Skip to content

Sign up for a small monthly payment and enjoy ads-free browsing at 3QD

Make a one-time donation and enjoy ads-free browsing at 3QD

Home
About Us
Recommended Reading
Magazine Archives
Support 3QD
Log In
Search for:

The Decline and Fall of Classic Maya Culture

Posted on Wednesday, Oct 8, 2025 9:56AMMonday, October 6, 2025 by Morgan Meis

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

Post navigation

The Thomas Pynchon Experience

Pranab Bardhan: When I first Came to the US two Political Issues Unexpectedly Disturbed Me

The Curated Links at 3QD *

The usual curated links to articles elsewhere are no longer on the front page. They are on the “Recommended Reading” page which can be accessed by clicking the menu item of that name, just under the main 3QD banner. Try it and see. Or just click here.

Receive 3QD Posts by Email

Please fill out the form below to get our email with all the posts from the previous 24 hours, which is sent out a bit after midnight (NY City time) each day. This is completely free of charge for everyone.

	Name:
	Your email address:*

Please enter all required fields Correct invalid entries

Follow 3QD on Social Media

What People Say About 3QD

"I really appreciate your selection of generally sane and mostly stimulating articles. 3 Quarks Daily has been my goto website at the end of the day, and now also during the day!"

—Horst Ludwig Störmer, Nobel laureate in physics and emeritus professor at Columbia University.

"3 Quarks Daily is a warm and often amusing home for intellectuals and other wags."

—Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer.

"3QD is always interesting--you (and your other contributors) have a fine eye for good writing in both the arts and the sciences, which is a very rare thing indeed."

—Rochelle Gurstein, author of The Repeal of Reticence, and frequent contributor to The New Republic, Salmagundi, and American Scholar.

"3 Quarks Daily is a great website which should be supported!"

—Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at NYU; former chair of the philosophy program at MIT.

"You guys rock!"

—Andrew Sullivan, former editor of The New Republic, author of five books, überblogger.

"3 Quarks Daily is terrific - many congratulations, and many thanks!"

—Alain de Botton, best-selling Swiss-British writer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

"Thanks for 3 Quarks Daily which has been very high on my reading list for several years now!"

—Huw Price, Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy and Fellow of Trinity College at the University of Cambridge. He is also co-founder, with Martin Rees and Jaan Tallinn, of a project to establish a Centre for the Study of Existential Risk.

"I have placed 3 Quarks Daily at the head of my list of web bookmarks."

—Richard Dawkins, previously Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University.

"I like to check in from time to time with 3 Quarks Daily."

—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. "One of the most celebrated writers of his generation," according to the Virginia Quarterly Review.

"I couldn't tear myself away from 3 Quarks Daily, to the point of neglecting my work. Congratulations on this superb site."

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University.

Recent Comments on 3QD

3QD Design History and Credits

The original site was designed by S. Abbas Raza in 2004 but soon completely redesigned by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis in 2006. The next major revision was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde in 2013. And this current version 5.0 has been designed and deployed by Dumky de Wilde in collaboration with S. Abbas Raza.

3 Quarks Daily

3 Quarks Daily started in 2004 with the idea of creating a curated retreat for everything intellectual on the web. No clickbait, no fake news, not just entertainment, but depth and breadth —something increasingly hard to find on the internet today. If you like what we do, please consider making a donation.