Skip to content

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


3 Quarks Daily

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


  • Home
  • About Us
  • Recommended Reading
  • Magazine Archives
  • Support 3QD
  • Log In

Hannah Fry: Why AI Agents are either the best or worst thing we’ve ever built

Posted on Wednesday, May 13, 2026 12:45PMWednesday, May 13, 2026 by S. Abbas Raza

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

Post navigation

What drives health spending in the U.S. compared to other countries?

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 wait...
Please enter all required fields Click to hide
Correct invalid entries Click to hide

Follow 3QD on Social Media


What People Say About 3QD




“I’m a longtime fan of 3 Quarks Daily!”

—Ben Orlin, author of four best-selling mathematics books: Math with Bad Drawings (2018), Change is the Only Constant (2019), Math Games with Bad Drawings (2022), and Math for English Majors (2024).




"The algorithms that curate your social-media timeline do so with indifference and programmed greed. The humans who curate 3QD do so with love and well-aged wisdom. Read 3QD instead! It’s so much better!"

—Justin E. H. Smith, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Paris.




"The cross-disciplinary curatorial website 3 Quarks Daily represents a pocket of humanity in an increasingly amoral, algorithmic internet."

—Thomas Manuel, playwright, in The Wire.




"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.




"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 one of the most interesting and thoughtful websites out there."

—Sean Carroll, physicist at Caltech, author.




"It is a great honor to be mentioned in one of my two ONLY portals to the internet—and the world, since I do not read newspapers. My discipline, to avoid drowning in information, is not to cruise the web outside of these two points. I tried many sites; yours has CHARM."

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. [The other site NNT is referring to is the excellent Arts & Letters Daily.]




"You guys rock!"

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




3 Quarks Daily is an essential stop for any serious reader on the Web."

—Ken Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch since 1993.




“From my perspective as an early modernist, what you’re undertaking is akin to the heroic labors of Renaissance compositors, who would (like you) read widely and excerpt and synthesize vast amounts of knowledge for others. A real service to the republic of letters.”

—Scott Newstok, Executive Director of the Spence Wilson Center for Interdisciplinary Humanities, Rhodes College, and author of How to Think like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education.









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.