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

Oliver Eagleton at The Ideas Letter:

One of the most intriguing ways of conceptualizing the scorched landscape of the 2020s is the theory of ‘hyperpolitics’, advanced by the Belgian political philosopher Anton Jäger. Our current predicament, he writes, is one of “extreme politicization without political consequences.” While ideological commitment is ubiquitous, institutional outlets for it are absent. While contestation is fierce, the form it takes is frustratingly ephemeral. Politics is at once everywhere and nowhere – permeating our everyday lives but failing to influence state policy, which continues on much the same neoliberal trajectory, with minor variations here and there.

More here.

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

Erin O’Donnell in Harvard Magazine:

London cabbies are famous for knowing their way around their city’s maze of streets. To obtain a taxi license in London, drivers must pass a legendary test requiring them to memorize the names and locations of 25,000 streets, as well as landmarks and businesses. Passing the exam demands years of intensive study.

This knowledge appears to affect the drivers’ brains, enlarging the hippocampus, an area responsible for spatial memory and navigation. According to a small brain-imaging study published in 2000, London cab drivers had unusually large hippocampi. This part of the brain also happens to degrade in people with Alzheimer’s disease. With those findings in mind, four Harvard researchers recently conducted a new study, published in the BMJ (formerly known as the British Medical Journal), which explored rates of Alzheimer’s-related deaths among almost nine million people across 443 different occupations between 2020 and 2022.

“The two occupations with the lowest Alzheimer’s mortality are ambulance drivers and taxi drivers, jobs that very heavily use the hippocampus as a function of their everyday work,” explains Newhouse professor of healthcare policy Anupam Jena. He and his colleagues were startled by the strength of their results: ambulance drivers and taxi drivers were less than half as likely to die of Alzheimer’s disease than the general population.

More here.

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

Alex Shephard in The Washington Post:

In April 2024, Favreau visited the White House with his podcast co-hosts and several other “influencers” at a meet-and-greet the night before the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Biden was incoherent and frail; he kept telling stories that no one could understand. Sixteen months had passed, but he seemed to have aged a half-century. An alarmed Favreau approached a White House aide, but his concerns were brushed off. The president was just tired, he was told. It was the end of a long week. There was no reason for concern. Two months later, Biden delivered the single worst performance in the 60-year history of televised presidential debates, dooming his reelection campaign, destroying his presidency and essentially delivering the country to Donald Trump.

Favreau’s experience was hardly unique. Far from it. “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper and Axios reporter Alex Thompson’s account of Biden’s marked deterioration throughout his presidency, is littered with similar anecdotes.

More here.

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

At the Top of Das Flores

the tropical sun
wind-blowing though trees and ferns
water-golden, rushing to the waterfall
rocks-around, under, over everything
the sound of cascading water
butterflies of every color
my love sitting next to me

fire  air  earth  water
music  art  love

I am full
I am complete
I am at peace

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil, 2007

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

Ian Kumekawa at Literary Hub:

On a spring day in 1989, a container ship arrived in New York harbor from Eemshaven, a deepwater port in the Netherlands. The Vessel, named the Bibby Resolution, belonged to a well-established Liverpool shipping line, one whose founder had invested in the Atlantic slave trade two hundred years before. But while the company that owned it had a history that went back centuries, the ship itself was unmistakably a product of the late twentieth century.

The Vessel was assembled out of standardized parts developed for streamlining oceanic trade. It was a global polyglot: manufactured in Sweden, it had a British owner and an international crew. In the decade since its launch, it had been registered in four different countries. At the time it moored in New York, the Vessel was listed in the Bahamas, though it had never physically been close to Bahamian waters. Like other container ships, the Bibby Resolution was a creature not so much of a single country but of a global economic order.

The Bibby Resolution was an unusual container ship.

More here.

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

Carlo Rovelli in Nature:

Nature seems to have played us for a fool in the past few decades. Much theoretical research in fundamental physics during this time has focused on the search ‘beyond’ our best theories: beyond the standard model of particle physics, beyond the general theory of relativity, beyond quantum theory. But an epochal sequence of experimental results has proved many such speculations unfounded, and confirmed physics that I learnt at school half a century ago. I think physicists are failing to heed the lessons — and that, in turn, is hindering progress in physics.

Take the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. Peter Higgs and François Englert, two of the theorists who had established the underlying theory almost 50 years earlier, shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics for this feat. The Higgs boson was the last particle of the standard model of particle physics to be discovered, and spectacularly confirmed that model, rather than the dozens of theories beyond it. Meanwhile, the apparent absence of evidence for ‘supersymmetric’ particles in LHC data has disappointed a generation of theoretical physicists who had bet on such particles existing, motivated by speculative theories, including string theory.

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 Wallace-Wells in the New York Times:

Established in 2000 — when Melinda French Gates was just 35 and Bill Gates was 44 and the world’s richest man — the foundation quickly became one of the most consequential philanthropies the world has ever seen, utterly reshaping the landscape of global public health, pouring more than $100 billion into causes starved for resources and helping save tens of millions of lives.

For all its pragmatic public-health spade work, the foundation has also served as a kind of valorous abstraction — the seeming embodiment of “the Golden Rule,” in a phrase that Bill Gates likes to use, and the face of an increasingly anachronistic era of elite optimism.

“You could say this announcement is not very timely,” Gates says, but the timeline isn’t short: He is committing the foundation to 20 more years of generous aid, more than $200 billion in total, targeting health and human development. And it comes laced with familiar humanitarian confidence, as Gates and his team now believe that their central goals can be achieved in much shorter time. But it is also disconcertingly definitive: The foundation will close its doors, permanently, on Dec. 31, 2045, at least several decades before originally intended. In the meantime, it will be spending down its endowment, as well as almost all of Gates’s remaining personal fortune.

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.

Frances Wilson in Literary Review:

Poets tend not to enjoy parties. W H Auden recalled that when T S Eliot was asked at a party if he was having fun, he replied, ‘Yes, if you see the essential horror of it all.’ ‘My wife and I have asked a crowd of craps/To come and waste their time and ours,’ writes Warlock-Williams in Philip Larkin’s ‘Vers de Société’. ‘Perhaps/You’d care to join us?’ ‘In a pig’s arse, friend,’ the speaker thinks. Why waste an evening holding a glass of ‘washing sherry’, catching ‘the drivel of some bitch/Who’s read nothing but Which’ and ‘Asking that ass about his fool research’? Small talk is usually the problem. Auden, in ‘At the Party’, moans how ‘Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes:/Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose.’

Party talk makes for good social comedy. Tom Rachman’s story collection Basket of Deplorables begins with an election party hosted by Democrats in Manhattan in 2016. ‘What I don’t get about chiropractors, osteopaths and physios is how they interface, you know?’ opines one guest. ‘If I may mansplain…’ another interjects. ‘Social media’, a third is heard to say, ‘is taking ownership of the self.’ ‘Definitely an interesting narrative to unpack,’ responds a professor of cultural theory. ‘If it’s all the same to you,’ thinks Georgie, the hostess, ‘I’d rather just scream.’

More here.

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

Rebecca Roberts in The Scientist:

In a presentation at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) Annual Meeting 2025, author Andy Zeng of the University of Toronto revealed that their approach could distinguish 12 distinct patterns of differentiation across AML samples—this level of granular information could not be achieved using current methods. “You can see that despite having the same diagnosis, they differ profoundly in terms of the regions of hematopoiesis that are implicated,” said Zeng. The team used their reference map for normal hematopoiesis, comprised of 263,159 single-cell transcriptomes across 55 cell states, as a North Star. They mapped over 1.2 million cells from more than 300 leukemia samples to this reference atlas to determine patterns of aberrant differentiation.

Among the different cell differentiation stages that the team identified, some were characterized by early blocks in differentiation, and some by the enrichment of differentiation states from many stages of hematopoiesis. Others were characterized by the enrichment of differentiation states from a specific progenitor, such as an erythroid, lymphoid, or myeloid progenitor. Erythroid and lymphoid enrichment were unexpected because AML is typically characterized by a differentiation trajectory toward myeloid cells.

More here.

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

Justin Hawkins at the Hedgehog Review:

There have always been many ways of dying badly. In the late eighteenth century, the devout English writer Samuel Johnson struggled furiously and profanely against his own demise, ordering his surgeon, beyond all hope and reason, to delve deeper with a scalpel to force more senseless bleeding. That was then. Surely things are better now? Not according to theologian and ethicist Travis Pickell, who argues in his new book that the vast array of modern end-of-life technologies have only ended up providing us with even more ways of shuffling off this mortal coil. What Pickell calls “burdened agency” is a particularly modern condition arising from a combination of two factors. First, because we are presented with more choices than ever before, we are obliged to choose more than ever before. Only a century ago, for example, an ailing person simply met death when it came. Now the ailing person must choose whether to undergo exceedingly invasive medical operations, or perhaps hasten death through physician-assisted suicide. Even if one were to reject both of these routes, that itself is a choice with consequences and moral meanings. Where once an elderly person dwindling slowly to death may have stood as an example of resolution and quiet dignity unto the last, now that person is stubbornly choosing to drain the healthcare coffers and drive up insurance premiums for the rest of us, when they could instead have disqualified themselves from life and saved society the burden.

more here.

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

Madeleine Adams at The Baffler:

Trash is the hidden foundation of modern civilization. The ancient Trojans waded “ankle deep” in pottery shards and animal bones and whatever else they threw on the floor until they got so fed up with the mess that they paved it over. Rome’s first underground sewer, the Cloaca Maxima, which used the city’s rivers to sweep away waste, was constructed in the third century BC. Writing over two centuries after its construction, Livy praised the Cloaca as a monument without match, and Pliny, writing about a hundred years after him in AD 77, called it the “most noteworthy achievement” of the Roman Empire, beating out the Colosseum and the Parthenon. At the time of its construction the Cloaca was an engineering spectacle, and it also became a symbol of Roman civic virtue. Sturdy infrastructures that served the people endured; flashy monuments to emperors did not. During floods, Pliny noted, “the street above, massive blocks of stone are dragged along, and yet the tunnels do not cave in.” Humbly concealed by walls and by continued elevations of the surface of the city through centuries of accumulated matter, its invisibility ensured its durability.

more here.

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

The Gift

he walked into the bakery to buy bread
a big man
well worn cowboy hat
gentle face

we were sitting at a table
drinking our papaya juice
and talking to the dona behind the counter

he turned to us and said
“uma cancao”
and he began to sing in a soft sweet voice
he sang of his seventy-three years
he sang of his growing up
he sang of his family and the death of his wife
he sang of his travels
and he sang of his cows

I didn’t understand all the words
but I understood his song and marveled at its beauty

when he finished singing he just smiled at us
took his bread
and walked out of the bakery

there remained a silence
that was filled
with the gift of his song

by Robert Markey
from Poems From Brazil
2015

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

Nafeesa Syeed at Public Books:

Author Zahid Rafiq spent years as a journalist covering Kashmir, one of the world’s most militarized zones. He made the switch to fiction, completing his MFA at Cornell. In his first book, The World With Its Mouth Open, Rafiq explores the lives of contemporary, everyday Kashmiris. In 11 riveting short stories, his taut but knowing prose forces us to see and hear from characters whose voices are rarely included in the geopolitical discussions around the conflict-ridden region.

Rafiq spoke to me recently over Zoom from Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital. He was sandwiched between rows of bookshelves on either side of him. He insists that accepting one’s own foolishness is key as a writer. In developing his own voice, he’s looked to Chekhov, Kafka, and “lots of Russians,” as well as the chatter of shopkeepers and autorickshaw drivers from his youth.

More here.

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

Alexandra Skores at CNN:

Driverless trucks are officially running their first regular long-haul routes, making roundtrips between Dallas and Houston.

On Thursday, autonomous trucking firm Aurora announced it launched commercial service in Texas under its first customers, Uber Freight and Hirschbach Motor Lines, which delivers time- and temperature-sensitive freight. Both companies conducted test runs with Aurora, including safety drivers to monitor the self-driving technology dubbed “Aurora Driver.” Aurora’s new commercial service will no longer have safety drivers.

“We founded Aurora to deliver the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly, said Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora, in a release on Thursday. “Now, we are the first company to successfully and safely operate a commercial driverless trucking service on public roads.”

The trucks are equipped with computers and sensors that can see the length of over four football fields. In four years of practice hauls the trucks’ technology has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across 3 million miles with human supervision. As of Thursday, the company’s self-driving tech has completed over 1,200 miles without a human in the truck.

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.

David Gordon White at Aeon Magazine:

Demonology, the ‘science of demons’, has always comprised two complementary facets – the one theoretical and the other practical. If one was to battle one’s enemy effectively, one first had to know him, his human confederates, his disguises, his ruses. I use the singular here, because in many of the world’s religious traditions, the demonic hordes were held in the thrall of a single great embodiment of evil, an arch-rival to a benevolent God or gods. The relationship between the demonic host, the pandemonium, and its master was envisioned in several ways. Quite often, the demons were simply a protean swarm, overwhelming by their sheer numbers, visiting natural disasters and plagues upon the land, and madness, sickness and death upon their human victims.

In some cases, however, the pandemonium was imagined as a hierarchy whose structures mimicked those of human institutions or divine pantheons. For the monks of medieval Catholicism, the organisation of the demonic host replicated its own hierarchy. In the same way that the good angels were ranked according to their stations and functions, so too with the evil spirits: our bishops had their counterparts in their bishops, our abbots in their abbots, our priors in their priors, and so on.

more here.

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