My Father as Weather
Each morning he rises
out of the scrub grass,
half-thought, half-threat.
The grass doesn’t scream,
just splits its dry mouth to cradle him.
I watch from the bluff
where the sky folds white into a tired napkin.
His whole shape borrows
from wind and sand.
No coat, no wallet,
no time creased
into the pocket of apology.
Just the sea of drift releasing him
molecule by molecule.
I move closer.
I stand where the grass parts
like scribbled sutures,
let his wind-bone shoulder drag
through the part of me
that can’t quit
still asking what I did
wrong by being born.
A field never mourns
what weather carries off.
Even when the sky cuts
his outline like scissors
I outlive. I stay—
salt-numbed & radiant.
What he abandoned,
I gathered:
scrap wind, a dead name,
the luminous debris of his daughter.
by Chrissy Stegman
from Ekphrastic Challenge
Rattle Magazine, July2025
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
We’ve all heard (some among us have preached) well-meaning sermons about the importance of amplifying marginalized voices in literary spaces. Yet despite good intentions—e.g., tropes of the “perceptive outsider” or “staunch individualist”—there remains a dearth of more fully rendered neurodiverse characters. One of our finest contemporary writers, Gary Shteyngart, is here to remedy that problem. Meet Vera Bradford-Shmulkin, the plucky, if often melancholy, 10-year-old protagonist of Shteyngart’s enchanting new novel, Vera, or Faith. An academic overachiever obsessed with language and a future career as “a woman in STEM,” Vera feels alienated from her classmates at her Manhattan magnet elementary. She struggles to calm her “monkey brain” and control her toe-walking and arm flaps, signature behaviors of mild autism, or what we used to categorize as Asperger’s syndrome. Shteyngart portrays these with compassion; his focus is on the potential of the “outsider” as a gifted truth-teller. Far from a subject of pity, Vera is a wise and feeling guide—like a 10-year-old Virgil, shepherding us through the novel’s netherworld of tormented souls while contending with her own angsts.
Ecologist Mark Vellend’s thesis is that to understand the world, “physics and evolution are the only two things you need”. 
Because of climate, the North farmed crops like wheat and barley that required very little work, and that work was easy to automate. This tended to make farmers independent, incentivize industrialization for the machinery, and push settlers west very fast, as they weren’t as limited by labor needs.
Kaputt
Historians of science have a guilty secret: we don’t particularly enjoy writing about those deemed singular geniuses. The public – or at least publishers – want stories of revolutionaries who stood entirely apart from their peers and predecessors, or, failing that, to see them ‘exposed’ as plagiarists (ideally stealing the work of the oppressed). But science rarely works in such simplistic ways. A century of historical scholarship has shown that the figure of the lone genius is largely mythical.
For some three billion years, unicellular organisms ruled Earth. Then, around one billion years ago, a new chapter of life began. Early attempts at team living began to stick, paving the way for the evolution of complex organisms, including 
Made at the high point of Kline, de Kooning, and Pollock, Andy Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans” was a poke in the eye of abstract expressionism. Not only was it blatantly mimetic, but it was being blatantly mimetic with a mundane commercial product found in every supermarket and corner grocery store in America. When people think of repetition in painting, they probably think first of these iconic soup cans.
Automating routine tasks expands possibilities. Before automatic differentiation, deep learning practitioners derived and implemented gradients by hand for each model family, a laborious and error-prone process. When Theano and its successors automated this mathematical labor, they transformed neural networks from a specialized practice into a broadly accessible discipline. This unlock, combined with massive datasets and GPU computing, catalyzed the deep learning revolution.
Following the 2008 financial collapse, US capitalism changed forever. While the banks were bailed out, more and more workers with secure, high-quality employment found themselves among the “untouchables” scrounging for a living in short-term, low-paid, dead-end jobs. Whereas Reagan and the Bushes won elections because secure proletarians voted for them and untouchables were too disheartened to vote at all, Trump won by rallying the untouchables, who now included a growing number of hitherto secure proletarians.
What transpired next was a kind of Dionysian rural festival where performers hung carcasses and living bodies, animal and human, losing themselves in pouring, smearing, splashing—actions Nitsch had developed for years. Mythical figures became crucial scaffolds alongside Christian elements like garments, foot-washing, a grail, and the cross. Odysseus and Parsifal recurred as structural motifs that framed the choreography, scent, sound, and sacrificial acts: Odysseus as an emblem of the wandering heroic subject who must cross the threshold into chaos, the way the performers descend into a forest of flesh. Performers took their time carrying wooden structures for which human and animal bodies were used as embellishment. Huge white cloths were stretched, spattered with bright-red animal blood next to lilies, slaughtered flesh, and the symbolically crucified, tied-up human body.
“Raised in Britain as a post-Christian secular humanist and trained in Asia as a Tibetan and Zen Buddhist monk,” Stephen Batchelor writes at the end of his book, Buddha, Socrates, and Us, “I find that I can no longer identify exclusively with either a Western or an Eastern tradition.” Decades of dwelling in these traditions—each with its own intellectual, spiritual, and philosophical riches—have left him strangely homeless. Far from making him unhappy, though, this state of existential homelessness has given Batchelor access to what he sees as a higher life. For, while “unsettling and disorienting” at times, such “spaces of uncertainty seem far richer in creative possibilities, more open to leading a life of wonder, imagination, and action.”
Apples and bananas may be some of America’s favorite fruits. But nutrition experts say that kiwis deserve a spot in your shopping cart. These brown, fuzzy fruits with green, yellow or even red flesh are packed with beneficial nutrients like fiber and vitamin C. And on TikTok, wellness influencers rave about their