Raymond Zhong, Jason Gulley and Bora Erden in the New York Times:
The ice of the Himalayas is wasting away. Glacier-draped slopes are going bare. The ground atop the mountain range, which sprawls across five Asian countries, is slumping and sliding as the ice beneath it — ice that held the land together — disappears. Meltwater is puddling in the valleys below, forming deep lakes.
As humans warm the planet, so much ice has been erased from around Mount Everest that the elevation at base camp in Nepal, which sits on a melting glacier, has dropped more than 220 feet since the 1980s.
But this loss is not unfolding gradually.
Often it begins slowly, imperceptibly — and then it happens all at once, with catastrophic consequences for the people below. That was how it went on a warm August day last year.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
These programs share a common origin: a Cold War-era desire in the West to demonstrate technological superiority over the Soviet Union. Apollo was, of course, championed at the highest levels of the U.S. government and consumed 
It started with the memes. People in the online know were all reading the tweets of Bronze Age Pervert. Quoting from neo-Nietzschean joke-manifesto Bronze Age Mindset was a sign, on what was still in 2016 called the alt-right, that you not only valued strength and masculine vigor and the annihilation of all liberal and feminizing impulses from the sclerosis of the liberal-bureaucratic-democratic establishment but also that you could speak the cant of the scene. It was the first Trump administration, and half the alt-right was high on the promise of meme magic—the tantalizing notion that a group of posters on 4chan had, implausibly, harnessed the latent energies of the universe and the powers of Internet vibes to meme Donald Trump into office. Neopagan vitalism was as sexy, in the recesses of the Internet characterized by avatars of cartoon frogs, as the mirror-image figure of the “resistance witch” on the anti-Trump left.
The very first sentence of Arabelle Sicardi’s book, The House of 
It’s been a long time since Alice Charton got a good look at a human face. There are plenty of people moving through her world, of course—her husband, her friends, her doctors, her neighbors—but judging just by what she can see, she’d have to take it as an article of faith that any one person was there at all. It was five years ago that the 87-year-old retired schoolteacher, living in a suburb of Paris, first noticed her eyesight failing, with a point in the middle of her field of vision going hazy, muddy, and dim. Soon that point grew into a spot, and the spot into a blotch—until it became impossible for her to recognize people, read a book, or navigate unfamiliar places on the streets.
For my money, though, the book is most interesting for those aforementioned moments of tonal whiplash, scenes wherein big shifts of register or reference point are undertaken with remarkably little in the way of narrative scaffolding. Shadow Ticket, in addition to being extremely fun and almost indecently readable, is also replete with edges left conspicuously unsanded, a combination that might go some way toward frustrating or at least reframing the prevailing misconception of Pynchon as a willfully difficult, high-maximalist, paranoid outsider-recluse. It’s a reputation that has obscured a clear view of the author’s work in one form or another for the entirety of a long career, alternately burnishing the image of an enigmatic hipster sage or offering up a strawman for the excesses and overreaches of the showoff tradition he supposedly epitomizes. It’s made the name “Thomas Pynchon” into a byword for inaccessible genius, the Trystero horn into an enduring stall-wall Sharpie tag, and Gravity’s Rainbow into a punchline on The O.C., but, meanwhile, the, you know, actual books? Those have drifted considerably from these mythic calcifications, gradually resolving into a scope and style more characterized by shaggy plotting, political generosity, and out-and-out sweetness than anything resembling the lit-bro hazing rituals that some contemporary readers have been conditioned to expect.
What we can see from the last two information crises is that they involve enormous leaps forward in knowledge and understanding, but also a period of intense instability. Following the invention of writing, the world was filled with new, beautiful ideas and new moralities. And there were also new ways to misunderstand each other: the possibility of misreading someone entered the world, as did the possibility of warfare motivated by different interpretations of texts. After the invention of the printing press came the Enlightenment, an explosion of new scientific knowledge and discovery. But before that period, Europe had plunged into the Reformation, which led to the destruction of statues and other artworks and many institutions that had been working at least adequately until then. And, to get to the heart of the matter, the Reformation in Europe meant a lot of people got burned at the stake, or killed in other terrible ways.
Artificial intelligence is booming. Technology companies are pouring trillions of dollars into research and infrastructure, and millions of people now interact with AI in one form or another. But what is it all for?
We are at that strange stage in the adoption curve of a revolutionary technology at which two seemingly contradictory things are true at the same time: It has become clear that artificial intelligence will transform the world. And the technology’s immediate impact is still sufficiently small that it just about remains possible to pretend that this won’t be the case.
Last season on Broadway, one of the most buzzworthy shows was Kip Williams’s adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Originally presented by the Sydney Theater Company, the production featured 26 characters, all played by “Succession” actress Sarah Snook. When the show moved to London’s West End, Snook won an Olivier Award; when it came to Broadway, she won a Tony. Though the show was thoroughly modern, with plenty of technological wizardry, the story was not. Wilde’s novel was published in 1891. And that prompts the question: How is it that “Dorian Gray” continues to be relevant to modern audiences?
Before a car crash in 2008 left her paralysed from the neck down, Nancy Smith enjoyed playing the piano. Years later, Smith started making music again, thanks to an implant that recorded and analysed her brain activity. When she imagined playing an on-screen keyboard, her 
During the last quarter century, there has been an explosion of scholarship by philosophers of physics and, especially, historians of philosophy on Isaac Newton and his reception in philosophy. This growing interest is prima facie puzzling because Newton did not write a major philosophical work. And while he clearly elicited important philosophical responses (e.g., by Du Châtelet, Kant, Hume, etc.) and engendered important philosophical debates (e.g., Leibniz-Clarke), this does not justify or explain the growing attention. After all, not every person who was a significant interlocutor to philosophers in his own day should be subject of study by a community of historians of philosophy today. (We largely don’t do this for Digby, Mersenne, Riccioli, William Harvey, Kepler, Hooke, Halley, or De Volder, etc.) That Newton was seminal to the history of science and mathematics is insufficiently explanatory (because there is relatively little philosophical scholarship on Euler, the Bernoullis, etc.).
The Lord, Soraya Antonius’s vivid chronicle of Palestinian life before the Nakba of 1948, is a novel that moves fast, driven by fury and passion. Tales are told within tales; there are jump cuts and flashbacks. Antonius’s eye is as keen as her wit. The narrator of the book, which was first published in 1986, is an unnamed woman journalist in the Lebanon of the early eighties. She is covering current events—the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres are obliquely referred to at one point—but she also takes an interest in the region’s past, and is particularly curious to find out about a young man named Tareq, who grew up under the British Mandate and played a significant role in the 1936–1939 Palestinian uprising against colonial rule. Her curiosity leads her to the elderly Miss Alice, an Englishwoman who was Tareq’s teacher in a mission school founded by her father at the start of the twentieth century. Tareq, Miss Alice tells the narrator, was a boy of humble background and an undistinguished student, who, however, possessed uncanny powers that Miss Alice can’t really account for. How he put those powers to use will be the novel’s story.