Mina Tavakoli at n+1:
At the blow of a whistle, each dog, one at a time, was let out onto the grounds and on its doggy way, snuffling the grooves and crevices of the obstacle course in the hunt for a swab doused in an herbal essential oil. The dogs moved evenly, steady as magnetic north, until they appealed to their handlers with glances that functioned like code. This dogsperanto—a language of punctuation marks, canine body cues in expressions of “?” or “!”—met human encouragement in a surrealist covenant between trainer and trainee. Woof begat nod, nod begat pursuit. The lagotto came to a halt at a traffic cone.
“Yes, folks, now what you’re looking at is called ‘fringing.’ Fringing is when a dog is noticing a smell a little too early,” the announcer announced.
I knelt to knead a spaniel at my ankles. The spaniel—a dog with a ramen-noodley curl pattern, a nice hamster warmth, and a tiny heart about two inches deep inside her, which at this second was appreciably whizzing—let out something like a cough.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
T
Between 17 January 2023 and 19 August 2024, María Branyas Morera, of Spain, was officially the 
AI holds immense potential to advance human wellbeing, yet its current trajectory presents unprecedented dangers. AI could soon far surpass human capabilities and escalate risks such as engineered pandemics, widespread disinformation, large-scale manipulation of individuals including children, national and international security concerns, mass unemployment, and systematic human rights violations.
In a 1996 interview with The Paris Review, the reporter and novelist John Gregory Dunne was asked why he chose to classify his 1974 book, Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, as fiction as opposed to journalism. The book recounts six months Dunne spent alone in Vegas, taking a break from his marriage. Dunne, the narrator and protagonist of the book, spends most of it in a severe depression contemplating the possibility of divorce, eating junk food in his rental, and hanging out with a bunch of Vegas archetypes: the sex worker, the private investigator, the failed comic. Dunne tells the interviewer that although he was contracted at the time to write a nonfiction book, he opted to call the finished product a novel “since I made most of it up.” He offers as an example a scene in which he meets the sex worker, Artha, at a casino at five in the morning. He’s not there to gamble money; his brand of gambling takes the form of talking to strangers while in the grip of insomnia. During his conversation with Artha, he discovers some obviously bad poetry she has written on the back of a keno ticket, which he reproduces for the reader. It’s true, Dunne tells the interviewer, that while in Vegas he met a sex worker who wrote poetry. But the poems that appear in the book were written as a joke by his wife, Joan Didion.
This week on the podcast, Donovan Hohn speaks with biographer Nicholas Boggs about Baldwin: A Love Story, a book three decades in the making. The episode follows James Baldwin on his transatlantic commutes, introducing listeners to four formative—and transformative—friendships with “crazy outsiders” that sustained Baldwin and that organize this new biography. We meet painter Beauford Delaney, the “spiritual father” and artistic mentor Baldwin found in Greenwich Village. In post-war Paris, we meet Lucien Happersberger, the Swiss émigré who would become Baldwin’s lover, muse, and lifelong friend. We meet Engin Cezzar, the “blood brother” who created for Baldwin a home in Istanbul. Finally, Boggs introduces us to Yoran Cazac, the French painter with whom Baldwin collaborated on his “child’s story for adults,” Little Man, Little Man, which Boggs helped bring back into print. Along the way, Boggs and Hohn dwell on the meaning of love in Baldwin’s life and work, and on his yearning for a home “by the side of the mountain, on the edge of the sea.” Hohn and Boggs also spend time with Otto Friedrich, who befriended Baldwin during his Paris years and would become Lewis Lapham’s editor and mentor. The episode concludes with a selection of entries about Baldwin from the journal Friedrich kept in 1949.
If the 264 million students enrolled in higher education around the globe were a country, it would be the fifth most populous in the world. Some 53% of its citizens would identify as women and most would be located in Asia. Residents would speak and study in hundreds of languages, but English would dominate. This nation of learners would also be one of the fastest growing. Since 2000, the number of university students around the world has more than doubled, and the number that cross borders to learn has roughly tripled, to almost seven million. Aided by the Internet, conferences, shared curricula and collaborations, the world of higher education has become more tightly linked.
When it comes to caffeine, we often speak about ‘needing our fix’ but I’ve yet to hear of an intervention staged for the friend who drinks three double espressos before noon. In fact, when it comes to caffeine, we rarely worry about things like tolerance, dosage or long-term effects in the same way we do for other substances. We don’t speak in terms of use, misuse and psychoactivity. But caffeine, like other drugs, directly 
AI models have already been used to generate DNA sequences, 
The other day I gave a talk at 
DANIEL BIRNBAUM: Many people I know are reading your recent book Post-Europe [2024] right now. It challenges us to participate in the creation of a new, globally conscious mode of thinking—an approach that is responsive to the complexities of our interconnected world. You draw upon a rich tapestry of philosophical influences, including thinkers like Gilbert Simondon, Bernard Stiegler, and Jan Patočka as well as Kitarō Nishida, to support a vision of a post-European philosophical landscape.
This question forms the basis of what came to be known as the ‘measurement problem’. One influential answer emerged from the mind of one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, János (or ‘John’) von Neumann, who was responsible for many important advances, not only in pure mathematics and physics but also in computer design and game theory. He pointed out that when our spin detector interacts with the electron, the state of that combined system of the detector + electron will also be described by quantum theory as a superposition of possible states. And so will the state of the even larger combined system of the observer’s eye and brain + the detector + electron. However far we extend this chain, anything physical that interacts with the system will be described by the theory as a superposition of all the possible states that combined system could occupy, and so the crucial question above will remain unanswered. Hence, von Neumann concluded, it had to be something non-physical that somehow generates the transition from a superposition to the definite state as recorded on the device and noted by the observer – namely, the observer’s consciousness. (It is this argument that is the source of much of the so-called New Age commentary on quantum mechanics about how reality must somehow be observer-dependent, and