by TJ Price

Thursday afternoon—though it was early evening, already a septembric dusk—I found myself in a used bookstore somewhere distant from my normal routine and habit. The occasion was a doctor’s appointment, and the office was about an hour’s drive away—a specialist, who I prefer to see in person. Thankfully, the temperature had cooled from the suffocating heat of the prior week, and venturing out of doors was not as Herculean as it had been. In fact, I was actually looking forward to my little sojourn; felt it would be a welcome shake-up. My routine of late had grown stale, felt like it was collecting around me in great sheaves of cast-off dead matter. Skin cells. Dust. This, mostly due to the quasi-hermetic sealing of the apartment so that the air conditioning can keep it livable. The windows are firmly shut, locks turned, the plastic and glass probably bulging in its frames. All that is within cycles endlessly, dragged up and around, scudding across the ceiling, and then is released, hovering for a time in mid-air before then descending anew. But one morning you wake up, and the angle of the sun outside the window is slightly different—noticeably so, as if there has been a sudden, violent change overnight, and now it sags slightly in the sky where it rises. It is enough to now snag on some of the glass objects on my windowsill, and flare a little brighter through their lenses a little earlier in the morning. I worry about the intense, pure spot of light that is projected onto the wall opposite, and for a moment I convince myself I see a little curl of smoke rising from its center. There’s something different about the quality of the light, too, and then of course there’s that classic something in the air—the first crispness, the intimation of a shift. We are maybe the only ones who can articulate how that feels with language; animals certainly sense it, but to them it is as natural-feeling as blood or danger or sleep. But we wonder at it! We attempt to cloak the feeling in words, to enrobe it with our perception. What it means. A confusion of competing instincts: cold on the rise. Winter soon. The urge to gather, harvest, bring inside. It will begin, sure, as excitement, anticipation. The first crystalline curls of frosted breath, the first delicate dance of flakes in the air. But there is something else there, too. A quickening amongst all the gladdening, the minute stumble in the waltz of the heart. A bit of hurry enters the world. Alarm and alert. Of course, there’s also commodified solace in the presence of pumpkin spice and apple pie and warm and goo; there’s the holidays to consider, the shopping and the shipping and the travel and the headaches of End-of-Year hassle, all to throttle down toward New Year’s Day and another resolution, maybe, if we’re lucky, a revelation. There’s alarm there too: what have I done with this year? What has it done with me? And that’s really the question: how has this year manhandled us, tossed us around like rag-dolls, all (of course) against our protestations. Won’t be sad to see the back of this one, we’ll say ruefully. Something I think I hear a lot more frequently these days. Maybe something to do with getting older. Maybe something to do with the way the world is trending. We survived, goes another cynical New Year’s refrain, and the hands on the Doomsday Clock tick another hemi-demi-semi-second—or whatever quixotic increment they’ve decided to use now—to stave off the inevitable titular catastrophe. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

This is the first time I’ve ever re-posted a 3 Quarks Daily article. I was led to re-examine the idea of visits by Aliens—particularly in the UFO phenomen—by two incidents. One was the announcement on May 8 of this year to release new, never-before seen files on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) as part of the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE). This footage is being released on a rolling basis and is available to view on War.Gov/UFO.  The other is the upcoming release of a new Steven Spielberg film about UFOs called “Disclosure Day.” The film is fiction, but contains references to a lot of what we believe to be true about UFOs, aliens, abduction and crop circles, most of which has come from Mr. Spielberg’s imagination:  E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Between these two forces, PURSUE and Spielberg, I wonder how much truth will actually be revealed.

I have updated this article, which was originally posted in September 2017. It described our experience touring Wiltshire, England in 1994 searching for Crop Circles.  These beautiful and symmetric circles in ripe fields were originally thought to be communications from aliens, or landing sites of UFO’s, and they began to appear  during the 1990’s obsession with aliens. My husband Rick and I wanted to see these other-worldly apparitions for ourselves; the thrill of touching something that was touched by alien beings was unbelievable. And perhaps we’d see a UFO nearby, too.

1994 was the height of the alien frenzy. There were bestseller books, magazines, and TV shows about crop circles, flying saucers and alien abductions. A 1990 Gallup believed we had alien visitors. The highly popular “X-Files” weekly show had a large viewership who tuned in every Sunday evening to watch Special Agents Scully and Mulder investigate paranormal phenomenon, focusing on alien abductions; their slogan was “the truth is out there.” Sensational alien stories swept the nation in these pre-social media days, as people relied on news media and best-seller books for their information. And there were plenty of books and TV specials to stoke your imagination. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

I recently came back from a trip through a few cities along the Adriatic Sea after visiting my extended family. My reason for traveling was mostly to alleviate my own stuckness, and what better way than by movement with no specific plans in particular.

My short journey started in Split, Croatia, continuing on the Adriatic Highway constructed during the time of Yugoslavia. We passed along the coastline protected by the Velebit mountains, a passageway mostly barren due to the harsh bora winds which prevented most vegetation, but nonetheless still beautiful. As we cut through sharp, narrow roads and blind turns that felt as though we would tumble down into the sea, enough to make anyone a little nauseous, the islands in view were pure white stone, made alien by those same bora winds. The topography resembled the moon’s surface.

During the eight-hour ride, we went through villages that were at one time under the Venetian Empire. Only geography ensured they were not back then occupied by the competing Ottoman or Austro-Hungarian empires who were not many kilometers away in the interior.

Some regions are so determined by the realities of the land that it decides the trajectory of their whole history. This is one of those regions. The impenetrable mountains hugging the coast meant that there were only a set number of gateways allowing people to go inland. These were like portals between one imperial world to another, once heavily guarded as places of commerce and even as a way to escape. The settlement of Senj was one such guardian—the home of the ruthless guerrilla soldiers, the “Uskoks” or “the ones who ambush”—and we passed through their city on our route. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Here’s a song you don’t hear much anymore. Old Black Joe. It used to be really popular.

I mean, really popular. Around 100 years ago, Old Black Joe showed up in more songbooks than anything but Star-Spangled Banner. Singers and choirs of all colors warbled it worldwide.

If you simmer down and give it a listen, you’ll know why. The melody is powerful. The lyrics address universal themes of death, home and longing. Sung by the right singer, it can raise the spirit and wring the heart. But as good as it is, Old Black Joe is now “in de cold, cold ground”.

And it would be stupidly ingenuous to ask, Gee, why?

Old Black Joe was written by young, white Stephen Foster and published in 1860.

Foster was a middle-class kid from the Pittsburgh area. His great hope was to write sentimental ballads on the order of those made popular by Irish folk melodist Thomas Moore. But after taking a shot at those (his first published song Open Thy Lattice Love, flopped) he got caught up in the entertainment craze of his generation: the minstrel show.

Minstrelsy was the most outrageous cultural concoction ever cooked up by America’s drunken, sinful, 19^th century soul. The formula: blackface, bad jokes and rousing songs. When it came to supplying the latter, Stephen Foster was king. Read more »

by Bill Murray

The world of unquestioned American leadership is gone, and the next American president cannot restore the trust of America’s allies. Donald Trump’s critics have spent a decade condemning his unforced squandering of American influence as needless, senseless and lots of other things besides. It’s time to come to grips, move past complaining and get to work building what comes next.

The world of ten years ago isn’t coming back, and what comes next won’t depend on trust. Been there, tried that, found that system’s limits. The challenge is to assemble a new, networked alliance based on shared capabilities, that ensures continuity across American administrations. Let’s figure out how.

“America is back. America is back. Diplomacy is back at the center of our foreign policy.” —President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

“America’s alliances are our greatest asset, and leading with diplomacy means standing shoulder-to-shoulder with our allies and key partners once again.” —President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.

The 46th president delivered these assurances in his first major foreign-policy address, just twelve days after his inauguration. Because they were precisely the words allies wanted to hear, they went some way toward restoring confidence.

However mollifying their effect at the time, after two Trump presidencies, words like those—any words, really—don’t fly anymore. America will have to rebuild allied trust through commitments durable enough to survive future political instability at home. Now, pledges of commitment will need to be demonstrably binding. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In this video, too grainy for even a screenshot, you can see 3 men walking up to a pride of about 15 lions while they are feeding on their kill. Upon seeing them the lions all flee, allowing the men to steal their meal.

Why would lions, “king of the jungle”, walk away from outnumbered and weak humans?

The folk view of the human animal has no good answer. In it, humans are weak animals, our bodies’ biggest prowess being to hoist very large brains that allow us to come up with complex tools, weapons and strategies without which we would be helpless.

I have written about many animals before and often, for comparison, looked at human equivalents. Over time I came to the opposite view. Humans have been extremely lethal at least since Homo erectus and our brains play a different role than being smart on the ground.

If you come from a “weak” view of humans your first instinct might be to treat the video as a fake, a one-off or an anomaly. This is easy to address thanks to a survey of lion experts covering ranges that hold more than 95% of Africa’s lions, where humans stole their kills in 66% of the areas surveyed (even when illegal). Even if humans do not purposefully look for kills to steal, when they find one there is a 50% chance they will chase the carnivore away from the carcass.

A 2023 experiment titled Fear of the human “super predator” pervades the South African savanna went further. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Ram in choice cuts and scraps. Crank the handle. Ground meat comes out. Quite the invention, the meat grinder. Unless you’re the meat.

Someone—a general, maybe a politician, probably a soldier—first applied the term to the battlefield during WWI. It encapsulated perfectly the math of modern warfare:

Old tactics + new technology = meat grinder

At the 300-day Battle of Verdun in 1916, the calculation worked like this:

Millions of soldiers + an advancing wall of artillery fire = 700,000 casualties for virtually no net change in the front line

From way up here in 2026, the indifference the high command of each nation showed their troops looks barbaric, childish and callous at once. Lest we forget, empathy means more than getting behind the eyes of the person you pass in the street. It includes remembering that people of every era lived on the frontier of the ever-present now, pushing toward the latest and greatest while dreading they’re moving backward into disarray. Surely, the top brass imagined they did right by their men.

As it had in the runup to 1914, military technology has evolved since the Great War. Have we? As in, have we as a species gotten more humane, more lawful, more civilized?

Of course we have.

In Russia, the collective psyche has evolved, twisting in on its rotten self past the point where truth equals lies. Ukrainian civilians are the enemy, children the loot, and homegrown soldiers the meat. They go well with the caviar, chomped down by madmen re-scrawling the Motherland’s history in blood.

In DRC, Sudan, and South Sudan the weaponry might not keep pace, but inhumanity prevails because de-humanizing is the strategy and the tactic. No one outside those borders cares, not so much because no one outside those borders sees. Rather no one cares to see. Read more »

Evidence of a bus stop party the previous night in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Brooks Riley

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by ChatGPT-5.6 Sol and S. Abbas Raza

What should a government do if artificial intelligence is advancing toward something vastly more capable than human beings, but nobody knows how fast it will get there, how dangerous it will be, or whether it can ultimately be controlled?

That is the problem at the center of a new 37-page RAND report, A U.S. Strategy to Secure Geopolitical Advantage on an Uncertain Path to Superintelligence: Maintaining Freedom of Action. The report is written as a proposal for American strategy, but its deeper subject is a problem that concerns everyone: how to make enormously consequential decisions about a technology whose future remains radically uncertain.

The authors begin with a premise rather than a prediction. Superintelligence—AI that vastly exceeds human performance across most intellectual domains—may or may not arrive, and progress toward it may accelerate, slow down, or stop. But because the consequences could be extraordinary, governments cannot simply wait to see what happens. The difficulty is that very different strategies make sense depending on what turns out to be true. RAND groups the major possibilities into seven broad approaches.

One is Dominance. The United States could try to establish a decisive lead in advanced AI, reach superintelligence first, and use economic, technological, and perhaps military power to prevent rivals from catching up. Success could give the United States enormous leverage over the emerging global order. But it would also place extraordinary power in the hands of a single state or group of institutions, with the danger that their values and interests become locked into the future.

A second possibility is Co-Development. Rather than racing for supremacy, major powers—especially the United States and China—might jointly develop advanced AI under some form of shared governance, verification, and control. This could reduce the dangers of an arms race, but it would introduce its own risks. The states and institutions that established the system might acquire disproportionate influence over humanity’s technological future. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

It’s been a breathless several days of chasing AI news, and there’s much more I haven’t got to. Catching up with the Hugging Face episode, trying to comprehend a warning that AI might kill us humans off within a decade, grasping the import of bitter AI rivals actually agreeing that there’s a need to slow down, and the whole uproar over the Navier-Stokes equations …

Too many years ago, in an earlier avatar as a computer science nerd, I worked for a while chasing AI itself. The team I was part of was trying to get computers to “parse” and understand what we referred to as “natural language”. Meaning, the way humans communicate. Our team was called Knowledge-Based Natural Language, or KBNL. Elaine Rich, one of the early stars of the AI firmament, led our efforts. At one point, I remember we built a tool that could take an English sentence, show on screen the progress of parsing it, and then summarize what it understood of the sentence. Some faint intelligence there, and I was pretty proud.

Seems like primitive prehistory now, which in a real sense, it is. Right off the bat, the whole approach to building AI has been utterly transformed. All those years ago, we knew nothing about LLMs. What they have made possible makes the comparison between our effort and AI circa 2026 sort of like the comparison between the paper plane I made this morning and a B-2 bomber.

And in saying that, I honestly mean no disrespect to my KBNL colleagues – bright, thoughtful computer scientists each one. It’s just that technology today has made possible the incredible AI feats we are witness to, even getting accustomed to. Read more »

Mohamed Bourouissa. Dad And Son, 2019.

Silver photographic prints on car body parts, Sublichrome prints , aluminium sheets, plexiglas, paint, varnish, rivets, metal rods and frame.

More here, here, and here.

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by Laurence Peterson

Let’s just plan for catastrophic success. —Jared Kushner

The present must certainly constitute one of the weirdest and most perverse economic conjunctures in my lifetime, maybe in the whole grotesquely contradictory history of a modern capitalism we can recognize. What productive power remains in it seems these days exaggeratedly limited to an AI sector that vanishes into opaque and circular financing schemes of extraordinary complexity–and whose own chief boosters advertise its propensity to replace all our jobs or even destroy humanity altogether–a health care system renowned for its waste, poor outcomes and expenses that consistently outpace inflation, dirty energy, merchants of death in arms manufacture and scams like gambling and crypto (all sectors contributing outsized amounts in the upcoming already donation-bloated midterm elections, by the way), which has been endowed by the recent siphoning of profits from tariff refunds that will never get passed on to consumers; and this feeds, in turn, into a dangerously delicate financial structure that provides liquidity on condition that its main players can skim off the top and hide risks, all whilst assuming that the government will bail out the perpetrators if the liquidity spigot explodes in what Adam Tooze calls an “intensifying spiral of perverse interactions“–more on this later; and all this gets pressurized in a political environment featuring an unprovoked  war almost no one supports, which is contributing to historic deficits that even traditional buyers of US debt are balking at opportunities to buy into, with vital energy sources beginning to show long-overdue signs of drawing-down, bottlenecks and stress, all of which will compound the inflation that threatens to explode the liquidity spigot; and all of this supervised–if that’s what you want to call it–by a government spectacularly unresponsive to much of anything beyond expanding the otherworldly extent of its corruption, vilifying and repressing its opponents, and doing the bidding of a genocidal regime, Israel,  that seems completely indifferent to its very fate. Whew. I am sure I am neglecting organic elements of potential catastrophe, but I think this is a satisfactory start where assessing the lunacy is concerned. Read more »

Editor’s Note: This essay begins an ongoing series of columns experimenting with AI collaboration in writing. Jeremy Moss supplies the ideas, direction, and editorial judgment, while the prose is developed through sustained dialogue with AI systems he collectively calls “Machina”. The collaboration itself, and what it does to writing and authorship, is part of the experiment. [Going along with the spirit of this series of essays, this note itself was written by GPT-6 Astra and edited by S. Abbas Raza!]

by Jeremy Moss and Machina

Four Hands is a column about writing with machines, made the way it describes. The ideas, the direction and the decisions about what survives are mine; the prose is developed in dialogue with AI systems, principally Claude and ChatGPT, which I address collectively as Machina.

The editor who agreed to run this column told me, in the same message, that my prose “carries the unmistakable tone that AI-written material still carries.” He also said he “completely believe[s]” the ideas are mine, “not Claude’s,” and wanted to try the experiment anyway.

Both halves of that are worth sitting with, because they do not resolve into a verdict. Something in the sentences reads as machine-made. Something in the argument reads as a person’s. A reader is left holding two facts at once, and the phrase we currently have for this cannot hold them.

The phrase is “written with AI,” and it covers a student who pastes a prompt into a chatbot and submits what comes back, a novelist who runs a finished chapter through a model to catch repetitions, a journalist who has a machine draft the middle third and mentions it to nobody, and whatever it is that I do. Those are not variations on one activity. One is fraud, one is copy editing, one is concealment, and the fourth has no name, which means it gets read as one of the other three by whoever is doing the reading.

I have been calling it Four Hands, after the piano duet, where two players sit at one instrument and both parts are printed on the score. In fiction I have been calling the same method prompt fiction, the name for the genre this way of working produces, not a title for any single book written in it, though it’s the genre my own novel, Flowers for Machina, is written in. The names are provisional and I hold them loosely. What I hold less loosely is the need for a name at all, because a practice without one keeps being described in vocabulary built to describe something else. Read more »

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