

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by Laurence Peterson

I have recently heard at least twice, I can’t remember exactly where, different commentators expressing a sentiment very much like the following: we require nothing short of an entirely new vocabulary to describe the otherworldly corruption of the Trump regime. And events of this past week alone (I am writing on Sunday afternoon, May the 24th, 2026) have indeed provided extensive evidence in favor of at least the spirit of this sentiment. First of all, according to a report filed with a federal ethics agency (according to the Associated Press), Trump engaged in more than 3,600 buy and sell orders in the first quarter of 2026 alone. That is more than all 535 members of the rightly-maligned Congress put together, as Ryan Grim noted. Vice President Vance claimed that all the trades were conducted by presumably independent financial professionals who administered accounts Trump had no direct access to, but analysis made it clear that many of the trades were in companies directly influenced by Trump’s policies, and occurred mere hours, or even minutes, before important policy–including military and national security-related ones–announcements were made by Trump (sometimes on Truth Social), or administration personnel. This renders the veracity of Vance’s statement very problematic, to put it mildly. And then it was reported that Trump’s personal fortune has increased 165% during his time in office in the second term alone. And, finally (there may be more, but I will end the recitation here; this article provides a quite comprehensive list of the most important instances of fraud, double-dealing, insider dealings, conflicts of interest and simple grift that Trump and his family have been involved in during recent years for those who care to stomach more), the week also witnessed the appearance of the most spectacular instance of corruption perhaps imaginable at this level at this time: Trump directed his own Department of Justice (whose head, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, recall, served as Trump’s personal lawyer until assuming the post at Justice) to drop a lawsuit against the IRS Trump had lodged only in January because information from his tax returns (which Trump had promised to make public anyway) had been leaked years before. The leaker was charged and imprisoned, which should have brought an end to the matter altogether, but Trump continued to litigate until a judge appeared close to dismissing the suit because Trump as was essentially suing his own IRS, which is simply absurd. Trump reversed gears and told the DoJ, again run by his former personal lawyer, to settle with the IRS, dropping the damages from $10 billion to $1.8 billion ($1,776 billion to be exact, conspicuously ratifying the frivolity of the claim, perhaps, by making it match the year the United States claimed independence, rather than any plausible claims).

But this is not the end of the preposterous story. Read more »