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

Elisabeth Egan at the New York Times:

Twice during a 90-minute interview about her memoir, Cher asked, “Do you think people are going to like it?”

Even in the annals of single-name celebrities — Sting, Madonna, Beyoncé, Zendaya — Cher is in the stratosphere of the one percent. She’s been a household name for six decades. She was 19 when she had her first No. 1 single with Sonny Bono. She won an Oscar for “Moonstruck,” an Emmy for “Cher: The Farewell Tour” and a Grammy for “Believe.” Her face has appeared on screens of all sizes, and her music has been a soundtrack for multiple generations, whether via vinyl, eight track, cassette tape, compact disc or Spotify. But wrangling a definitive account of her life struck a nerve for Cher. There were dark corners to explore and 78 years of material to sift through. And — this might have been the hardest part — she had to make peace with the fact that her most personal stories will soon be in the hands of scores of readers.

more here.

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

Howard Davies at Literary Review:

Kaput is about the problems facing Germany rather than the successes of the UK. Münchau (the clue is in the umlaut) is very pessimistic about his native land. It can do little right, in his view. In the German version of Winnie-the-Pooh, Pu der Bär, he is I-Aah, the gloomy donkey. But I-Aah often has a good point to make, and so does Münchau.

The core of his argument is that the German economic model is broken. How so? Let me count the ways. For decades it has been built on engineering excellence driving exports of manufactures, particularly cars and machine tools. Now that Germany’s Asian rivals have enhanced their productivity, that model increasingly depends on access to cheap energy. The Germans placed two large bets to sustain this model. The first involved establishing a warm and cuddly relationship with Russia, an approach pioneered by the former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder, whose ties with Putin were (and indeed still are) remarkably close, and sustained by Angela Merkel.

more here.

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

The Shoelace

………. —excerpt

a woman, a
tire that’s flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard…

it’s not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …

The dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there –
license plates or taxes
or expired driver’s license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink’s stopped-up, the landlord’s drunk,
the president doesn’t care and the governor’s
crazy.

And the phone bill’s up and the market’s
down
and the light has burned out –
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it’s
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear-view mirror
and China and Russia and America —

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

by Charles Bukowski
from Mockingbird Wish Me Luck

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

Angela Haupt in Time Magazine:

Thirty years ago, when Thomas Brinthaupt became a new parent—and was in the thick of long, sleep-deprived days and nights—he started coping by talking out loud to himself. That inspired him to research why people engage in this type of self-talk. A few key reasons have emerged, including social isolation: As you might expect, people who spend lots of time alone are more likely to keep themselves company by chit-chatting out loud. (Brinthaupt’s mother lived by herself, and after he overheard her solo conversations, she told him talking to herself helped her get through the day.) The same goes for only children—who engage in self-talk more frequently than those with siblings—as well as adults who had an imaginary companion they talked to when they were kids.

The other main reason why people talk out loud to themselves is to deal with “situations that are novel or highly stressful, or where you’re not sure what to do or think or feel,” says Brinthaupt, a professor emeritus of psychology at Middle Tennessee State University. Studies have found that when you’re anxious or experiencing, for example, obsessive-compulsive tendencies, you’re much more likely to talk to yourself. Upsetting or disturbing experiences make people want to resolve or understand them—and self-talk is a tool that helps them do so, he says.

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

Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Researchers are flocking to the social-media platform Bluesky, hoping to recreate the good old days of Twitter.

“All the academics have suddenly migrated to Bluesky,” says Bethan Davies, a glaciologist at Newcastle University, UK. The platform has “absolutely exploded”. In the two weeks since the US presidential election, the platform has grown from close to 14 million users to nearly 21 million. Bluesky has broad appeal in large part because it looks and feels a lot like X (formerly known as Twitter), which became hugely popular with scientists, who used it to share research findings, collaborate and network. One estimate suggests that at least half a million researchers had Twitter profiles in 2022.

That was the year that billionaire Elon Musk bought the platform. He renamed it X and reduced content moderation, among other changes, prompting some researchers to leave. Since then, pornography, spam, bots and abusive content have increased on X, and community protections have decreased, say researchers. Bluesky, by contrast, offers users control over the content they see and the people they engage with, through moderation and protections such as blocking and muting features, say researchers. It is also built on an open network, which gives researchers and developers access to its data; X now charges a hefty fee for this kind of access.

More here.

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

John Marsh at Literary Hub:

Can a book change a landscape? If ever a book did, it was The Great Gatsby. And if The Great Gatsby did, it did so thanks to one of its first and most ambitious readers, the urban planner Robert Moses.

Next year marks the one hundredth anniversary of The Great Gatsby. The novel survives in cultural memory as a narrative of star-crossed lovers (Gatsby and Daisy); as a reckoning with the elusive quality of the American dream (Gatsby and the green light); or, most commonly—witness its latest revival on Broadway—as a celebration of the excitement and excess of Jazz Age America. Few remember it for what it is: an indictment of, if not the wealthy per se, than of how wealth can deform basic human decency.

The climax of the novel makes the point. In a Manhattan hotel room, Daisy informs her husband, Tom Buchanan, that she intends to leave him and marry Gatsby. After revealing the sordid ways Gatsby has made his money—bootlegging whiskey and passing fraudulent bonds—Tom bullies Daisy into staying with him.

More here.

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

John Wentworth at Less Wrong:

The generalized efficient markets (GEM) principle says, roughly, that things which would give you a big windfall of money and/or status, will not be easy. If such an opportunity were available, someone else would have already taken it. You will never find a $100 bill on the floor of Grand Central Station at rush hour, because someone would have picked it up already.

One way to circumvent GEM is to be the best in the world at some relevant skill. A superhuman with hawk-like eyesight and the speed of the Flash might very well be able to snag $100 bills off the floor of Grand Central. More realistically, even though financial markets are the ur-example of efficiency, a handful of firms do make impressive amounts of money by being faster than anyone else in their market. I’m unlikely to ever find a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, but Terry Tao might. Etc.

But being the best in the world, in a sense sufficient to circumvent GEM, is not as hard as it might seem at first glance (though that doesn’t exactly make it easy). The trick is to exploit dimensionality.

Consider: becoming one of the world’s top experts in proteomics is hard. Becoming one of the world’s top experts in macroeconomic modelling is hard. But how hard is it to become sufficiently expert in proteomics and macroeconomic modelling that nobody is better than you at both simultaneously? In other words, how hard is it to reach the Pareto frontier?

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.

Jesse Singal at Reason:

When Scientific American was bad under Helmuth, it was really bad. For example, did you know that “Denial of Evolution Is a Form of White Supremacy“? Or that the normal distribution—a vital and basic statistical concept—is inherently suspect? No, really: Three days after the legendary biologist and author E.O. Wilson died, SciAm published a surreal hit piece about him in which the author lamented “his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.” That author also explained that “the so-called normal distribution of statistics assumes that there are default humans who serve as the standard that the rest of us can be accurately measured against.” But the normal distribution doesn’t make any such value judgments, and only someone lacking in basic education about stats—someone who definitely shouldn’t be writing about the subject for a top magazine—could make such a claim.

Some of the magazine’s Helmuth-era output made the posthumous drive-by against Wilson look Pulitzer-worthy by comparison.

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.

The Great Watchers

Think of those great watchers of the sky,
the shepherds, the magi, how they looked
for a thousand years and saw there was order,
who learned not only Light would return,
but the moment she’d start her journey.

No writing then. The see-ers gave
what they knew to the song-makers —
the dreamy sons, the daughters who hummed
as they spun, the priestly keepers of story —
and the clever-handed heard, nodded,

and turned poems into New Grange,
Stonehenge, The Great Temple of Karnak.

by Nils Peterson
from An Autumnal, 2024

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

Will McGrath at The Believer:

Cedar-Riverside was humming. The boys were looking fresh—Frenchy with his hair twisted up, Saiid’s beard trimmed tight—everybody edged up and faded up and straight from the barber’s chair. Once their moms were out of sight, a few boys snugged durags over their heads, and then Wali started talking about how one time his mom caught him wearing a wave cap like that and smack—he pantomimed a big open hand—too hip-hop. Wali had the boys rolling. Relatives were milling in the shadow of C Building, uncles and older brothers and former players slipping cash into the boys’ palms, something for the journey. The boys were doing that teenage-boy thing where their bodies are short-circuiting on adrenaline but they’re trying not to show it, grabbing and slap-fighting and punching a little too hard. Kids were calling down from the balconies, yelling final Somali encouragements, and even Riverside Plaza itself—those looming brutalist towers, born of 1960s utopian public housing fever dreams and then left to molder—even those concrete towers were glowing. A late­afternoon rain had scoured clean the buildings. The towers’ iconic red, yellow, blue, and white panels were popping in the Minneapolis golden hour, the women’s hijabs and headscarves were popping, the boys’ new kicks were popping, everything was looking nice.

more here.

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

Dan Reiter at The Millions:

No quote from antiquity sums up the metaphysical challenge of being a surfer more aptly than this one, from Marcus Aurelius, the last Emperor of the Pax Romana: “There is a river of creation, and time is a violent stream. As soon as one thing comes into sight, it is swept past and another is carried down: it too will be taken on its way.” Waves, by their nature, do not hold still. “Catching” one, therefore, can be a kind of thought experiment, a quantum paradox. To hitch yourself onto a surge of liquid energy—to soar across its frothing surface—demands both physical and mental suspension of disbelief.

Catching a wave is a tricky business in itself; to do it on the printed page requires yet another level of imagination. Which might explain why so few surf-themed books have tapped into the literary mainline. Notwithstanding the stray bubble-gum-kitsch bestseller (Frederick Kohner’s Gidget) or the outlier Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir (William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days), the canon of “surf literature” is relatively thin.

more here.

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

Adam Rutherford in The Guardian:

All things must pass, but some leave legacies. That is the story of life on Earth. Fossilised remains of organisms represent just one of the various treasure troves of information about how life used to be, one set of clues to why it is the way it is today. In the early 20th century, genes entered the storehouse of evidence for evolution, first as theoretical particles, later as the unit of selection, and today with molecular precision. Some 165 years after Darwin’s Origin of Species, evolution by natural selection is incontrovertible, the proof of it irrefutable and bounteous.

Richard Dawkins has done the lord’s work in sharing this radical idea for more than a third of that time, partly through research, but with wider impact in his general writing. This book, one of nearly a dozen he has written about evolution, looks set to be his last (he has called a tour to support it The Final Bow).

More here.

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

Rohini Subrahmanyam in The Scientist:

Aging is inevitable for most cell types in the human body, but hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) seem to defy the process. They retain their self-renewing ability almost throughout an organism’s lifetime and exhibit a delayed onset of typical hallmarks of aging like DNA damage or protein aggregation. “Stem cells are really remarkable in their longevity,” said Andre Catic, a researcher working on aging at the Baylor College of Medicine.

Previously, scientists found that one reason contributing to HSC longevity was that they could exist in a functionally inactive state for prolonged periods.¹ Now, Catic and his team found another clue as to how these cells maintain their youth. In a study published recently in Nature Cell Biology, they reported that HSCs contain high levels of a protein cyclophilin A which prevents these cells from rapid aging.² Understanding mechanisms of how HSCs  avoid the wear and tear of senescence has wide-ranging implications, from figuring out cells’ fundamental anti-aging secrets to determining how these mechanisms breaking down could lead to leukemia.

More here.

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

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Last month, I challenged 11,000 people to classify fifty pictures as either human art or AI-generated images.

I originally planned five human and five AI pictures in each of four styles: Renaissance, 19th Century, Abstract/Modern, and Digital, for a total of forty. After receiving many exceptionally good submissions from local AI artists, I fudged a little and made it fifty. The final set included paintings by Domenichino, Gauguin, Basquiat, and others, plus a host of digital artists and AI hobbyists.

1: Most People Had A Hard Time Identifying AI Art

Since there were two choices (human or AI), blind chance would produce a score of 50%, and perfect skill a score of 100%.

The median score on the test was 60%, only a little above chance. The mean was 60.6%. Participants said the task was harder than expected (median difficulty 4 on a 1-5 scale).

How meaningful is this? I tried to make the test as fair as possible by including only the best works from each category; on the human side, that meant taking prestigious works that had survived the test of time; on the AI side, it meant tossing the many submissions that had garbled text, misshapen hands, or some similar deformity. But this makes it unrepresentative of a world where many AI images will have these errors.

More here.

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

Raymond Zhong in the New York Times:

Big-name investors including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman have staked hundreds of millions of dollars on this, fusion’s potential Kitty Hawk moment: the one that shows that the limits of our species’ mastery have once again been catapulted forward.

Today’s fusion start-ups aren’t just preparing for this moment in the lab. They are signing presale deals with customers, developing supply chains, cultivating a work force, talking with regulators — all the elements that will be needed to make fusion an affordable, practical power source, not just a science experiment.

And yet, closer than ever does not necessarily mean close. Fusion’s history is a graveyard of missed deadlines and thwarted milestones, bursts of excitement followed by bruising disappointments.

The sunny view is that the start-ups are moving more quickly than government labs ever could. They can try, fail and try again.

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.

Chris Power in The Guardian:

In the early evening of 12 November 2015, three cars left Charleroi in Belgium, arriving a few hours later at a rented house in the northern suburbs of Paris. The occupants of the cars – or “the death convoy”, as they called it – were Islamic State terrorists who, the following night, rampaged through the French capital. Three attacked the Stade de France, where a football friendly between France and Germany was being played. Arriving late, they were denied entry to the stadium and blew themselves up outside.

At the same time, another group opened fire on cafes and bars in the city centre. Two members fled, while another walked into a restaurant and detonated his suicide vest. Meanwhile, the remaining trio entered the Bataclan theatre, where a crowd of 1,500 were attending a gig by the US rock band Eagles of Death Metal. The attack and subsequent siege lasted two and a half hours and ended with all three terrorists dead. Across the city, 130 people had been murdered and hundreds more injured.

Five years later, in the autumn of 2020, on the eve of publishing his new book, Yoga, and reeling from a difficult few years – mental illness, divorce, legal battles – Emmanuel Carrère was hunting for a subject.

More here.

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