Kenneth Roth in Foreign Policy:

That willingness to abandon democracy can be traced to two primary causes: the disillusionment of some people with the democratic system, and the demagoguery of autocratic politicians. The disenchantment is found in people who believe that democratic government is leaving them behind. They feel that they are stagnating economically amid growing inequality, that they are not served, heard, or even respected by governing officials. It only makes matters worse when democratic governance is paralyzed by today’s increasingly divisive politics. The answer to this politics of despair lies in part in better governance and in promoting policies that are seen to respond to, and serve, all members of society.

That is easier said than done, but it is not as if autocrats govern any better. As they undermine the checks and balances on their power, autocrats typically deliver for themselves (and their cronies) more than for the people of their country. But they avoid outrage from their supporters because they excel at covering up their self-serving policies—at changing the subject—by scapegoating disfavored minorities.

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.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens at Bookforum:

AMERICA IS A LAND OF BEGINNINGS, impatient, virginal, suspicious of foreplay. Sales are clinched on first impressions; books judged by covers; presidents, on their first one hundred days. The critic, novelist, and short story writer Lynne Tillman is an author who refreshingly resists our national logic of instant gratification. What might initially seem like a “theatrical” tendency to keep the audience at arm’s length soon gives way, as the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín once observed, to something “kinder and more considerate and oddly vulnerable.” In a Tillman story, everything can come together in the final line, and often does. In a land of beginnings, here is a master of elegant endings, the rare writer who can construct entire plots (or rather, “plots”) from false starts. By design, her stories unfold with the knowledge that she may lose some ticket holders at the intermission—but also with the confidence that those who mutiny will be the poorer for it. As usual, Tillman is correct.

more here.

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

Siddhant Pusdekar in Science News:

Add a little-known species of assassin bugs to the list of animals that can fashion and wield tools. And true to their name, the insects use that tool to draw their prey into an ambush, researchers report May 12 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Found in Thailand and China, Pahabengkakia piliceps is a species of predatory insects called assassin bugs that has a taste for the region’s stingless bees. When researchers at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in China began studying the assassin bugs in 2021, they became intrigued by how P. piliceps hunt. While lying in wait at a hive’s entrance, the assassin bugs use their front legs to proficiently pick off bees that fly by.

More here.

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

Audrey Wollen in Harper’s Magazine:

Legends, fairy tales, and myths are rife with the constraints of prophecy: the necessity of surrender before the all-powerful grammar of future time; the hubris of trying to manipulate destiny; the shock of having already fucked your mother, despite your best efforts not to. Myth assumes that the future is like walking into a narrow tunnel, and the light at the end is neither train nor sunshine, but some terrifying third thing, blinding in its inevitability. Don’t even bother trying to guess. In these stories, the witch is always right, always in the wrong way. But what of the seers themselves? Are they never burdened, heartbroken by the unexpected shape of their own accuracy? Do they ever look at the world they predicted and say, That’s not what I meant? That’s not what I meant at all.

I must begin in the register of the mythical to discuss Shulamith Firestone, because that was the deliberate and unabashed scale of her project. It is often observed that The Dialectic of Sex, the work of theory she published in 1970, at the age of twenty-five, verges on the silvered edge of science fiction. The book floats like an opaline shape behind silhouetted winter branches, a cross-hatched, shining sky-thing, confounding yet airborne.

More here.

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

Frances A. Yates at the NYRB (1979):

When Fontenelle was composing his éloge of Isaac Newton for delivery in the Académie Royale des Sciences, he was able to consult notes by John Conduitt from which he would have learned that one of Newton’s motives in beginning his work in mathematics was to investigate whether judicial astrology had any claim to validity. In writing his éloge, Fontenelle omitted any reference to this fact, an omission which, as Brian Copenhaver points out, was normal in the Age of Enlightenment. Astrology for Fontenelle was unworthy of even passing reference. “The occultist tradition and all its claims about the powers of magic, alchemy, divination, witchcraft, and the secret arts, no longer demanded a serious response from serious thinkers.” How did it come about that such subjects had disappeared from the mainstream of European mental equipment, banished from the surface to pursue in future only a discredited existence underground? Copenhaver writes, “By the time the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica appeared in 1771 the transformation was complete. The first Britannica gave only one hundred and thirty-two lines, less than a full page, to articles on astrology, alchemy, Cabala, demons, divination, the word ‘occult,’ and witchcraft. Astronomy occupied sixty-seven pages, and chemistry one hundred and fifteen.”

more here.

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

Round Them Up

Family With 2 US Citizen Children
Deported by ICE After Traffic Stop
Cheerios, dinner plates, wedding
Rings—teapots and targets. Eyes
On the circumference of your wrist.
On a round table in my classroom
With broken chairs: the globe.

Holes punched in the left margin, being
Left at the margins, not knowing:
Will knuckles rattle their doors,
Their shiny knobs bright, like that
Once-new promise of America?

Her torch blazes in the noonday sun
Before, during, after the election
From the island where she stands
With eyes hooded and low, ever
Watching over rough waters.

I tell this mother on the phone
From our classroom, cord curling ’round
My fingers, we will do our best. They can
Stand out there and press the doorbell,
Ring forever for all we care.

I am not worried, she assures me.
Yet there is no list it is safe to be on—
Everything being less sure. She is
Less assured now, the news rolling
On a twenty-four-hour cycle.

A knock at the door is a knock
In their hearts, thoughts spinning Round and round
Like the vultures’ turning—silent
Above the wide-open plain.

Carrie Jane Bond
from Rattle Magazine 

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

Bennett Kleinman at Word Smarts:

If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you’d probably get 100 different answers. There’s a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound mellifluous to the ear. While there’s no way to reach a universal consensus, many esteemed linguists have favorites of their own. These are a few of them.

Ailurophile

Accomplished linguist Dr. Robert Beard compiled a list of what he personally considers to be the 100 most beautiful English words. Up first — at least alphabetically — is “ailurophile,” which appropriately sounds quite alluring. The word, which essentially means “cat lover,” is derived from the Greek ailuros, meaning “cat,” and phile, meaning “lover.” Its origins date back to the 1910s, though the word continues to make the hearts of linguists purr today. Not only does it sound pleasant, but it also evokes the beautiful connection that humans have with their beloved pets.

More here.

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

Riley Black in Smithsonian Magazine:

The repeated evolution of huge birds is part of the dinosaurian legacy. Beaked birds were the only dinosaurs to have survived the asteroid-triggered mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. Avians like the six-foot-tall Palaeeudyptes that waddled across ancient Antarctica about 30 million years ago and Titanis, a towering carnivore that was the only terror bird to live in North America between 1.8 million and 5 million years ago, underscore that prodigious dinosaurs were not only relegated to the times of Stegosaurus and Triceratops. The conditions that allowed birds to evolve to large size over and over again have varied from case to case, however, and the process has left a lingering question. If birds possess the traits that opened the possibility of truly giant, multi-ton statures for non-avian dinosaurs, why have we not seen a bird the size of a T. rex?

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.

Eric Drexler at AI Prospects:

Even experts disagree about current and near-term AI capabilities. Research proceeds along multiple lines, sometimes in secrecy. New algorithmic approaches are reducing or bypassing previously anticipated compute requirements, undermining predictions based on hardware constraints.1 Specialized models are pushing frontiers in unpredictable directions,2 the use of external tools by models is proliferating,3 inference-time reasoning4 is still in its infancy, extensions to latent-space reasoning5 may prove transformative, prospective latent-space knowledge models6 promise to break the link between model size and knowledge scope, and both large concept models7 and nonautoregressive reasoning models8 mark departures from sequential token generation architectures. In every application area, patterns of success and failure — even in applying established technologies — have been surprising.9 No degree of intelligence or investment can eliminate these uncertainties.

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.

Note: Must watch.

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

Laura Tran in The Scientist:

Colorectal cancer (CRC) rates are rising in adults under 50, with incidence patterns varying significantly by global region.¹ As researchers dig into the age- and geography-related shifts, they’re zeroing in on risk factors behind early-onset cases. Environmental exposures and certain lifestyle factors can leave their mark on a person’s health and imprint characteristic patterns of somatic mutations in the genome, known as mutational signatures.²

Ludmil Alexandrov, a cancer geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, combines traditional and mutational epidemiology to analyze genomes for genetic patterns that may be responsible for the varying CRC incidence rates. In a new study, Alexandrov and his team found that early-life exposure to colibactin, a DNA-damaging toxin produced by certain strains of Escherichia coli in the gut, is strongly linked to early-onset CRC.³

More here.

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

Charles C. Mann at The New Atlantis:

Water systems and their problems are as old as the first cities, and possibly older. The urban complex of Mohenjo-Daro, on the banks of Pakistan’s Indus River, arose about 2600 b.c., around the time that Egyptians were erecting the pyramids. Mohenjo-Daro was the biggest city in what archaeologists call the Harappan or Indus Valley civilization. Most of the citizenry lived in the “lower town,” a Manhattan-like grid of streets and boulevards faced by low brick buildings. Atop a high platform of mud bricks to its west was the “upper town,” sometimes romantically called the Citadel, a civic center that held relatively few people. Remarkably, there is little evidence that people in the upper town were richer or more powerful than those in the lower — Mohenjo-Daro seems to have been a surprisingly egalitarian place.

Water control was at its heart. Some 700 public wells dotted the lower city, many of them sixty feet deep. Cylindrical and lined with bricks and plaster, these wells created an urban water supply with a capacity and safety level that would not be matched until the modern era.

more here.

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

Naguib Mahfouz at the Paris Review:

Dream 209

I found myself sitting with President Gamal Abdel Nasser in a small garden, and he was saying: You may be asking why we don’t meet as often anymore.

I said: I did wonder about that.

He said: It’s because every time I consult you about an issue, I find that your opinion either partly or entirely contradicts mine, and so I feared for our friendship.

I replied: For me, our friendship—no matter our differences—can never end.

Dream 210

I found myself at Café El Fishawi. A short distance away was the famous artist and ballerina soon to announce her retirement. I couldn’t help looking at her with great curiosity. She gracefully turned around and her lips gave me a faint smile. My companion said: Be glad, you won’t embark on life’s final battle alone.

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.

David Nasaw in The New York Times:

The partnership between the president and the richest man in the world is coming to an end. There is one clear loser in the breakup of this affair, and it is Elon Musk.

He fell from grace as effortlessly as he had risen. Like a dime-store Icarus, he took too many chances, never understood the risks and flew too close to the sun. Wrapped in the halo of his social-media superstardom, he was blinded to the reality of his circumstances until it was too late.

Mr. Musk has already inked several lucrative federal contracts and could get far more, but he leaves Washington with his reputation as a genius jack-of-all-trades — a reputation he relied on to boost his company’s stock prices and win investors for his ambitious adventures — severely damaged. Once likened to the Marvel superhero Tony Stark, he is becoming increasingly unpopular. Many formerly proud owners of his Tesla electric cars are trading them in or pasting apologies on their bumpers. Sales have plummeted.

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.

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