Why does this 40-year-old book by a career academic still hit so hard?

Laura Miller at Slate:

Every so often an eye-opening work of social criticism becomes a surprise bestseller. In 1979, everyone was talking about Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, and in 1987, it was Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. Last year, Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation raised the alarm, encouraging readers outside the parenting-book world to consider what the teenage mental health crisis might mean for the culture at large. Typically the work of a professor with an aptitude for speaking to a general readership, this sort of book hits just as popular anxiety about a new technology or ideology—smartphones, the self-actualization movement, multiculturalism—is cresting. Ideas that may have been simmering away in academia suddenly burst into the common conversation. However, the very qualities that make these books feel tremendously relevant at a particular historical moment also tend to make them fade into obscurity when that moment passes. The blockbuster cultural criticism book tends to speak to its time—then become a curio as the culture changes around it.

But Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death has legs. For a book published 40 years ago about a medium—TV—no longer considered the prime driver of politics and culture, Amusing Ourselves to Death sure still turns up in op-eds, in podcasts, and in interviews, its central arguments about the media still startlingly relevant in the internet era.

More here.

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

What the Mysterious Mating Habits of an Enigmatic Species Reveal About the Secrets of Evolution

Matt Ridley at Literary Hub:

In all animals mating is a deal: one sex donates a few million sperm, the other a handful of eggs, the merger between which—unless a predator intervenes—will result in a brood of young. Win-win for the parents, genetically speaking. But there are few creatures that behave as if sex is a dull, simple or even mutually beneficial transaction and many that behave as if it is an event of transcendent emotional and aesthetic salience to be treated with reverence, suspicion, angst and quite a bit of violence.

In the case of Black Grouse the males dance and sing for hours every day for several exhausting months, selling their little packages of sperm as passionately and persuasively (and frequently) as they can. To prepare for the ordeal they grow, preen and display fancy, twisted, bold-colored feathers. They gather together in one spot, putting themselves at conspicuous risk of attack by hawks and forgoing opportunities to feed. They fight with deadly intent again and again, suffering significant injuries. As excitement builds they expand the bright red, swollen, fleshy combs over their eyes, covered with hundreds of tiny tentacles like vermillion sea anemones. The act of sexual congress itself, the consummation of the deal, takes seconds. The rest has taken months of practice and preparation and is elaborate, extravagant, exhausting and elegant. Why?

More here.

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

How Kerala got rich

Tirthankar Roy and K Ravi Raman in Aeon:

With roughly 35 million people, Kerala, which sits along India’s southwestern tip on the Indian Ocean, is among the smaller Indian states, though it is densely populated. In the 1970s, Kerala’s average income was about two-thirds of the Indian average, making it among the poorest states in India. This difference persisted through the 1980s. In the coming decades, a miracle occurred. Kerala, one of the poorest regions in India, became one of the richest. In 2022, Kerala’s per-capita income was 50-60 per cent higher than the national average. What happened?

Even when it was poor, Kerala was different. Though income-poor, Kerala enjoyed the highest average literacy levels, health conditions and life expectancy – components of human development – in all of India. Among economists in the 1970s and ’80s and among locals, ‘Kerala is different’ became a catchphrase. But why, and different from whom?

More here.

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

Achmed Abdullah, Swinging Caravan

Tom Lutz at the LARB:

ACHMED ABDULLAH was, during the early decades of the previous century, a playwright with successes on Broadway and the West End, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter, an author of dozens of books, and a writer of adventure and fantasy stories for the pulps, including ArgosyThe All-StoryMunsey’s, and Blue Book. The gossip columns reported his comings and goings as a man about town.

One story he loved to tell was about a certain Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff, whose father was Grand Duke Nicholas Romanoff, a cousin of Tsar Nicholas II, and whose mother was Princess Nourmahal Durani, daughter of the amir of Afghanistan. The scion Alexander was born in Yalta, on the Crimean Peninsula, growing up in the Romanoffs’ Livadia Palace (the villa where Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin later met to carve up Europe after Germany’s surrender in 1945). In Abdullah’s story, the boy was sent from there to England for his education—where, for some reason, he went incognito, changing his name to an Arabic one, his mixed parentage allowing him to easily pass as an Arab. He attended Eton and then Oxford and joined the British armed services, which, given his many languages and changeable looks, employed him as a spy.

more here.

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

The mad king of a high-tech feudal state

Oscar Schwartz in The Drift:

As Isaacson surveyed the landscape in search of a new genius, one name kept coming up: Elon Musk. He was, without a doubt, a man with grand vision — electric cars, space travel, telepathy. He was unyielding in this vision, too, sometimes belligerently so.

…Nevertheless, when Musk was published in September of last year, it was clear from the dust jacket alone that the book would situate Elon in the Isaacson lineage, painting him as the true heir to Jobs — a brilliant, if troubled, Silicon Valley genius. The cover features a head shot of Musk staring directly into the camera, fingers on his chin — like Jobs, in a thinking position — and the epigraph consists of two quotes, the first from Musk: “To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?” Directly below it is one attributed to Jobs: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”

More here.

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

In Genetics, a Tense Coexistence of Mainstream and Fringe Views

Ashley Smart in Undark:

In the summer of 2022, Abdel Abdellaoui was set to give a keynote at the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research. But when he learned he’d be sharing a speaker roster with Emil Kirkegaard, Abdellaoui announced on Twitter that he was cancelling his lecture.

Kirkegaard is perhaps best known for his provocative writing on genetics and race. On his blog, he has asserted that Black Americans are less honest and less intelligent than their White counterparts; that affirmative action produces Black and Hispanic doctors who kill people with their incompetence; that Africans are excessively predisposed to violence; and that the hereditarian hypothesis of intelligence — roughly, the idea that races or ancestry groups differ in average intelligence in ways that are substantially attributable to genetics — is “almost certainly true.”

More here.

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

The German Peasants’ War

Peter Marshall at Literary Review:

Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion on an unprecedented scale swept across swathes of southern and central Germany. There is no real earlier point of comparison, and Europe would see no equivalent outbreak of popular fury prior to the French Revolution.

In the end, the rebels were comprehensively defeated by their masters, the German princes and ecclesiastical lords; as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have been killed in a succession of one-sided battles and the pitiless retribution that followed. And yet, as Lyndal Roper argues in this hugely impressive study – the first comprehensive account of the events to appear in a generation – the uproar of 1524–5 fully deserves the designation ‘revolution’. In one sense, the rebels achieved none of their aims; in another, nothing was ever the same again.

more here.

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

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Essay on Eid

From Stella Young with EssayGenius’s AI:

The origins of Eid can be traced back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. Eid al-Fitr, which translates to the “Festival of Breaking the Fast,” is celebrated at the end of Ramadan, the month of fasting. The significance of this festival lies in the completion of a month-long spiritual journey of self-discipline, reflection, and devotion to Allah. It is a time for Muslims to express gratitude for the strength and patience shown during Ramadan. The celebration of Eid al-Fitr is not only a personal milestone but also a communal event that reinforces the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood among Muslims.

Eid al-Adha, or the “Festival of Sacrifice,” commemorates the willingness of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son Isma’il (Ishmael) in obedience to God’s command. This event is rooted in the Quranic narrative and symbolizes faith, obedience, and submission to divine will. The festival occurs during the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah, coinciding with the Hajj pilgrimage, one of the Five Pillars of Islam. The connection between Eid al-Adha and Hajj emphasizes the importance of sacrifice and devotion in the Islamic faith, making it a time of reflection on one’s relationship with God.

More here.

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

Sunday Poem

By the Sea

I.
To watch a seagull fly overhead,
a girl child on the beach in red pajamas
tilts her head back and back,
impossibly back to anyone a second older.

Now she digs a hole
tossing the sand back between her legs
as if her hands were forepaws.

Now she sits on her haunches
in the hole and draws a circle
all about herself.

Now she is safe from everything.

//////II.
//////a seagull settles
………. on a translucent
………. restaurant umbrella
………. a little girl begins
………. to twirl it

………. the seagull spins
………. around three times
………. as if riding
………. a merry-go-round,
………. then flies away

III.
Low winter sun
………. on a black tarnish of sea
a crooked line of pelicans
………. serene and slow
riding the low air
………. above the breaking water

………. IV.
………. light shining on the sea’s
………. not interested in what’s beneath
………. it plays on the surface
………. rolls under a wave but out
………. before it breaks
………. it rides over the white foam
………. where the water caught
………. between the going out
………. and coming back is
………. almost still

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Caesura Editions 2019

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

Friday, March 28, 2025

The Biggest Loser

Luke Winkie in Slate:

“People give estimates of what they think we’re making, and it’s always way low,” he told me from the plush interior of his Rolls-Royce, which was still scented with a synthetic new-purchase aroma. “Our watch hours on YouTube [in December] were, like, 5.7 million hours. And there’s a commercial every 10 minutes.”

Vegas Matt was on the cusp of a remarkable achievement. In a matter of weeks, his YouTube channel would cross the million-subscriber mark—a metric that pairs nicely with the million or so people who follow his Instagram account, and the 685,000 on his TikTok. New videos appear daily, and they all follow the same format: First, Vegas Matt counts out a hefty wager in front of a blackjack table or a slot machine. Then, like so many gamblers, he simply tries his luck. The camera is framed to provide the illusion that the viewer is in the captain’s chair, preparing to immolate $3,000 on the altar of chance. Throughout all this, Vegas Matt displays no elite strategy, acumen, or gamesmanship. He does not claim to have an insider’s edge or an esoteric jackpot-juicing technique. No one watching his videos is going to pick up tips to improve their approach. But that’s the magic: He’s utterly relatable.

More here.

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

Having an AI on your team can increase performance

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

Over the past couple years, we have learned that AI can boost the productivity of individual knowledge workers ranging from consultants to lawyers to coders. But most knowledge work isn’t purely an individual activity; it happens in groups and teams. And teams aren’t just collections of individuals – they provide critical benefits that individuals alone typically can’t, including better performance, sharing of expertise, and social connections.

So, what happens when AI acts as a teammate? This past summer we conducted a pre-registered, randomized controlled trial of 776 professionals at Procter and Gamble, the consumer goods giant, to find out.

We are ready to share the results in a new working paper: The Cybernetic Teammate: A Field Experiment on Generative AI Reshaping Teamwork and Expertise.

More here.

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

Avoiding your neighbor because of how they voted? Democracy needs you to talk to them instead

Betsy Sinclair at The Conversation:

Political scientists Steven WebsterElizabeth Connors and I have investigated what happens to people’s social networks – their friends, family and neighbors – when partisan anger takes over. For example, suppose your neighbor is a member of the opposite political party. You’ve always watered their plants when they go on vacation. Given the news these days and how angry you’re feeling, what will you say when they ask for help during their next trip?

We found that when someone is angry with the opposite party, they avoid people with those views. That can include not assisting neighbors with various tasks, avoiding social gatherings attended by people from the other side, and refusing to date people who vote differently. It means being disappointed if your son or daughter marries a supporter of the opposing party, and even severing close friendships or distancing yourself from close relatives.

We see that political anger disrupts ordinary life – coffee with a friend – as well as more major life decisions. Political anger breaks our social networks.

People rely on their relationships to understand our world – and to vote. The more we isolate ourselves from people who see things differently, the easier it is to misunderstand them, pushing us to separate even more.

More here.

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