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

Daniel Treisman in The Conversation:

In the early 2000s, political scientist Andreas Schedler coined the term “electoral authoritarianism” to describe regimes that hold elections without real competition. Scholars Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way use another phrase, “competitive authoritarianism,” for systems in which opposition parties exist but leaders undermine them through censorship, electoral fraud or legal manipulation.

In my own work with economist Sergei Guriev, we explore a broader strategy that modern autocrats use to gain and maintain power. We call this “informational autocracy” or “spin dictatorship.”

These leaders don’t rely on violent repression. Instead, they craft the illusion that they are competent, democratic defenders of the nation – protecting it from foreign threats or internal enemies who seek to undermine its culture or steal its wealth.

More here.

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

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Artificial intelligence (AI) already helps clinicians to make diagnoses, triage critical cases and transcribe clinical notes in hospitals across the United States. But regulation of medical AI products has not kept up with the rapid pace of their adoption, argue researchers in a report published on 5 June in PLOS Digital Health¹. The authors point to limitations in how the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves these devices, and propose broader strategies that extend beyond the agency to help ensure that medical AI tools are safe and effective.

More than 1,000 medical AI products have been cleared by the FDA, and hospitals are rapidly adopting them. Unlike most other FDA-regulated products, AI tools continue to evolve after approval as they are updated or retrained on new data. This raises the need for continuous oversight, which current regulations have limited capacity to ensure.

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.

Susan Gubar at Lit Hub:

At midcentury, Marianne Moore emerged as a public personage, but not before a painful period of loss. Prefaced by a host of personal disasters—­the death of her mother’s onetime partner Mary Norcross, her own hospitalization for digestive problems, her mother’s painful shingles and neuralgia—­the decade of the 1940s brought sorrow. Moore had to deal with the rejection of her only attempt at a novel and the news that her Selected Poems had been remaindered at thirty cents a copy. Bouts of bursitis and bronchitis prompted her to hire a succession of nurses and helpers, one of whom—­Gladys Berry—­would work for Moore into her old age.

The busy rounds of teaching, conference going, and verse or letter writing were interrupted by her mother’s “battle to eat; or rather to swallow,” Moore explained to Pound: “I cannot write letters or even receive them.” To Bryher, she listed the ingredients—­“dehydrated goat-­milk, vegetable iron, brewers’ yeast”—­she used to nourish her mother. After one visit, Bryher described being “terrified” about the poet: “she could not eat if Mother could not eat, and thus got rashes and kidney trouble and pains.” Caregiving confined Moore to the Brooklyn apartment, where she started juicing vegetables.

more here.

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

Benjamin Buchloh at Artforum:

WHEN MARCEL DUCHAMP mounted a challenge to Constantin Brancusi during a joint visit to an exhibition of new airplane technologies in Paris in 1912—asking Brancusi whether he could ever sculpt anything as perfect as an airplane propeller—he figured a contradiction that haunted sculptural production for the remaining part of the twentieth century and into the first two decades of the twenty-first: the dialectics between traditional artisanal and artistic modes of sculptural production and the ever more compelling paradigm of the technologically produced readymade. Obviously, this dialectic has been constitutive of Gabriel Orozco’s work from the very beginning and determines it to this very day.

But the challenge addresses an even more pertinent question: Which, if any, of the traditional modes of sculptural production—e.g., modeling, cutting, and casting—is still viable and credible in the present at all? And how do we relate to a sculptural oeuvre like Orozco’s in which the artist continues to deploy all these supposedly outdated modes simultaneously (occupying in fact an almost unique position among sculptors since the second half of the twentieth century)?

more here.

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

Too Liberal

Does this old poop have any advice
for young people in times of such
awful trouble? Well, I’m sure you know
our country is the only so-called advanced
nation that still has a death penalty.
And torture chambers. I mean,
why screw around?

But listen, if anyone here
should wind up on a gurney
in a lethal injection facility,
maybe the one at Terra Haute,
here is what your last word should be:
“This will certainly teach me a lesson.”

If Jesus were alive today, we would kill him
with lethal injection. I call that progress.
We would have to kill him for the same reason
he was killed the first time.
His ideas are too liberal.

by Kurt Vonnegut
from Armageddon in Retrospect
J.P Putnam’s Sons Publishers, 2008

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

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

NEW POSTS BELOW

Read more »

Mark Kriegel at Literary Hub:

In December 2013, not long after the publication of Mike Tyson’s autobiography, The Wall Street Journal asked him—along with forty‑nine other distinguished writers, academics, artists, politicians, and CEOs—to name their favorite books of the year. Among Tyson’s selections was a Kindle book, Alexander the Great: The Macedonian Who Conquered the World.

“Everyone thinks Alexander was this giant, but he was really a runt,” wrote Tyson, who nevertheless, at the height of his own megalomania, commissioned a seven‑foot likeness of Alexander (along with congruently sized statues of Genghis Khan and the Haitian revolutionary Jean‑Jacques Dessalines) by the pool of his Las Vegas home.

“Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, even a cold pimp like Iceberg Slim—they were all mama’s boys,” wrote Tyson. “That’s why Alexander kept pushing forward. He didn’t want to have to go home and be dominated by his mother.”

More here.

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

Conor Feehly in Quanta:

Sharna Jamadar(opens a new tab), a neuroscientist at Monash University in Australia, and her colleagues reviewed research from her lab and others around the world to estimate the metabolic cost of cognition(opens a new tab) — that is, how much energy it takes to power the human brain. Surprisingly, they concluded that effortful, goal-directed tasks use only 5% more energy than restful brain activity. In other words, we use our brain just a small fraction more when engaging in focused cognition than when the engine is idling.

It often feels as though we allocate our mental energy through strenuous attention and focus. But the new research builds on a growing understanding that the majority of the brain’s function goes to maintenance. While many neuroscientists have historically focused on active, outward cognition, such as attention, problem-solving, working memory and decision-making, it’s becoming clear that beneath the surface, our background processing is a hidden hive of activity.

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.

Dorian Lynskey in The Guardian:

There is something biblical about the fraternal relationship between the atomic bomb and the nuclear reactor. Both involve bombarding uranium-235 atoms with neutrons to produce a chain reaction via nuclear fission. Both were made possible in the same instant, at 3.25pm on 2 December 1942, when the Manhattan Project’s Enrico Fermi orchestrated the first human-made chain reaction in the squash court of the University of Chicago. “The flame of nuclear fission brought us to the forked road of promise and peril,” writes Tim Gregory.

The bomb came first, of course, but atomic dread coexisted with tremendous optimism about what President Eisenhower dubbed “atoms for peace”: the potential of controlled fission to generate limitless energy. As David Lilienthal of the US Atomic Energy Commission observed, atom-splitting thus inspired a pseudo-religious binary: “It would either destroy us all or it would bring about the millennium.”

Nuclear optimism was shattered by the 1986 Chornobyl disaster but, as the subtitle of his book advertises, Gregory is determined to bring it back.

More here.

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

Rachel Syme at The New Yorker:

Two weeks ago, in the run-up to the release of her ninth studio album, “Something Beautiful,” Miley Cyrus, who is thirty-two and one of the most successful pop stars of all time, revealed, in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, that she has a little-known medical condition called Reinke’s edema. Also known as polypoid corditis, it is a noncancerous throat disorder that, when the voice is overused, can cause fluid to accumulate in the vocal folds, making them swell up and feel gummy and thick. Cyrus explained that she has lived with the issue for much of her life, and she was careful to note that while most people tend to develop symptoms at an older age, usually as a result of smoking, her particular case was innate. “My voice always sounded like this. So, it’s a part of my unique anatomy.” She also insisted, calmly, that she has absolutely no intention of fixing the problem. She had one minor operation, in 2019, but when the doctors suggested further surgery to remove a giant polyp from her vocal cords she vehemently refused. “I’m not willing to sever it,” she told Lowe, given “the chance of waking up from a surgery and not sounding like myself.”

It makes sense that Cyrus would be reluctant to risk her instrument, which is currently one of the all-time great voices in pop music. Her timbre, having deepened as she has aged, is rich and rumbly (in a typical high-school chorus, Cyrus would likely be seated in the “Alto 2” section), but it is also oddly nasal, with a shimmery breathiness and a hint of blatty Tennessee twang that evokes her status as Nashville royalty, the daughter of the country star Billy Ray Cyrus and the goddaughter of Dolly Parton.

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.

Katie Kitamura in The Yale Review:

I found the doorknobs at a street market in one of the less fashionable parts of Paris. They were inside a box amid a jumble of other doorknobs, all in many ways indistinguishable. The vendor said they were going for five euros each, which seemed to me an excellent price, about the same as a cappuccino. The doorknobs were technically bric-a-brac, but with their brass stems and crackled glaze, they looked ostentatious to me. I picked them up and felt their pleasing weight in the palms of my hands. I coveted them, and was also a little ashamed of coveting them. I knew they had no real place in my life. I couldn’t imagine them in my actual home. They were objects that had nothing to do with me.

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.

Lyndall Gordon at the New Statesman:

Does the accuracy vital to biography preclude art? Is this a limited, documentary genre or might imaginative truth co-exist with factual truth? Can biography lend itself to narrative, selection, even subjectivity? The writer Ann Wroe, reconceiving the obituary, believes that the soul is not to be found in lists of achievements but in fleeting intimate moments – “that unreachable thing”. It’s not unlike the “epiphanies” distilled by Joyce in Dubliners.

One of Ellmann’s Oxford colleagues, Bernard Richards, recalls that, in the 1980s, when he asked Ellmann how he was getting on with his biography of Oscar Wilde, “he said something like ‘I am up to 1882.’” How studiedly chronological this is. The line withholds a figure in the carpet (a defining pattern to be discerned in the oeuvre of a great writer, a challenge put forward by Henry James in his tale, “The Figure in the Carpet”). I say “withholds” because Ellmann did, at one stage, contemplate a shorter biography and assured his editor that he had a “coherent” idea of Joyce. The editor vetoed this and Ellmann complied.

more here.

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

Raymond Geuss in Sidecar:

Alasdair MacIntyre, who died on 21 May 2025 at the age of 96, never got the memo informing him that Descartes was the father of modern philosophy. He never thought that imagining the disembodied subject abstracted from its social context was a good starting point for anything, or that epistemology had philosophical priority, or that a principal task of philosophy was to defend the validity of our knowledge against sceptical doubt or to argue that some ‘ethical demands’ were ‘obligatory’. He certainly never received the notification issued at the start of the 20th century that henceforth philosophy would be essentially devoted to the analysis of language, the construction of formal arguments and the solution of logical puzzles. In contrast to all this his thought had a kind of archaic substantiality. He was one of the very few anglophone philosophers of the past two hundred years whom one could imagine emerging from the pages of Plutarch or Diogenes Laertius.

There are a number of reasons for this. He was, of course, erudite, highly intelligent and argumentatively incisive, but more importantly he instantiated an unusual form of the unity of thought and life. He had a remarkable ability to learn and willingness to change his position. At various times in his life he was a Marxist, a practising analytic philosopher, an Aristotelian, a Presbyterian, an Anglican, and eventually a Roman Catholic and Thomist-Aristotelian. At times he seemed close to psychoanalysis; he wrote knowledgeably about Hegel, Kierkegaard, Hume, Edith Stein, various figures of the Scottish Enlightenment and a number of theologians. In the case of almost any other philosopher, one might think it a sign of flightiness, but actually it was a mark of intellectual integrity.

More here.

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

Connor O’Brien in Phenomenal World:

The 29th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC (COP29) was the much-anticipated “finance COP.” Negotiators were tasked with replacing the previous $100 billion target with a more ambitious New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG). After tense last-minute discussions, the developed countries eventually committed to “taking the lead” on providing “at least [$]300 billion per year by 2035,” out of a $1.3 trillion total.

While nominally tripling the previous $100 billion target for developed country financing, the new goal incorporates funding from “a wide variety of sources.” When combined with the effects of inflation, this makes the NCQG at best marginally higher than the previous target, a reality that has generated withering criticism from activists and climate vulnerable states in the global South.

The return of US President Donald Trump has cast further doubt on the credibility of the NCQG. Having already withdrawn again from the Paris Agreement and announced a 90-day USAID spending freeze, the Trump Administration will likely redirect much if not all of the US’s planned multi-billion dollar annual climate finance contributions in the coming years, creating a sudden funding shortfall that will be difficult to fill.

Global South states have already begun to look elsewhere to meet their financing needs.

More here.

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

Leif Weatherby in The Ideas Letter:

As a new surge of AGI talk has taken over the airwaves in the third year of LLMs, a deeply revealing form of Actually Existing AI speaks against the hype: Elon Musk’s Department of Governmental Efficiency, a sloppy, violent-yet-banal attack on the codebase and massive personal data dragnet of the federal government. While we wait for AGI—and while we’re distracted by endless, ungrounded debates about it—the reality of modern AI is parading in plain sight in the form of the most boring constitutional crisis imaginable. Rather than machine intelligence, AI is an avant-garde form of digital bureaucracy, one that deepens our culture’s dependence on the spreadsheet.

The discourse is providing cover for this disastrous attack. Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for the New York Times, recently explained why he’s “feeling the AGI.” (Unfortunately, Roose’s reasons seem to boil down to, “I live in San Francisco.”) Similarly, Ezra Klein, of the paper’s Opinion pages, thinks the government knows AGI is coming. And the statistician Nate Silver suggests we have to “come to grips with AI.” The internet ethnographer and journalist Max Read has dubbed this surge of AI believers the “AI backlash backlash,” a reaction to the anti-tech skepticism we’ve seen over the past few years. The position, according to Read, is that AI “is quite powerful and useful, and even if you hate that, lots of money and resources are being expended on it, so it’s important to take it seriously rather than dismissing it out of hand.” That’s a far cry from the derisive characterization of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT as “stochastic parrots” (which remix and repeat human language) or “fancy autocomplete.” These systems are far more capable—and more dangerous—than the skeptics make them out to be. Dispelling the myth of their intelligence does not excuse us from paying close attention to their power.

More here.

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