As swimmers dare
to lie face to sky
and water bears them,
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace
by Denise Levertov
from Task: To Be Where I am
Nils Peterson, 2025
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Cynthia Zarin at the Paris Review:
I learned to drive in the parking lot of what was then called the A&P supermarket, which marked the turnoff to a house my family owned then, by a cove and across from a small harbor. The idea was that my father would teach me. During the summers I spent a good deal of time alone with my father on a nineteen-foot sailboat called the Nausicaa. In the Odyssey, Nausicaa, the daughter of King Alcinous and Queen Arete, is washing clothes by an inlet on the island of Phaeacia, near where Odysseus, after a shipwreck, has washed ashore. When he appears, roused from slumber by the splash in a tidepool engineered by the goddess Athena, Nausicaa’s startled handmaidens flee, but “Alcinous’ daughter held fast, for Athena planted courage within her heart.”
Odysseus is naked. Nausicaa lends him some laundry to wear and takes him home to meet her parents, whom he entertains by telling stories: The Nausicaa episode is a frame for many of the tales of the Odyssey. Oddly, her name is often translated as “ship burner.” The boat had come with that moniker, and it didn’t occur to my father to change it.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Yuri Slezkine at Equator:
These books were born in Western Europe and North America at the confluence of imperial expansion, mass literacy and the rise of the translation industry, popular periodicals and book serialisation. They owed their existence to the arrival of boys as a separate – and increasingly profitable – segment of the book-reading public. Robert Louis Stevenson described Treasure Island as “a story for boys”; Haggard, his imitator and competitor, offered King Solomon’s Mines “to boys and to those who are boys at heart”.
In Russia, these books had become required reading by the turn of the twentieth century. My grandfather, born in 1885, read them, and so did my father, my father’s war-veteran friends and most of my classmates, no matter what their fathers and grandfathers did for a living.
In Speak, Memory (1951), Vladimir Nabokov remembers “savouring” The Headless Horseman as a child in St. Petersburg, the book’s watery-grey frontispiece turning “completely bleached” in the blaze of his imagination.
More here. [Free registration required.]
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Doug Jacobson in The Conversation:
When millions of people suddenly couldn’t load familiar websites and apps during the Amazon Web Services, or AWS, outage on Oct. 20, 2025, the affected servers weren’t actually down. The problem was more fundamental – their names couldn’t be found.
The culprit was DNS, the Domain Name System, which is the internet’s phone book. Every device on the internet has a numerical IP address, but people use names like amazon.com or maps.google.com. DNS acts as the translator, turning those names into the correct IP addresses so your device knows where to send the request. It works every time you click on a link, open an app or tap “log in.” Even when you don’t type a name yourself, such as in a mobile app, one is still being used in the background.
To understand why DNS failures can be so disruptive, it’s helpful to know how the Domain Name System is constructed. The internet contains over 378 million registered domain names, far too many for a single global phone book. Imagine a single book containing every American’s name and phone number. So DNS was intentionally designed to be decentralized.
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.
Zoe Kleinman in BBC:
There’s an old adage among tech journalists like me – you can either explain quantum accurately, or in a way that people understand, but you can’t do both. That’s because quantum mechanics – a strange and partly theoretical branch of physics – is a fiendishly difficult concept to get your head around. It involves tiny particles behaving in weird ways. And this odd activity has opened up the potential of a whole new world of scientific super power. Its mind-boggling complexity is probably a factor in why quantum has ended up with a lower profile than tech’s current rockstar – artificial intelligence (AI). This is despite a steady stream of recent big quantum announcements from tech giants like Microsoft and Google among others.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Eric Lach in The New Yorker 100:
t’s ancient history now, but when Zohran Mamdani first entertained the notion of running for mayor, he imagined himself running against Eric Adams. It was 2021, and Adams had just won a squeaker of a primary, convincing New Yorkers that what they needed in the post-COVID moment was a swaggering ex-cop who believed in good old-fashioned law and order. This summer, while I was reporting a Profile of Mamdani, Kenny Burgos, an old classmate of his from high school and a colleague in the New York State Assembly, recalled Mamdani being despondent at Adams’s victory. “He was, like, ‘Who are we going to get to run against this guy in four years?’ ” Burgos told me. “I said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ He said, ‘I’m too young, they won’t take me seriously.’ ”
Four years later, every apprehension that Mamdani and other leftists and liberals had toward an Adams mayoralty has proved justified. The Adams administration unravelled in a spray of cartoonish corruption charges that brought to mind the old grafts of Tammany Hall; the Mayor saved himself from prosecution by cutting a deal with a newly reëlected President Donald Trump. Now, as masked federal agents snatch weeping fathers and mothers from immigration court, just a few blocks from City Hall, Adams, having dropped his campaign for reëlection, is enjoying his lame-duck period. He just went on a sightseeing trip to Albania.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Snigdha Poonam in The Guardian:
On the surface, the town of Jamtara appeared no different from neighbouring districts. But, if you knew where to look, there were startling differences. In the middle of spartan villages were houses of imposing size and unusual opulence. Millions of Indians knew why this was. They knew, to their cost, where Jamtara was. To them, it was no longer a place; it was a verb. You lived in fear of being “Jamtara-ed”.
Over the past 15 years, parts of this sleepy district in the eastern state of Jharkhand had grown fabulously wealthy. This extraordinary feat of rural development was powered by young men who, armed with little more than mobile phones, had mastered the art of siphoning money from strangers’ bank accounts. The sums they pilfered were so staggering that, at times, their schemes resembled bank heists more than mere acts of financial fraud.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
My first thought wasn’t the drama above
but the bone-tired scientist I read about
who held a mirror up to a mouse,
just to watch his whiskers
………………………………………. twitch.
Proof of self-awareness, the article said.
But how to read this one,
his tail clenched in the raptor’s claw,
swaying side-to-side
like the pocketwatch of a hypnotist.
He must be watching the horizon roll up
on one side and then the other.
…….. Must be dazzled by the soft green
comforter spread below—
canopy of hickories and poplars
he’s only seen from root level
until now.
Surely the reek of the Red-tailed’s body
assails his nose (instinct and observation
sniffing out doom).
At least he’s been spared the worst part—
………. the wanting to know why.
No groping for answers for him,
no wondering if life has some meaning
death cannot destroy.
I envy how he takes it all in,
soothed by the breeze ruffling his fur.
A lesson for the rest of us perhaps,
also carried along by unseen powers,
…….. blood rushing to our faces
as we try to make sense of the view,
wishing we could match the pirouette
he’s performing,
arms and legs akimbo, standing on his head.
by Ken Hines
from Rattle #89, Fall 2025
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Sukhdev Sandhu in The Guardian:
Think Anthony Bourdain and a whole rush of TV memories flood back. There he is – in shows such as Parts Unknown and No Reservations – a gonzo gourmand trekking to backstreet nooks and favela hideouts in parts of the world where celebrity chefs fear to tread. In Beirut and Congo; savouring calamari and checking out graffiti in Tripoli; slurping rice noodles and necking bottles of cold beer with Barack Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam. One course follows another, evenings drift past midnight and he’s still chewing the fat with locals, hungry for stories – about drugs, dissidence, gristly local politics.
But Bourdain, who killed himself aged just 61 in 2018, had always seen himself as a writer. His mother was an editor at the New York Times, and his youthful crushes were mostly beatniks and outlaws – Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Lester Bangs, Hunter S Thompson. (Orwell too – especially his account of a dishwasher’s life in Down and Out in Paris and London.) A college dropout, he later signed up for a writing workshop with famed editor Gordon Lish. His earliest bylines appeared in arty, downtown publications; two crime novels (Bone in the Throat, Gone Bamboo) got decent reviews but sold poorly.
Things turned around after the publication in 2000 of his bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential. It portrayed New York’s restaurants as sweatshops, military trenches, last chance saloons for a whole bevy of social misfits. For Bourdain they were refuges.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Eric Drexler at AI Prospects:
Most AI research pursues incremental advances — efficiency gains, domain extensions, specific capabilities. Groups seeking transformation typically bet on conceptual breakthroughs or brute scaling. Few tackle the implementation-heavy path: integrating many components into powerful system-level capabilities.1
But implementation barriers are flattening. As I explored in “The Reality of Recursive Improvement,” AI increasingly automates its own advancement. When complex integration — heterogeneous agency architectures, malleable latent-space knowledge stores, orchestrated AI services — shifts from years of human effort to months or weeks of heavily automated exploration, the strategic landscape shifts. The question becomes not what we can build, but what we should build first: systems that can yield broad benefits — scientific tools, medical advances, structured transparency, discovery of win-win options — not those that (further) compromise biosecurity, societal epistemics, or strategic stability.
Leading AI researchers expect transformative R&D automation soon. They’re working to make it happen, and the recursive dynamics suggest they’ll succeed. The implications for research planning are profound.
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.
Amardeep Singh at the Pittsburgh Review of Books:
Zohran Mamdani, as most readers know by now, is the son of a filmmaker, Mira Nair. His parents met while she was working on Mississippi Masala (1992); his father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor of international affairs and anthropology who had lived through the events from the 1970s described in the film.
Zohran was born 34 years ago (October 1991), and his mother’s film was released only a few months afterwards (in the U.S., February 1992). Obviously, one shouldn’t read the politics of one person through the lens of their parents, as some pro-Israel groups have been attempting to do. And in a New York Times interview with both parents from June, Mahmood Mamdani made it a point to differentiate his own ideas and beliefs from his son’s: “He’s his own person,” he said. Strikingly, Mira Nair immediately jumped in to express a contrary point of view: “I don’t agree… Of course the world we live in, and what we write and film and think about, is the world that Zohran has very much absorbed.” I’m curious about what might happen if we take that seriously: What can we learn about Zohran’s approach to politics through his mother’s approach to filmmaking?
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Amelia Soth at JSTOR Daily:
Of all the sins that might damn your soul for eternity, mumbling is probably pretty far down the list. Still, in medieval Europe, there was a demon for that: Tutivillus, who totted up all the mistakes clergymen made when singing hymns or reciting psalms. Every slurred syllable would be weighed against their souls in the final reckoning.
In one thirteenth-century version of the story, a holy man sees the demon in church, dragging a huge sack. According to a translation by historian Margaret Jennings, “These are the syllables and syncopated words and verses of the psalms which these very clerics in their morning prayers stole from God,” Tutivillus explains. “You can be sure I am keeping these diligently for their accusation.” You can see the scale of the stakes here: a tongue slip was no minor accident; it was theft from God.
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.
Editorial Board in The New York Times:
Mr. Mamdani, who campaigned on sweeping promises, can build a more positive legacy by focusing on tangible accomplishments. He should take notes from successful mayors, moderate and progressive alike, including Muriel Bowser of Washington, Mike Duggan of Detroit and Michelle Wu of Boston, who have delivered concrete solutions to specific problems. Mr. Mamdani cannot solve economic inequality, the problem that fueled his campaign. But he can make progress. He can build more housing. He can expand the availability of child care and good schools. He can improve bus and subway speeds.
If he succeeds, he will offer a model of Democratic Party governance at a time when many Americans are skeptical of the party and have departed Democratic-run states for Republican-run ones. Across U.S. history, political progressives have a proud record of using government to ameliorate extreme inequality and enabling more Americans to live well. Mr. Mamdani has an opportunity to write the next chapter in that story. In almost every area that featured prominently in the mayoral campaign, Mr. Mamdani can improve life in New York by marrying his admirable ambition to pragmatism and compromise.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Katie Kadue at Bookforum:
LONG BEFORE ELON “I am become meme” Musk sought to dismantle the federal government under the aegis of a dog meme, there were LOLcats. Founded by two software developers in 2007, icanhascheezburger.com hosted an array of image macros, foraged from forums like Something Awful or created with an in-site tool, that paired a cute cat with a caption in misspelled or ungrammatical English, as in the site’s URL. Like the countless memes that would follow and like the forgotten ones that came before, a LOLcat isn’t much on its own. Derivative and communal, it accrues meaning through use. The real memes are the shares, upvotes, and modifications we make along the way.
I Can Has Cheezburger, as the Dublin-based writer and multimedia artist Joanna Walsh reminds us, was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that’s good (and much that’s bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school (“just as a hobby, won’t be big and professional”), and even, in Walsh’s account, the World Wide Web itself.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
———————————-
Yes, these girls threading through cotton
are mourning boys whose names they’ll forget
in a few harvests. Do they know to watch out
for mice and snakes? No—they imagine
out here’s a life without danger.
They imagine they race to mystery.
———————————-
But it’s all science, really, learning how
the earth yields and heals itself. We step in
where we can with sweat, lost sleep, bruised thumbs.
But I’ll let them think it’s magic, that thorns
in their sweaters could somehow mend sorrow.
Sometimes I let myself believe the same.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
Leann Davis Alspaugh at Acroteria:
“Go ahead, tell the end, but please don’t tell the beginning!” begs the movie poster for the 1966 film Gambit. Why would the filmmakers prefer to blow the ending rather than beginning?
Today’s moviegoer is accustomed to film plots that mangle chronology, forcing us to reassemble the sequence of events without clear signposts from the director. Gambit doesn’t quite go that far but it does employ a number of devices to trick the viewer into thinking a certain narrative has taken place when it has not. I can’t proceed without a spoiler alert so if that’s too much for you, please stop reading.
Gambit is a heist caper starring Michael Caine as the mastermind Harry Dean, Shirley MacLaine as the bait Nicole Chang, and Herbert Lom as Ahmad Shahbandar, the millionaire mark. Shahbandar has a priceless antique bust, Dean wants it, and Nicole is brought in to distract the millionaire. The trick is that the bust, a portrait of the ancient Chinese empress Li Su resembles Shahbandar’s beloved dead wife as well as a certain Eurasian woman—Shirley MacLaine—that Harry has discovered dancing in a shabby Hong Kong club. Harry plans to ingratiate himself with Shahbandar and use Nicole to dazzle the old man while the thief executes his plan without a hitch.
More here. [Editor’s Note: My wife and I just watched this film and enjoyed it a lot.]
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
