Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

I had early access to the first Mythos-class AI model being released to the public, Claude 5 Fable. Much of the discussion of Mythos has centered on its impact on software security, but I tested it on everything except that (the guardrails around Fable essentially prevent it from being used for cybersecurity at all). My conclusion is that it represents a very real leap over every model I have used before, and, maybe more important, suggests our relationship with AI is changing in drastic ways.

First, how good is Fable? In experiment after experiment I conducted, it outperformed basically every other public model I have used by a considerable margin. It was capable across many problems and produced some startling results — it would work up to a dozen hours executing on multi-page specifications. I’ll walk you through a couple of more complex, and serious, use cases shortly, but you could see the general improvement across the board on every task.

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.

Nathan Gardels at Noema:

As we have written often in Noema, the value created by intelligent machines is flowing mostly to those tech titans who “own the robots” and to the top 10% who own 93% of all equities. Meanwhile, the value of labor — and its bargaining power to reap a piece of the pie — is rapidly diminishing. Indeed, the public, whose data is exploited to train AI models, generally has no claim to the new wealth created from the raw material of their information.

Lately, this realization has fostered a proliferation of proposals from Democrats, Republicans and Big Tech to more broadly share the vast profits generated by AI. Where they differ is in the ways and means to do so.

These proposals fall into two rough camps: redistribution of income and pre-distribution of wealth.

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.

Best Society

When I was a child I thought
Casually, that solitude
Never needed to be sought.
Something everybody had,
Like nakedness, it lay at hand,
Not especially right or specially wrong,
A plentiful and obvious thing
Not at all hard to understand.

Then, in twenties, it became
At once more difficult to get
And more desired – though all the same
More undesirable; for what
You are alone has, to achieve
The rank of fact, be expressed
In terms of others, or it’s just
compensating make-believe.

Much better stay in company!
To love you must have someone else,
Giving requires a legatee,
Good neighbours need whole parishfuls
Of folk to do it — in short,
Our virtues are all social.  If,
Deprived of solitude, you chafe,
It’s clear you’re not the virtuous sort.

Viciously then, I lock my door.
The gas-fire breathes. The wind outside
Ushers in evening rain. Once more
Uncontradicting solitude
Supports me on its giant palm;
And like a sea-anemone
Or simple snail, there cautiously
Unfolds, emerges, what I am.

by Philip Larkin
from Poetic Outlaws 6/2/26

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

Jessica George at JSTOR Daily:

In Fritz Eichenberg’s Heathcliff Under the Tree (1943), Emily Brontë’s antihero leans against a broad tree and faces the sky. His long coat cuts against an opposite volley of wind, animated with an “inner life” by “the touch of the graver.” Described by the artist as a “dialogue” among human and natural elements, the print captures Heathcliff’s turmoil amidst the haunting moors of the English countryside and exemplifies Eichenberg’s ability to convey and elicit human emotion through wood engraving. It is a scene that “captured the imagination of millions of people,” Eichenberg recalled, “[I]t’s always Heathcliff Under the Tree that they say, ‘This is the one that I love most.’”

Eichenberg was a prolific artist, and Heathcliff Under the Tree is one among thousands of works of art created during his lifetime. His oeuvre spans the twentieth century, responding to oppression, war, and exploitation through what he believed was the divine work of creative expression. Today, amid growing anxieties about artificial intelligence and creativity, Eichenberg’s life and work offer new audiences an opportunity for revisiting what’s human about art.

more here.

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

Julia Kornberg at Poetry Magazine:

In the 1980s, a young American student named George B. Moore sent an extensive telegram to José Emilio Pacheco, one of Mexico’s premier poets, hoping to interview him. Telegrams were expensive—typically priced per word—but Moore sent question after question anyway. Pacheco later claimed the message ran to about 10 pages, which might have cost thousands of dollars to transmit. Instead of answering directly, Pacheco responded with the now-classic “Letter to George B. Moore in defense of anonymity,” a poem that doubles as an ars poetica. In it he writes, “I don’t know why we write, dear George . . . Strange, this world of ours: it’s interested more in poets / and less in poetry.”

Although he was a central figure in Mexican letters, Pacheco was shy and humorously self-effacing. Like Jorge Luis Borges, whom he greatly admired, he understood that the writer’s task is not to speak as a unique, divinely inspired being, but to intervene in an infinite network of texts—often stealing, translating, or rehashing ideas from the past. For Pacheco, the writer is nothing more than a reader: as he wrote in his poem to Moore, “we don’t read others, we read ourselves into them.”

more here.

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

From the New York Times:

The Participants

Daron Acemoglu, economist at M.I.T. and a Nobel laureate

Dean Ball, formerly an adviser on A.I. and emerging technology for the Trump administration, now a senior fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation

Ethan Mollick, professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Co-Intelligence” and the forthcoming “Co-Existence”

Clara Shih, former top A.I. executive at Salesforce and Meta, co-founder of New Work Foundation, a nonprofit that aims to help entry-level workers navigate A.I.

Bill Wasik, moderator, editor of the Science desk at The New York Times and formerly the editorial director of The Times Magazine

Read the discussion here.

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

Chris Simms at New Scientist:

A rich and complex ecosystem stretching back 700,000 years that included woolly mammoths, bison, horses and big cats has been unveiled thanks to DNA preserved in frozen faeces.

Arctic ground squirrels (Urocitellus parryii) are rodents about 40 centimetres long, found in cold regions of both North America and Siberia. These areas were joined by a land bridge in the past, with the whole region being known as Beringia.

“The squirrels hibernate for about eight months of the year and in the four months that they’re conscious, they really need to get out there and eat and bring as many resources as they can back to their burrow,” says Tyler Murchie at the Hakai Institute in Campbell River, Canada.

This means their burrows often contain a wealth of faecal pellets and food caches, which makes the animals like “natural archivists”, says Murchie.

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.

Jordan Karp at The Western Journal:

I never thought I’d say this. I agree with Marjorie Taylor Greene. Not on policy, certainly not on her rhetoric, but on her suggestion that Americans might be happier if we split into two separate nations — one red, one blue.

It may sound unthinkable to many. But let’s be honest, America has never been as united as its name suggests. The Articles of Confederation established an unworkable loose alliance of sovereign states, and it took the Constitutional Convention’s compromises — on slavery, representation, and federal power — to hold our young nation together, eventually leading to the Civil War, still our bloodiest conflict.

Post-Reconstruction, the divides persisted. The agrarian populism of the Midwest clashing with Eastern industrialism, the isolationist heartland versus coastal internationalism during the World Wars. The 20th century was marked by furious battles over civil rights, voting, and gender equality. From the beginning, we have been — and continue to be — a nation at odds with itself.

More here.  And more in this series of op-eds arguing for two Americas 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.

Francine Prose at Lapham’s Quarterly:

“Everyone expected this comet to hit and obliterate England in 1857,” says Francine Prose in this episode of The World in Time. “So a lot of the novel is about the pressure from this belief or non-belief that the comet is going to hit. And of course, Dickens, who’s sort of scientifically minded, dismisses it immediately. And Andersen, who is romantic—paranoid, fearful, the whole list of things which would make you believe you’re about to be obliterated by a comet—is completely convinced and can’t really accept Dickens’ attempts to reassure his household that this is not going to happen.”

This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with Francine Prose, editor-at-large of Lapham’s Quarterly, about her new novel Five Weeks in the Country, which, mingling historical fact with fiction, narrates five disastrous weeks that Hans Christian Andersen spent with Charles Dickens and his family in the summer of 1857. The episode ends with an audio version of Hans Christian Andersen’s contribution to The City issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, a tour of Venice narrated by the moon.

more here.

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

Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

Peptides have become the latest cure-all trend on social media — a way to eliminate wrinkles, build lean muscle, boost metabolism, clear brain fog, heal torn ligaments and more. Influencers rave about their peptide-fuelled glow-ups on TikTok. Bodybuilders exchange information about their favourite combinations at the gym. US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is a proponent. “I’m a big fan of peptides,” he told US podcaster Joe Rogan in February. “I’ve used them myself, and used them with really good effect on a couple of injuries.”

Peptides are made of the same building blocks as proteins, but are shorter — typically less than 50 amino acids long. And they can be powerful medicines. The hugely successful GLP-1 diabetes and weight-loss drugs, for example, are peptides; as is the hormone insulin.

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.

Dina Nayeri at The Guardian:

It’s difficult in 2026 to talk about Iran without confronting a lot of crude certainty. The average non-Iranian gets their information in snippets, filtered by algorithms. The Iranian diaspora is too fractured and traumatised to educate everyone. And the regime has muffled the voices inside its borders, responding to every major uprising with internet blackouts that hide both the people’s rage and its own violent response. Meanwhile, its own network of misinformation spreads lies – that protesters are foreign instruments, that the unrest is manufactured by outsiders – exploiting legitimate western anxieties about intervention, Islamophobia, sanctions, oil and Israeli imperialism.

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati’s powerful history of the Islamic republic is a badly needed corrective because it is at once an engrossing story and a balanced, meticulously researched primer on modern Iran (the clearest I’ve ever read). And it is dramatic, personal and often heartbreaking, told through six lives lived at the forefront of the Iranian people’s almost five-decade struggle with a corrupt regime that has stolen their freedoms, votes and many thousands of their lives.

more here.

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

John M. Church

I was attorney for the “Q”
And the Indemnity Company which insured
The owners of the mine.
I pulled the wires with judge and jury
And the upper courts, to beat the claims
Of the crippled, the widow and the orphan,
And made a fortune thereat.
The bar association sang my praises
In a high-flown resolution.
And the floral tributes were many—
But the rats devoured my heart
And a snake made a nest in my skull.

by Edgar Lee Masters
from Spoon River Anthology
Collier Books, 1944

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

Leanne Ogasawara at the Pittsburgh Review of Books:

One of the most anticipated books of the year, Dave Eggers’ new novel Contrapposto was twenty years in the making and draws on the author’s own background as a trained visual artist before he turned primarily toward writing.

When Cricket meets Olympia, he is only nine years old. The introverted son of a single mother who has recently lost his beloved grandfather, he struggles as he is made to endure his mother’s string of terrible live-in boyfriends. Cricket is adrift, until Olympia arrives in his life like a supernova. For the next six decades the two orbit each other, coming together, drifting apart, and always showing up when it counts.

I’ll confess: I am not a big reader of coming-of-age stories. Underage protagonists leave me restless, and so I almost put this down in the early pages. Reader, I did not put it down. And by the end I was completely undone, which tells you everything about how necessary those opening sections turned out to be. Eggers knew exactly what he was doing.

More here.

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

Yascha Mounk at his own website:

Yascha Mounk: Last time we spoke, you gave a really great introduction to how to think about the influence of evolution on human nature and human psychology. You are now out with a book that speaks more specifically about sex differences and how those are rooted in biology. Let’s go through some of the sex differences that the literature establishes relatively decisively.

One way you break this down is to say some sex differences are just completely dimorphic—women give birth, men do not—while others are more statistical variances. Tell us a little bit about how to think about the kinds of sex differences and what some of the most common ones are.

Steve Stewart-Williams: The new book is called A Billion Years of Sex Differences. I start by listing what I call the standard issue sex differences: a list of very well-established sex differences in our species. As you say, they range from the very large and strictly dimorphic and categorical, to the not-so-large—at the other end, just statistical differences, relatively modest discrepancies in the average scores of massively overlapping distributions.

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.