Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

Eisenman has said she started out in a “degenerate and proto-queer” environment, asserting that, when she arrived in New York in the late 1980s, there “was no such thing as queer yet.” The artist wasn’t interested in modernism’s pieties. She was after drama. Her influences include Caravaggio, Giotto, Michelangelo, Grant Wood, Georg Baselitz, and WPA murals, all mixed into clusterfucks of seriousness and stupidity, tenderness and the grotesquerie. Her Alice in Wonderland depicts a tiny Alice whose head is jammed into the vagina of Wonder Woman. She’s created scenes of castration and Betty Rubble and Wilma Flintstone in flagrante ecstasy. Artist Amy Sillman wrote that Eisenman renders figures “with riotous unpredictability, anti-Puritanically taking delight in misbehavior on every level.” Eisenman takes the sacred and drags it across the barroom floor.

Her paintings at 52 Walker are delirious indictments of politics, art, and money. The show is brilliantly installed on tinted Homasote walls that exude warmth and knit together the entire space. Drawings and collages are pushpinned to the walls.

more here.

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

Cynthia Zarin at the Paris Review:

During a week in December when violence seemed to rap on every door, I saw two plays about women who take their lives into their own hands: Hedda Gabler at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, and Anna Christie at Saint Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The plays were written thirty years apart. Hedda Gabler by Henrik Ibsen in 1891, and Anna Christie by Eugene O’Neill in 1921. That year, Alexander Woollcott, reviewing the first production of Anna Christie for the New York Times, wrote, “All grown-up playgoers should jot down in their notebooks the name of Anna Christie as that of a play they really ought to see.” Though O’Neill won the Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie, the play has been infrequently performed. It is being directed now by Thomas Kail, and Anna is played by his wife, Michelle Williams. On the other hand, Hedda Gabler, directed this time by James Bundy and starring Marianna Gailus, is a warhorse.

Both plays are about traps, and both confound expectations. Anna, a pinup saint, is stymied by circumstance but frees herself. Hedda, a monster, steps backward into a baroque ambuscade of her own making.

more here.

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

The Nature of This Flower Is to Bloom

…, and for ourselves, the intrinsic
“Purpose” is to reach, and to remember,
and to declare our commitment to all
the living, without deceit, and without
fear, and without reservation. We do
what we can. And by doing it, we keep
ourselves trusting, which is to say,
vulnerable, and more than that,
what can anyone ask?

by June Jordan, in a personal letter
from Her Blue Body Everything we Know
by Alice Walker, Harcourt Inc. 1996

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

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

Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:

An octopus’s adaptive camouflage has long inspired materials scientists looking to come up with new cloaking technologies. Now researchers have created a synthetic “skin” that independently shifts its surface patterns and colors like these intelligent invertebrates.

The ability to alter an object’s appearance on demand has a host of applications, from allowing machines to dynamically blend into their surroundings to creating adaptive displays and artwork. Octopuses are an obvious source of inspiration thanks to their unique ability to change the color and physical structure of their skin in just seconds. So far, however, materials scientists have struggled to replicate this dual control. Materials that change color typically use nanostructures to reflect light in specific ways. But changing a surface’s shape interferes with these interactions, making it challenging to tune both properties simultaneously. Now, in a paper published in Nature, Stanford University researchers cracked the problem by creating a synthetic skin made of two independently controlled polymer layers: One changes color and the other shape.

More here.

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

Tim Clare in The Guardian:

Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points – a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress.

But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort. Things came to a head when I passed an entire holiday glued to my phone, repeating the same 30-second Kanji lesson over and over like a pigeon pecking a lever, ignoring my family and learning nothing.

Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. “Value capture”, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric – in some sense it supplants your original goal – until it has “redefined your core sense of what’s important”.

More here.

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

Chris Simms at New Scientist:

We often hear talk of things being good for our microbiome, and in turn, good for our health. But it wasn’t entirely clear what a healthy gut microbiome consisted of. Now, a study of more than 34,000 people has edged us closer towards understanding the mixes of microbes that reliably signal we have low inflammation, good immunity and healthy cholesterol levels.

Your gut microbiome can influence your immune system, rate of ageing and your risk of poor mental health. Despite a profusion of home tests promising to reveal the make-up of your gut community, their usefulness has been debated, because it is hard to pin down what a “good” microbial mix is.

Previous measures mainly looked at species diversity, with a greater array of bacteria being better.

More here.

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

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

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

Yascha Mounk at his Substack:

An awe-inspiring protest movement is shaking the foundations of power in Iran. Millions of people have taken to the streets to protest the corruption which has impoverished them, and the theocratic restrictions which have taken away their liberties. Men and especially women are standing up for their dignity and their livelihoods in the face of the deadly threat of state-sanctioned violence.

There are many reasons to fear that this protest movement could end badly. The regime could once again decide to crack down on its own citizens, killing dozens or hundreds or perhaps thousands of them in the process. (Indeed, according to eyewitness reports, it has already started doing so.) Power might shift from the ailing Ayatollah Khamenei to the Revolutionary Guards, perhaps lifting some restrictions on the country’s women but frustrating the broader political and economic aspirations of the population. Even a transition to democracy need not bring lasting results, as the failed experiments with democratic rule from Egypt to Tunisia prove.

But the sympathies of every single person who believes in freedom and equality and the basic rights of women should be with those courageous millions in Iran.

More here.

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

Sanjay Subrahmanyam interviewed at Granta:

Editor:

You were born fourteen years after Indian Independence in 1947. What was your impression of the British Empire growing up?

Subrahmanyam:

Growing up in the 1960s, the British Empire was not much of a subject of regular conversation, and people did not usually express violent anti-British sentiments. It was only at the age of eleven or twelve that the subject of the anti-colonial movement came up in our history classes, and most of my classmates were perplexed by the avid nationalism of our teacher, a very intelligent Bengali woman whom I remember fondly to this day. There were actually a few Anglophiles around in our neighborhood, one of whom even grew hybrid roses in the fond hope of exhibiting them in the annual Chelsea Show. When the Indian television, which was run by the government, eventually showed British Top of the Pops programmes in the late 1960s with Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, and the Moody Blues, there was a lot of enthusiasm in some households, and only a few realized that Engelbert had been born in Madras [Chennai]. Within my family, there was a bit of a division. My father was a convinced nationalist who cordially detested the British Empire.

more here.

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

Teresa Stoppani at the MIT Press Reader:

The unsettling operation of worms is something science realized a long time ago. Drawing on observations by Charles Darwin and Otto August Mangold, Jakob von Uexküll explains that the earthworm identifies different parts of a leaf or a pine needle — not by shape but by taste. There is “nothing to the notion of shape perception in earthworms,” Uexküll concluded. “The worm is in no condition, by its constitution, to develop shape schemata,” and it is the change in taste that becomes the “form symbol for the earthworm.”

Indeed, no shapes for the earthworm, which smells and tastes and operates by moving matter around and through its own body. If anything, it is this that the architect can grasp and represent. The traces left behind/around by the earthworm are not only the marks of its movements and the spaces of its making, but the product of the transformation of the soil it performs: the transferring, the processing, and the digestion of matter.

Consider “The Nebelivka Hypothesis,” a collaboration between Forensic Architecture and archaeologist David Wengrow in 2023. Their research project, which focused in part on the village of Nebelivka, spread across a wide area of the Ukrainian steppe to explore the traces of 6,000-year-old settlements.

more here.

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

Possible Love Affair

If Romeo and Juliet had made appointments
to meet, in the moonlight-swept orchard,
in all the peril and sweetness of conspiracy,
and then more often than not failed to meet —
one of the other lagging, or afraid, or busy elsewhere —
there would have been no romance, no passion,
none of the drama for which we remember
and celebrate them.

Writing a poem is not so different —
it is a kind of possible love affair
between something like the heart
(that courageous but also shy factory of emotion)
and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

by Mary Oliver
from Poetic Outlaws

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

Trisha Thadani in The Washington Post:

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

Christina Caron in The New York Times:

In recent years, the vagus nerve has become an object of fascination, especially on social media. The vagal nerve fibers, which run from the brain to the abdomen, have been anointed by some influencers as the key to reducing anxiety, regulating the nervous system and helping the body to relax.

TikTok videos with the hashtag “#vagusnerve” have been viewed more than 64 million times and there are nearly 70,000 posts with the hashtag on Instagram. Some of the most popular ones feature simple hacks to “tone” or “reset” the vagus nerve, in which people plunge their faces into ice water baths or lie on their backs with ice packs on their chests. There are also neck and ear massages, eye exercises and deep-breathing techniques. Now, wellness companies have capitalized on the trend, offering products like “vagus massage oil,” vibrating bracelets and pillow mists, that claim to stimulate the nerve, but that have not been endorsed by the scientific community.

More here.

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

James McWilliams at The Hedgehog Review:

I had a book come out last July. It was about a dead poet and it led to many speaking engagements (be careful what you wish for). Nearly every weekend during the fall semester of 2025, I was on the road or in the air. Once, on the water.

Typically, I spend my days monastically alone at my desk. But these trips took me to universities, book festivals, bookstores, public libraries, record shops, and music venues. Just as significantly: interstates, airports, hotels, motels, Ubers, taxis, restaurants, food trucks, gas stations, drug stores, grocery stores, bars, and diners. In other words, democratic spaces where American strangers encounter American strangers.

What I witnessed in these spaces alarmed me. Basic human interactions seemed poisoned. Instances of rudeness and aggression that I once thought rare were routine. People were noticeably hostile, inconsiderate, paranoid, jumpy, rushed, pissed, straight up mean. Most of the conflicts I witnessed were small, but they led to a big hypothesis: kindness is dying. Maybe it’s already dead.

More here.

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

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

Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I opened Claude Code and gave it the command: “Develop a web-based or software-based startup idea that will make me $1000 a month where you do all the work by generating the idea and implementing it. i shouldn’t have to do anything at all except run some program you give me once. it shouldn’t require any coding knowledge on my part, so make sure everything works well.” The AI asked me three multiple choice questions and decided that I should be selling sets of 500 prompts for professional users for $39. Without any further input, it then worked independently… FOR AN HOUR AND FOURTEEN MINUTES creating hundreds of code files and prompts. And then it gave me a single file to run that created and deployed a working website (filled with very sketchy fake marketing claims) that sold the promised 500 prompt set. You can actually see the site it launched here, though I removed the sales link, which did actually work and would have collected money. I strongly suspect that if I ignored my conscience and actually sold these prompt packs, I would make the promised $1,000.

More here.

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

Michael Fried interviews Luc Delahaye at nonsite:

It’s been twenty years since your exhibition at La Maison Rouge. That was my first encounter with your work and it also marked a radical turning-point for the photographer you were at the time. How do you see that exhibition today?

It was an important moment because, after four years, there was enough material to take stock of the work from that first period. Showing it in France also had a particular meaning for me as a statement. I was very conscious of the singular nature of my position, neither in one world nor the other. But the exhibition also marked the beginning of a new cycle because the two most recent photographs had been produced on a computer; I was initiating a new approach that was added to the direct documentary one of the first stage. This duality, which became part of my work at that point, corresponds to two ways of conceiving the role of the imagination. One utilises the unlimited, uncontrollable possibilities of the real; the other draws on the resources of the mind, which are more or less under control but limited. I had given myself a precise definition of this work on the computer: composing a picture from fragments of the real, captured within the conditions of reportage and captured to that end. I sensed that this was my path, and yet, at the beginning, it gave me the impression of doing work that wasn’t my own. Touching the image, altering the image, entering the image. I didn’t exactly see where I was going or what I could gain, but I knew what I might lose. And for me, this approach was not any more artistic than the first. This redefinition of the word “author” was a profound challenge to what I had always done

more here.

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

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