D. Graham Burnett in The New Yorker:
You can want different things from a university—superlative basketball, an arts center, competent instruction in philosophy or physics, even a cure for cancer. No wonder these institutions struggle to keep everyone happy. And everyone isn’t happy. The Trump Administration has effectively declared open war on higher education, targeting it with deep cuts to federal grant funding. University presidents are alarmed, as are faculty members, and anyone who cares about the university’s broader role.
Because I’m a historian of science and technology, part of my terrain is the evolving role of the university—from its medieval, clerical origins to the entrepreneurial R. & D. engines of today. I teach among the humanists, and my courses are anchored in the traditional program of the liberal arts, in the hope of giving shape to humans equal to the challenge of freedom. But my subject is the rise of a techno-scientific understanding of the world, and of ourselves in it. And, if that is what you care about, the White House’s chain-jerk mugging feels, frankly, like a sideshow. The juggernaut actually barrelling down the quad is A.I., coming at us with shocking speed.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
A century ago, one of the richest men in the world decided to wade into the public sphere by throwing his weight behind a series of cuts that would reach into every corner of American life. The president of the day, sensing early support for these reforms and not wishing to be left behind, jumped on board with impulsive zeal, demanding that all federal offices implement the cutbacks with immediate effect.
The legal doctrine of “habeas corpus,” a Latin phrase that has its 
What’s distinctive about humans is that homo sapiens domesticated themselves. We are self-domesticated apes. Anthropologist Brian Hare characterizes recent human evolution (Late Pleistocene) as “Survival of the Friendliest”, arguing that in our self-domestication we favored prosociality — the tendency to be friendly, cooperative, and empathetic. We chose the most cooperative, the least aggressive, the less bullying types, and that trust in others resulted in greater prosperity, which in turn spread neoteny genes, and other domestication traits, into our populations.
Against the backdrop of a cold white room, Iris Apfel’s yellow outfit, which she wore on the occasion of her hundredth birthday, sings its own joyous song. Both here and elsewhere, Apfel, an artist and fashion designer, often paired gorgeous things sensually by color and texture, rather than by invoking some obvious theory or idea. She was not afraid to wear a yellow tulle coat with yellow silk pants (which she designed herself in collaboration with H&M). She celebrated yellow vivaciously; she took up space with yellow. With her arms raised in this picture, she looks like some sort of bishop or religious figure. Her open palms throw spectral glitter upon us. A spiritual icon. Just by looking at her, I feel her upturned palms manifesting my dreams.
T
What Rina Green calls her “living hell” began with an innocuous backache. By late 2022, two years later, 
L
Parenting teenagers
In the Preface to his landmark Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson wrote that ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride’. Any dictionary, any grammar, is but a snapshot: all living languages change, and they do so constantly and at every level.