After Babel

What moved the men of Shinar
to build with brick and slime
their storied tower?

Was it a name
that kept them unified?

And why should God
destroy this unity
scattering them one by one
across the world?

I’ve never mastered
another tongue
always wondering
what was the language that we lost
the Ur-Sprache,
the babble we once shared

and whether it reappears unwittingly
in a mother’s lulling of a child,
the dialects of love,
our gestures when another suffers pain,
the will to give.

These are the bricks
we’ve always used to build
not only towers and walls
but simple, open places where we can live and breathe
and may still do.

by Michael Jackson
from Dead Reckoning
Auckland University Press, 2006

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

Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker:

Karl Jaspers, the German psychiatrist and philosopher, has described what he calls the “delusional atmosphere,” a profound alteration in the way certain people experience the world. “There is some change which envelops everything with a subtle, pervasive and strangely uncertain light,” he wrote. People in this state search for a story that explains why everything suddenly feels uncanny and ominous. The “vagueness of content must be unbearable,” he wrote. “To reach some definite idea at last is like being relieved from some enormous burden.”

Mary had landed on a story that overwrote the reality of her daughters’ lives, but they also recognized in it a kind of emotional logic. Mary had been pressured to marry Chris, in an arranged match, and, when they settled in America, he had traditional ideas about a woman’s role and restricted her freedom to pursue her career. Christine and Angie came to feel that their mother’s delusions—that her former colleagues would free her from marriage and she’d be restored to her place in the medical community—were “a way of explaining how she ended up trapped in this position,” Christine said. “We theorized that psychosis was almost a reasonable response.”

more here.

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

Adam Aleksic at Literary Hub:

It seems as though everything happens faster on the internet. Each week brings a dizzying parade of new memes, fads, and slang words that evaporate as quickly as they materialize. It can be hard to keep up with the latest references unless you’re spending hours a day catching up on social media trends.

Of course, it wasn’t always like this: Look at Middle English six hundred years ago. Language was far more insular. Each city and region had its own, different dialect, to a point where there can scarcely be any discussion of a uniform “English” language as we understand it today. The only reason to adopt a new word was that it helped you better communicate with your fellow townspeople, so of course change came about more slowly.

Then England centralized, and the dialects of London and the East Midlands became the basis of what we now think of as Standard English. It was as if a switch had flipped: The upper class suddenly had a set vocabulary they could point to as “correct,” meaning that all other dialects became “incorrect.” By the 1750s, the word “slang” emerged as a catchall term to describe the nonstandard words used by the lower classes.

More here.

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

Amos Zeeberg in Quanta:

The Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a chatbot earlier this year called R1, which drew a huge amount of attention. Most of it focused on the fact(opens a new tab) that a relatively small and unknown company said it had built a chatbot that rivaled the performance of those from the world’s most famous AI companies, but using a fraction of the computer power and cost. As a result, the stocks of many Western tech companies plummeted; Nvidia, which sells the chips that run leading AI models, lost more stock value in a single day(opens a new tab) than any company in history.

Some of that attention involved an element of accusation. Sources alleged(opens a new tab) that DeepSeek had obtained(opens a new tab), without permission, knowledge from OpenAI’s proprietary o1 model by using a technique known as distillation. Much of the news coverage(opens a new tab) framed this possibility as a shock to the AI industry, implying that DeepSeek had discovered a new, more efficient way to build AI.

But distillation, also called knowledge distillation, is a widely used tool in AI, a subject of computer science research going back a decade and a tool that big tech companies use on their own models. “Distillation is one of the most important tools that companies have today to make models more efficient,” said Enric Boix-Adsera(opens a new tab), a researcher who studies distillation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

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.

April White at JSTOR Daily:

“The sea is a stranger to me,” Sheldon confessed in the first pages of her journal, yet the thirty-six-year-old had not hesitated a moment when she had been asked, two days earlier, to join the voyage as the stewardess—the only woman on the crew for the sixty-five-day trip to Hong Kong and back, with stops for additional passengers and cargo in Japan and Hawai‘i. For Sheldon, who had been born into a farming family in central Wisconsin before the Civil War, and for other women like her, the position of ship stewardess was a rare and, from the outside, glamorous chance to see the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her travels, Sheldon would see things most Americans had encountered only in books or on canvas. “The sunset was beautiful,” she wrote on her first evening aboard the Belgic, “one of those soft pink and yellow tinted skies which we see in pictures and think was created by the artist just to see what he could do. I know now they are real.”

For at least eight years, between 1892 and 1900, Sheldon worked shipboard for the Occidental and Oriental Steamship Company and the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, traveling from San Francisco to Asia and Central America tending to the every need of the women passengers in the first-class, or “saloon,” cabins and doing the ship’s mending. On at least six of those voyages, she kept a detailed record of her travels. Now, more than 125 years later, the Ella Sheldon Diaries have been shared via JSTOR by the University of the Pacific.

more here.

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

Udi Greenberg in Aeon:

To grasp just how revolutionary this inter-Christian peace was, it’s worth remembering what came before it. Because the mutual hatred between the confessions shaped not only the early modern era, when gruesome acts of violence like St Bartholomew’s Day (1572) and the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) tore Europe apart. Anti-Catholicism and anti-Protestantism remained powerful forces well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and shaped social and political life. The most extreme case was Germany, where the Protestant majority in 1871 unleashed an aggressive campaign of persecution against the Catholic minority. For seven years, state authorities expelled Catholic orders, took over Catholic educational institutions, and censored Catholic publications.

In the Netherlands, Protestant crowds violently attacked Catholic processions; in Austria, a popular movement called ‘Away from Rome’ began a (failed) campaign in 1897 to eradicate Catholicism through mass conversion. Catholics, for their part, were just as hostile to Protestants. In France, Catholic magazines and sermons blamed Protestants for treason, some even called for stripping them of citizenship. Business associations, labour unions and even marching bands were often divided across confessional lines.

Even on an everyday level, it still was common into the 20th century for neighbourhoods, parties and magazines to be strictly Catholic or Protestant.

More here.

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

Michael Wood at the LRB:

The events​ of Danny Boyle’s new film, 28 Years Later, are not too far away. It’s set in the near future, but the prologue takes us back to 2002, which is when Boyle’s earlier film 28 Days Later was released. (There is also 28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but this seems to borrow a piece of the storyline without becoming part of the sequence.) In the first film a virus strikes Britain, killing millions and turning survivors into zombies, smeared with blood and often naked. The prologue to 28 Years Later shows a group of massive zombies killing a priest, who is mysteriously smiling and passes a young boy a cross to remember him by. The priest is sure that this is the end of the world and is ready to welcome it as such.

It’s not the end of the world, but the world has changed. The virus has spread beyond Britain, and continental European nations have found a way of keeping it at bay. But the British haven’t, and the mainland of England, Scotland and Wales has become a vast space of quarantine. The virus is called Rage, allowing for a crisp double meaning: the virus is rage and rage is a virus. To be alive and infected is to be angry.

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.

Donald Ingber in The Scientist:

In April of this year, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a new roadmap that aims to replace animal testing in the development of new drugs with more human-relevant methods. The goal is to improve drug safety, accelerate the evaluation process, shorten drug development timelines, reduce costs, and spare animal lives. The FDA aims to make animal testing the exception rather than the norm within three to five years. Is this possible?

The FDA has required animal testing of new drugs since the 1930s after more than 125 American adults and children died after ingesting an antibiotic elixir that mistakenly contained the poison found in antifreeze—diethylene glycol—which was then thought to be just a sweetening agent. Animal testing remains the mainstay of drug evaluations by the FDA, and it undoubtedly has helped prevent other potentially dangerous chemicals from reaching patients. However, on the flip side, the results of drug tests in animals fail to predict future responses in humans more than 90 percent of the time.¹ It is also likely that many drugs that could have been safe and effective in humans never received approval because they were found to be toxic in early animal studies. Aspirin is a great example; we are all lucky because it was first marketed before 1900.

More here.

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

Bonagameise

I was never sure what it meant,
but it was a loose translation
of my German-American grandmother’s
answer to feeding her family of 11 children.

A soup of green beans and spuds
from her garden, it was flavored by her laughter
and a nearly naked ham bone
rescued from the corner grocer.

The salty stew brewed all day
in a huge pot of water from the pump.
Spiced by her laughter,
it provided a satisfying supper
they ate “in shifts.”

Like a brood of chickens at a trough,
the youngest fed first, sliding
off a bench behind the table
when their bellies were full, making
space for the next in line.
The table wasn’t big enough
to seat them all at once.

by Gail Eisenhart
from Rattle #88, Summer 202

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

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

Tim Whitmarsh at Literary Review:

James Romm’s Plato and the Tyrant describes the next phase, when the city slid into tyranny under first a father and then his son, both named Dionysius. This is a work of history, but it is as compelling as any novel. Syracuse in the late-classical period found itself locked in a love-hate relationship with Athens. The frenemy cities could not get enough of each other. Plato and the Tyrant reconstructs a crucial chapter in that psychodrama. 

Both Dionysius I and II seem to have hosted Plato, the famous Athenian philosopher, in Syracuse. I write ‘seem to’, because the only contemporary ‘evidence’ for Plato’s visit comes in a series of letters attributed to him. Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure of Plato (who barely speaks of himself in his works) a richer, more glamorous biography. Romm is a self-avowed maximalist: he not only accepts as Platonic the parts of the letters relevant to the Syracusan stay but is also open-minded about many of the details archived in the much later biographical accounts of Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius.

more here.

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

Samir Chadha at the European Review of Books:

In Vigdis Hjorth’s novels, to be functional is to be underwhelming. In Long Live the Post Horn!, for instance, (published in 2012 in Norwegian, translated into English in 2020), the protagonist receives from her boyfriend (himself underwhelming), the « shared present » of a well-reviewed vibrator. The wrapping is enticing, maybe, « in glossy black paper with a purple ribbon », but the maiden voyage is not so successful:

It took longer than usual for him to come, then he rolled over and took the gadget out of me, it continued to hum and vibrate, he tried to turn it off but couldn’t, he held it up under the lamp on the bedside table again, the humming was louder now, he still wasn’t able to turn it off, finally he got up and put it in the hall, but we could still hear it, he got up again and put it even further away, maybe in the kitchen drawer.

The vibrator is a gadget, and in the worst sense: gimmicky, in poor taste, both garish (it is purple) and coldly functional. That’s what makes it egregious: it is too reliable, performing recognisably even when there’s nothing to perform on. It’s not the relationship’s only underwhelming gadget; she’s not long ago received an engagement ring.

More here.

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

Jeremy L Foust at Psyche:

Finally, the vacation you’ve been waiting for is happening tomorrow. You and your friends are going on a two-week cruise, free of responsibilities and full of fun. You’re starting to pack when you feel a little bit lightheaded. You don’t think much of it because you’ve been stressed lately trying to get ready for the trip. Later, you start coughing. Probably just allergies, you think to yourself as you go about your day. When you wake up in the morning – the day of the trip – you have a sore throat and chills. You briefly think to yourself: This feels like it could be COVID. Maybe I should take a self-test. You start walking to your medicine cabinet, but then you pause. If you test positive, you’ll feel obliged to isolate from others and miss the trip. You’ve spent so much time thinking about the trip and paid a lot for the tickets. Your friends will be disappointed. I’m sure I’m fine. You decide it’s better not to know.

Whether you’ve actually been in this sort of situation or not, many of us have likely chosen not to know in other ways: for example, delaying a trip to the doctor to get checked out, declining to look at your credit score, or shutting down certain topics of conversation because you prefer to not find out what others really think. This process of choosing not to learn a piece of freely available information is called information avoidance.

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.

Antón Barba-Kay in The Hedgehog Review:

A senior researcher at Microsoft tells me that the sale of TikTok is more momentous to the fate of American democracy than the mobbing of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He argues that the latter was a circumscribed event, while the enforced sale of TikTok will put the eyeballs of 170 million American users under the control of one of the two or three bidders already wealthy enough to buy it—such as Elon Musk. I find this view awfully grim, not because Musk has too many conflicts of interest to be a benign presence in government but because I find it dismaying that “American democracy” should occur in the same sentence with “TikTok,” let alone be identified with it. If the fate of American democracy rests on the ownership of TikTok, then maybe the towel has already been thrown in.

It is more complicated than that, of course. But since one of the unshakable convictions of the digital age is that digital services are or could or might be democratic, it is high time we think through the truth of this truism. What hath TikTok—or our current digital environment as a whole—to do with democracy? Nothing good. Or so I will argue.

More here.

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

Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Many readers of this particular Substack may already realize that its very name—“Wondercabinet”—wends back, in terms of my own lifework, to my days covering the then-barely-nascent Museum of Jurassic Technology, for what became my 1995 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. I say “barely nascent,” but in fact the MJT was born “age-old,” and as many noted, in at least one of its aspects, seems a veritable reincarnation of one of those sixteenth century Wunderkammers it itself so clearly reveres, this is an otherwise conventional swath of the Culver City neighborhood of West Los Angeles—with its founder, David Wilson, being a sort of Athanasius Kircher Redux, or Ole Worm, or Elias Ashmole.

When the book first came out, many reviewers could barely credit the place’s actual existence, thinking I was making the whole thing up; some reviewers were only assuaged when they looked the place up on “Information” and found an actual listing—as if that would have proved anything (did they actually imagine that were I making the whole thing up, I wouldn’t have had the wit to place a phony listing before publishing my hoax?) One guy—I particularly savored this response—visited the Museum a few months after the publication of my book, spent several hours meandering about its labyrinthine back-halls, and then returned to the front desk and earnestly inquired of the gnomic little fellow sitting there at the desk whether he was either David Wilson or Lawrence Weschler, and when informed that he was the former, leaned over and queried, confidentially, “Come on, tell me the truth, does that guy Lawrence Weschler really exist?”

more here.

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

Nicholas Barber in BBC:

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