Madison Smartt Bell at The American Scholar:

Forty years ago, most white Americans had no idea that, hard on the heels of the American and French revolutions, an enslaved population on a Caribbean island had claimed its freedom by force of arms and founded a new Black nation called Haiti. Today, Haitian revolutionary studies is an overcrowded field. Researchers have combed through acres of hard-to-find and often drastically disorganized archives, not only in Haiti and France but also in other European and Caribbean countries, and made their contents a lot more orderly and accessible than they used to be. Still, reconstructing the profile of even a fairly well-known individual from the revolutionary period can be something like deducing a whole dinosaur from a couple of toenails and teeth—a problem that confronts Marlene Daut in the writing of her exhaustive and sometime exhausting biography of Henry Christophe, the onetime king of Haiti.

more here.

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

Ariel Dorfman at Literary Hub:

It was in a trattoria on the Piazza Navona in early April of 1974 that for the first but not the last time I heard Gabriel García Márquez refuse to even contemplate turning his masterpiece, Cien Aňos de Soledad, into a film.

Gabo—as his friends called him—was in Rome as one of the vice-presidents of the Second Russell Tribunal convened to denounce human rights violations in Latin America, so the conversation that evening was basically political. But towards the end, a question was broached by the illustrious Brazilian director, Glauber Rocha. Everyone else at the table went quiet—it was a star-studded gathering, the Argentine author Julio Cortázar, the legendary Chilean artist Roberto Matta, the exiled Spanish poet Rafael Alberti and his white haired wife, María Teresa León, who had sworn at some point during the evening that she would enter Madrid on a white horse, totally naked, as soon as Franco died.

None of us expected the vehement reaction of the Colombian novelist, usually so softspoken. “Never!” Gabo exclaimed. “To synthesize that story of seven generations of Buendías, the whole history of my country and all of Latin America, really of humanity, impossible. Only the gringos have the resources for that sort of film. I’ve already received offers: they propose an epic, two hours, three hours long. And in English! Imagine Charlton Heston pretending he’s an unknown, mythical Colombian in a fake jungle.” And added a definitive, “Ni muerto!”

Which could be translated as “Over my dead body” but better rendered as “Not even after I’m dead!”

More here.

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

Bernard Marr in Forbes:

What makes agentic AI truly revolutionary is its architecture. While generative AI excels at processing and producing content based on patterns in its training data, agentic systems incorporate sophisticated planning modules, memory systems, and decision-making frameworks that allow them to maintain context and pursue objectives over time. They can break down complex tasks into manageable steps, prioritize actions, and even recognize when their current approach isn’t working and needs adjustment.

We’re beginning to see the first signs of convergence between generative and agentic capabilities in mainstream AI tools. OpenAI’s recent introduction of scheduled tasks in ChatGPT represents an early step in this direction. This feature allows the AI to operate semi-autonomously, performing scheduled actions and maintaining ongoing responsibilities without constant user prompting. While still in its early stages, it points to a future where AI systems combine the creative and analytical capabilities of generative AI with the autonomous decision-making of agentic AI.

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.

Niklas Serning in Aeon:

I became a psychotherapist and psychologist to maximise the good I could do in the world. It seemed obvious that helping people by engaging with the root of their suffering would be the most helpful thing to do. I also became a child psychotherapist to address the roots of suffering in childhood, where they seemed to stem. I experienced how deepening into a feeling could transform it, and learned about pre-natal trauma; I even wrote a doctorate on trauma. Now, two decades into my career, I practise, lecture, supervise and write about all of these things, but increasingly I reject everything that I learned. Instead, I practise the art of ‘being for another’, an idea that arose in conversation with my colleague Sophie de Vieuxpont. I’m a mentor, a friend in an asymmetrical friendship, and a sounding board and critical ally assisting people as they go through the complexities, absurdities, devastations and joys of life.

Along the way, over years of practise, I lost faith that awareness was always curative, that resolving childhood trauma would liberate us all, that truly feeling the feelings would allow them to dissipate, in a complex feedback loop of theory and practice.

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.

Casanova and Feltus in Scientific American:

When Neandertals were first discovered nearly 170 years ago, the conceptual gap between their lineage and that
of modern humans seemed vast. Initially scientists prejudicially believed that the Neandertals were primitive brutes hardly more intelligent than apes and that their lack of advanced thinking had doomed them to extinction. Since that time, researchers have amassed evidence that they shared many of the cognitive abilities once considered unique to our species, Homo sapiens. They made complex tools, produced staples such as flour, treated their ailments with plant-based medicines, used symbols to communicate and engaged in ritual treatment of their dead.

More here.

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

Shayla Love at The New Yorker:

The literature showed insects to be far more sophisticated than one might expect of an automaton. Many have nociceptors that send signals to other parts of the insect brain, such as the central complex (associated with spatial navigation and locomotion) and the mushroom bodies (linked to learning, memory, and sensory integration). Cockroaches have a nervous-system pathway that leads up from the body to the brain and back again. In a 2019 study, researchers exposed cockroaches to a hot stimulus and a neutral stimulus; the neutral stimulus prompted a weaker signal from the body to the brain, and the hot stimulus led the roaches to try and escape. (Unsettlingly, cockroaches without heads responded to the heat but did not try to escape.) A recent genomic study of mantises, which are notorious for eating their mates during and after sex, found genes that code for nociceptive ion channels—proteins that respond to pain.

Gibbons and her colleagues ultimately found “strong evidence for pain” in adult flies, mosquitoes, cockroaches, and termites. Such insects did not appear to be at the bottom of a hierarchy of animals; they met six out of eight criteria developed for the Sentience Act, which was more than crustaceans.

more here.

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

economy’s tentacles

…….. you may well talk
…….. about economic power
…….. sitting quietly on a chair
…….. watching boat refugees
…….. fall into the sea

but meanwhile
somewhere
beneath that water
and the earth and the places
you sit and stand upon

there is this concealed
event
leading entire groups to despair
destroying many
and making others rich

you can’t
talk about it calmly
because you learned the hard way
and you know
you are part of it
through all its tentacles

by Sonja Prins
from Poetry International

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

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

Catherine Pepinster in The Guardian:

As the first ever memoir by a sitting pope, Hope is a publisher’s dream, with a rich backstory culminating in Francis’s election in 2013. It recounts how, as Jorge Bergoglio, grandchild of Italian immigrants to Argentina, he grew up in a sprawling family, loved football and the tango (which he calls “an emotional, visceral dialogue that comes from afar, from ancient roots”), studied chemistry, then joined the Jesuit order and became a priest. After dallying with Peronism and enduring the Argentinian junta, he became the cardinal archbishop of Buenos Aires. Then, just as he was planning his retirement, Benedict XVI resigned and he was chosen as his successor.

Any conclave – as those who have watched the recent movie will know – is dramatic, but the 2013 papal election was particularly so. Although Bergoglio came second in 2005 when Benedict XVI was elected, most people had either forgotten or assumed the cardinals would choose someone younger, and not a man from the other side of the world.

But rather than that historic moment, Francis begins with his grandparents and father emigrating from Italy to Argentina in the 1920s, after narrowly avoiding getting on board a ship that subsequently sank.

More here.

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

Yongyi Min in Nature:

As I sat down to read David Spiegelhalter’s The Art of Uncertainty, much of the world’s focus was on the 2024 US presidential elections. Forecasts flooded news outlets and social media, saying that the race was too close to call. When the results came out — a resounding win for Donald Trump — they laid bare the limitations of predictive models, which are subject to assumptions, uncertainty and shifts in voter behaviour. It was ideal timing, it turned out, for reading a book that emphasizes the importance of humility when dealing with uncertainty and predictions.

Spiegelhalter, a renowned statistician, has crafted a masterful examination of how to understand, measure and communicate uncertainty. His great ability to translate complex statistical concepts into accessible language is fully on display. Drawing from decades of experience, he neatly weaves together historical anecdotes, real-world examples and rigorous statistical analyses to provide a comprehensive overview.

This book asks how we can use data and statistical analysis to make informed decisions in the face of uncertainty. It equips readers with the tools to think critically about risk and chance, enabling them to make better choices in their lives.

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.

Yascha Mounk at his Substack:

After Donald Trump was first elected, the same political scientists who had adamantly insisted that he could never win a presidential election quickly coalesced on the same interpretation of his success. He was an authoritarian populist who cleaved the electorate into “real” Americans and everybody else, promising to put the former in charge while banishing the latter to the margins (or, according to the more extreme alarmists, putting them in camps). On this interpretation, two things were intrinsically linked: Trump’s demagogic talent for mobilizing popular opinion against the norms and values of a deeply mistrusted establishment; and his apparent alliance with a predominantly white and elderly electorate that had experienced a decline in their social status, feared the future, and was ready to resist change by any means necessary.

It turns out that this was a grave analytical error, which made it impossible to understand what has been brewing in the United States for the past ten years. For despite all the predictions that Trump couldn’t possibly win, he didn’t just squeak through in 2016; he also won a more convincing victory, taking the popular vote, in 2024.

More here.

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

Mark Jacobs at the Hudson Review:

Unknowability was everywhere, not just in my interactions with people, but in the life and world I was eagerly observing. One morning early, maybe five a.m., I woke in a one-room shack of boards with a dirt floor and a thatched roof. It was raining. I had no bed; slept on a pallet. The thatch leaked, making the floor a muddy lake whose shore brushed my pallet.
 
In the soft insistent rain, across the way I heard a family stirring. Someone was building a fire, someone filling a kettle for the morning mate, without which no day began. I lay on my soggy pallet and listened. They were speaking in Guaraní, the Paraguayans’ private language, in which I had less than a baby’s proficiency. I was still working on my Spanish. (Years later, a government minister told me that, while serving as an ambassador abroad, he and his colleagues spoke in Guaraní when they wished to keep a conversation confidential.) That rainy tranquil morning, what I experienced was more than the novelty of fresh perception, it was a shimmering. For me, it was in the wake of such shimmer that the impulse to tell a story found its first working out. I was at an intersection: new knowledge collided with a headstrong drive to say what I was seeing. I started writing Paraguay stories. Never stopped. Their genesis was everywhere.

more here.

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

Being out West When Time Stood Still

Once she had a seamless mind.
Clouds rolled into her thinking
like opposites attracting. And hitching.
There was that openness of beginning.
Those crisp little white cockle shells. And then
that low fog.  Spreading around
like when once you could touch time without rules or referees,
like when you used to dance alone with your eyes closed
serenading crazy in your room late, doors shut, the music on fire,
and you moved around in there, bumping the walls
like salmon swarming and flopping up the ladder.

Just that. Somehow just
to be seamless that way. Fiercely in the free.

Clouding in open fog.

by Linda E. Chown
from Numéro  Cinq Magazine

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.

Mayumi Inaba at the Paris Review:

It was the end of summer, 1977. At least I think it was late summer. I found a cat, a little ball of fluff. A teeny-tiny baby kitten.

Her face was the size of a coin, and was split by her huge wide-open mouth as she hung suspended in the dark. She was stuck inside the fence of a junior high school on the banks of the Tamagawa River in the Y. neighborhood of Fuchū City in western Tokyo. In which direction was the wind blowing that night? It was most likely a gentle breeze blowing up to my house from the river. I’d followed her cries as they carried on this breeze. At first, I searched the gaps in the hedge around my house and among the weeds of the empty plots on my street. But her cries were coming from high up, not low down. I looked up and suddenly saw a little white dot.

The large expanse of the school grounds was shrouded in the dim light. Before me was a high fence separating the road and the school. Somebody must have shoved the kitten into the fence. She was hanging so high up that even on tiptoe I could barely reach her as she clung on for dear life.

more here.

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