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

Blake Scholl at Big Think:

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 4% of the federal budget at its peak. Concorde was a joint venture between the French and British governments, established via treaty in 1962.

Both programs ultimately delivered tech demos — and both threw off technologies that might otherwise have taken longer to invent — but neither paved a path toward an enduring future of space exploration or supersonic travel. Both pursued glory without regard to cost or practicality.

Glory is a dangerous goal, and when it is pursued without regard to pragmatic utility, much damage is done.

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.

Tara Isabella Burton at the Hedgehog Review:

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.

But memes, as they tend to do, shape reality in their image. Somewhere between Trump’s shock victory in 2016 and the inevitability of his return, vitalism became not merely a pithy means of online identity-formation but a renascent political and, indeed, spiritual project.

more here.

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

Estelle Tang in The Guardian:

The very first sentence of Arabelle Sicardi’s book, The House of Beauty, reads: “When I tell you that beauty is a monster, I need you to know it is my favorite kind.” Sicardi, who splits their time between New York City and Los Angeles, has a love/hate relationship with the beauty industry. A writer and consultant working in beauty and tech, their projects include a beauty newsletter, a creative collective called Perfumed Pages and a non-profit arts project called the Museum of Nails Foundation. In their new book, they examine the impact of the $450bn beauty industry – the pretty and the very ugly.

Sicardi has written about beauty as “a terrorizing force” for their whole career, including a stint as a beauty editor at BuzzFeed, which proved a spiky learning experience. “I wrote a story critical of an advertising campaign and then got flak for it,” they recall. “I decided to leave because I didn’t want to deal with the politics and the insincerity of being told I can do something, but then having my work deleted. That type of situation still happens very regularly to writers for publications to this day,” they said.

More here.

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

Jeffrey Kluger in Time Magazine:

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.

The cause of the problem was age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a disease that afflicts some 200 million people worldwide and involves a breakdown of the cells in the retina, particularly in the area known as the macula, which is responsible for central vision. AMD does not typically cause blindness, but vision can be severely impaired. As for a cure for AMD? Nonexistent.

More here.

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

Mark Iosifescu at n+1:

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.

more here.

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

Yoga Relationship

—To Thine own Self
Write the Bloody Truth—

I will help you grow and you will help
me grow. I won’t need you to behave
in a certain way to make my ego feel
comfortable. And  you will not make me
behave in a way to satisfy your ego. I
won’t make you be anyone you’re not.
And I will love you for who
you are. I will tell you the truth.
I will tell it to you lovingly.
I will tell it to you so you can hear me.
I will tell it to you even though it will hurt
you. I will tell it to you even though you
probably won’t like it. I will tell it to you
because I love you that much. So when
you are being an asshole I will tell you.
In exchange for this I expect you to do the
same for me.

by Nancy Slonim Aronie
from Writing from the Heart
Hyperion, NY 1998

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

Naomi Alderman in The Guardian:

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.

More here.

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

Dan Fox and Richard Hodson in Nature:

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?

To find out, Nature spoke to six people at the forefront of AI development — people who are driving the technology’s development and adoption, and those who are preparing society to adapt to its rapid rise.

In this video series, they describe their greatest ambitions for the technology, their expectations of where and how it will be adopted in the coming years, and their concerns for the future.

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 own Substack:

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.

Nowhere is that more clear than on college campuses.

The vast majority of assignments that were traditionally used to assess—and, more importantly, challenge—students can now easily be outsourced to ChatGPT. This is true for the essay, the most classic assignment students complete in humanities and social science courses. While the best students can still outperform AI models, a combination of technological progress and rampant grade inflation means that students who are content with an A- or perhaps a B+ can safely cheat their way to graduation, even at top universities.

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.

Paul Alexander in The Washington Post:

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

Liam Drew in Nature:

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 brain–computer interface (BCI) translated her thoughts into keystrokes — and simple melodies, such as ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’, rang out¹.

But there was a twist. For Smith, it seemed as if the piano played itself. “It felt like the keys just automatically hit themselves without me thinking about it,” she said at the time. “It just seemed like it knew the tune, and it just did it on its own.” Smith’s BCI system, implanted as part of a clinical trial, trained on her brain signals as she imagined playing the keyboard. That learning enabled the system to detect her intention to play hundreds of milliseconds before she consciously attempted to do so, says trial leader Richard Andersen, a neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

More here.

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

Eric Schliesser at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

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.).

For a long time my own preferred explanation for the renewed philosophical interest in Newton was that the reception of Newton decisively changed something about the way philosophy was practiced in two closely related ways: first, a certain kind of argument from authority often associated with ‘naturalism’, which could block or silence certain philosophical arguments or positions, became popular in philosophy—the authority was Newton’s works in mathematical physics or how they were taken by others. This move was diagnosed early by Berkeley (critically) and Toland (ironically). And detestation of this move animates much of what is great in (say) Hume’s more epistemological work.

more here.

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

I Could Be a Whale Shark

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

Selma Dabbagh at the Paris Review:

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.

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.

Louis Bury at Art in America:

My hunch is that the contemporary artworks likeliest to one day appear prescient, albeit not always in reassuring ways, will come from para-artistic digital practices, whether artistic experiments with AI; so-called Red Chip art (which Annie Armstrong of Artnet News defines as works with flashy aesthetics that abjure art history); or folk forms such as NFTs, memes, or TikTok lore videos. What these practices have in common is not just that they’re relatively new, with strong ties to digital culture, but also that they’re only somewhat recognizable as great art, or even art at all, under our inherited value systems. Traditionalists gasp, often justifiably, at the ethical and aesthetic challenges AI art poses, or at Red Chip art’s tawdriness, or at digital folk art’s simplicity. But such practices are telling the old culture what’s happening to it, even if the message isn’t what most fine arts audiences want to hear.

What about all the painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance that people still love to make and see? They’re not going away, but it’s become harder to create fine art in those media while remaining on cultural discourse’s cutting edge. In her 2024 book Disordered Attention, Claire Bishop observes that contemporary artworks “tend to be symptomatic of larger conditions, rather than anticipatory fortune tellers,” because “the world changes faster and more cruelly than even artists can grasp.”

more here.

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