[{"id":311591,"date":"2026-09-17T12:45:11","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T16:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311591"},"modified":"2026-09-17T12:57:05","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T16:57:05","slug":"ai-researchers-debate-how-close-we-are-to-recursive-self-improvement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/ai-researchers-debate-how-close-we-are-to-recursive-self-improvement.html","title":{"rendered":"AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/PrSf7IOYu-I?si=-rFrSpC-sKcS0Uhx\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeff Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311591"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311593,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311591\/revisions\/311593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311584,"date":"2026-09-17T11:45:24","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:45:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311584"},"modified":"2026-09-17T11:10:43","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:10:43","slug":"remembering-richard-wright-outsider","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/remembering-richard-wright-outsider.html","title":{"rendered":"Remembering Richard Wright, Outsider"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Clifford Thompson at <em>The Common Reader<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-311585\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RichardWrightFormatted-360x203.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"203\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RichardWrightFormatted-360x203.jpg 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RichardWrightFormatted-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RichardWrightFormatted-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RichardWrightFormatted-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/RichardWrightFormatted.jpg 1280w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>Richard Wright (1908\u201360) left behind seventeen book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, two of which, the novel\u00a0<em>Native Son<\/em>\u00a0(1940) and the memoir\u00a0<em>Black Boy<\/em>\u00a0(1945), stand as essential works of American literature, and all of which have a great deal to tell us about American society and the world as they function today.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><em>Black Boy<\/em>\u00a0is the story of Wright\u2019s growing up poor and constantly hungry in the South\u2014Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas\u2014in a family whose religious strictures paralleled the absurd, inescapable racial strictures of that time and region, leaving the young man doubly isolated from mainstream society. Isolated and yet, even as he was often dazed from lack of food, oddly free: his outsider status allowed him to see the world around him more objectively than most, and combined with his intelligence, rebelliousness, and inner strength, it made him fiercely independent. Sent by his grandmother to spend time alone in prayer, he wrote his very first short story instead; advised by his peers to be obsequious in every encounter with Whites so as to avoid arousing their anger, he was unable, he wrote, to \u201cmake subservience an automatic part of my behavior\u201d; selected as his class valedictorian in ninth grade\u2014his last year of formal schooling\u2014he insisted on giving the speech he had written rather than the one that had been written for him. Finally, determined to escape his suffocating environment, as a young adult Wright made his way eventually to Chicago, where\u2014despite initially failing to make the weight requirement due to malnutrition\u2014he found work in the post office and spent his free time writing.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/commonreader.wustl.edu\/remembering-richard-wright-outsider\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Clifford Thompson at The Common Reader: Richard Wright (1908\u201360) left behind seventeen book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, two of which, the novel\u00a0Native Son\u00a0(1940) and the memoir\u00a0Black Boy\u00a0(1945), stand as essential works of American literature, and all of which have a great deal to tell us about American society and the world as they function&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311584"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311584\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311586,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311584\/revisions\/311586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311576,"date":"2026-09-17T11:44:40","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T15:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311576"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:46:42","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:46:42","slug":"the-life-and-work-of-celeste-dupuy-spencer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-life-and-work-of-celeste-dupuy-spencer.html","title":{"rendered":"The Life And Work Of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Moira Donegan at <em>Bookforum<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-311577 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/burning-275x360.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"275\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/burning-275x360.jpg 275w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/burning-230x300.jpg 230w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/burning.jpg 765w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 275px) 100vw, 275px\" \/>CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER KEPT ODD HOURS<\/strong>. Before she died in April, Dupuy-Spencer, a prominent painter\u2014commercially successful, critically acclaimed, and about as famous as a contemporary artist gets\u2014was habitually nocturnal. \u201cEven at the best of times,\u201d her father, the novelist Scott Spencer, told me, \u201cshe would go into the studio at three or four in the afternoon, and keep painting until six or seven in the morning.\u201d Nina MacLaughlin, a writer who authored a series of essays accompanying the artist\u2019s work in the new book <em>Burning in the Eyes of the Maker: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer<\/em>, wrote of the endeavor this way: \u201cCeleste Dupuy-Spencer stays awake for days when deep into work on a painting. . . . Forty hours. Sixty hours. Decentered. Hallucinatory.\u201d It was a feat of concentration and physical endurance that evoked religious mystics or marathon runners. A 2021 profile said that Dupuy-Spencer had placed shag rugs around her Los Angeles studio, so that she would fall onto something soft when she finally collapsed.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\">In the years before Dupuy-Spencer died, those long nights were often difficult. She received threats for months. Since 2023, as the genocide unfolded in Gaza, Dupuy-Spencer had begun to speak publicly and fervently in favor of Palestinian freedom. Her work changed, too. She started making pieces that depicted world leaders as moral grotesques, dwelling on their responsibility for the genocide.<\/p>\n<p>more <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bookforum.com\/print\/3301\/portrait-of-an-eye-62961\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Moira Donegan at Bookforum: CELESTE DUPUY-SPENCER KEPT ODD HOURS. Before she died in April, Dupuy-Spencer, a prominent painter\u2014commercially successful, critically acclaimed, and about as famous as a contemporary artist gets\u2014was habitually nocturnal. \u201cEven at the best of times,\u201d her father, the novelist Scott Spencer, told me, \u201cshe would go into the studio at three or&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311576","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311576"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311576\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311579,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311576\/revisions\/311579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311572,"date":"2026-09-17T10:43:45","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:43:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311572"},"modified":"2026-09-17T10:43:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T14:43:45","slug":"the-face-of-life-at-the-met","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-face-of-life-at-the-met.html","title":{"rendered":"The Face of Life At The Met"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Xiao Situ at <em>Commonweal<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-311573 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/images-26.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"225\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/images-26.jpg 225w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/images-26-150x150.jpg 150w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px\" \/>Portraiture is one of the first genres of art that young children produce. As soon as age three, toddlers begin to grasp the concept that the scribbles they make on paper can symbolize real-world objects and experiences. The most recognizable form they begin to draw is the human figure, consisting at first of just a circle for the head and two vertical lines for legs. As preschoolers\u2019 fine motor skills improve and their cognitive and emotional capacities mature, they add more expressive, descriptive attributes: arms, hair, facial features, clothing, and accessories. Through their choice of colors and their inclusion of variable details, young children are not only expressing themselves and experimenting with their sense of identity; they are actively processing their emotions and making sense of social interactions.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\">The portraits in <em>The Face of Life<\/em>, an ongoing exhibition that opened this spring at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, push viewers to grapple with the complexity of human experience. The show\u2019s title comes from American artist Alice Neel\u2019s insistence on the importance of depicting people \u201cin the face of life that comes crashing about you.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>more <a href=\"https:\/\/www.commonwealmagazine.org\/situ-art-review-xiao-portraiture-met\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Xiao Situ at Commonweal: Portraiture is one of the first genres of art that young children produce. As soon as age three, toddlers begin to grasp the concept that the scribbles they make on paper can symbolize real-world objects and experiences. The most recognizable form they begin to draw is the human figure, consisting at&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311575,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311572\/revisions\/311575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311567,"date":"2026-09-17T09:45:19","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311567"},"modified":"2026-09-17T09:46:48","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:46:48","slug":"a-vision-of-a-future-where-machines-fight-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/a-vision-of-a-future-where-machines-fight-wars.html","title":{"rendered":"A Vision of a Future Where Machines Fight Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Sarah Scole in\u00a0<em>Undark Magazine:<\/em><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-311568 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop-360x203.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"203\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop-360x203.jpg 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop-768x432.jpg 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop-1536x864.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop-300x169.jpg 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/GettyImages-2264957955_crop.jpg 1920w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span class=\"dropcap\">T<\/span><span class=\"bolded\">welve years<\/span> ago, Frank Kendall, then under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics at the Department of Defense, pulled up a PowerPoint slide to show a group of senior military officials who deliberate over budgets. It showed the choices he thought the military had to make in space, since China and Russia were working on weapons to take down American satellites that provide everything from intelligence to communications to navigation.<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\">The country, Kendall said, could either keep building the relatively few hyper-expensive satellites of yore, easily attacked and hard to defend; dream up a more resilient satellite infrastructure; or lean back from dependence on satellites. \u201cBusiness as usual was not a viable choice,\u201d Kendall writes in \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.simonandschuster.com\/books\/Lethal-Autonomy\/Frank-Kendall\/9798895656679\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lethal Autonomy: The Future of Warfare Whether We Like It or Not<\/a>,\u201d an account of a <a href=\"https:\/\/undark.org\/2024\/11\/26\/unleashed-autonomous-weapons\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">military future<\/a> where vehicles and weapons operate largely on their own \u2014 including making some decisions to strike people or infrastructure. Spacecraft, living in orbit as they do, already work more independently than other systems.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/undark.org\/2026\/09\/11\/book-review-lethal-autonomy\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sarah Scole in\u00a0Undark Magazine: Twelve years ago, Frank Kendall, then under secretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics at the Department of Defense, pulled up a PowerPoint slide to show a group of senior military officials who deliberate over budgets. It showed the choices he thought the military had to make in space, since&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311567"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311567\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311571,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311567\/revisions\/311571"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311563,"date":"2026-09-17T09:41:53","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:41:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311563"},"modified":"2026-09-17T09:41:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T13:41:53","slug":"googles-genome-atlas-predicts-the-effect-of-every-possible-dna-mutation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/googles-genome-atlas-predicts-the-effect-of-every-possible-dna-mutation.html","title":{"rendered":"Google\u2019s Genome Atlas Predicts the Effect of Every Possible DNA Mutation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Shelly Fan in\u00a0<em>Singularity Hub:<\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1xcfe9l\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-311564 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yellow-and-orange-helix-strands-like-dna-360x288.webp\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"288\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yellow-and-orange-helix-strands-like-dna-360x288.webp 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yellow-and-orange-helix-strands-like-dna-1024x820.webp 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yellow-and-orange-helix-strands-like-dna-768x615.webp 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yellow-and-orange-helix-strands-like-dna-300x240.webp 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/yellow-and-orange-helix-strands-like-dna.webp 1408w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>Atlases have long guided us through uncharted territory. Now, an AI-generated atlas by Google DeepMind seeks to do the same for the vast landscape of our DNA.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1xcfe9l\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\">Ever since the Human Genome Project, scientists have painstakingly traced the myriad DNA mutations that contribute to health and disease. But that quest has largely been stymied by the genome\u2019s vast scale. Only two percent encodes the proteins that make our bodies work; the rest may control how genes are turned on or off or be junk left over from evolution.\u00a0With roughly nine billion possible DNA letter swaps, testing each one in the lab is impossible. Making sense of their interactions is an even tougher challenge. Yet these changes often contribute to differences in risk for cancer, dementia, and other medical scourges.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-1xcfe9l\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\">DeepMind\u2019s new atlas could lend researchers a hand.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/singularityhub.com\/2026\/09\/14\/googles-genome-atlas-predicts-the-effect-of-every-possible-dna-mutation\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Shelly Fan in\u00a0Singularity Hub: Atlases have long guided us through uncharted territory. Now, an AI-generated atlas by Google DeepMind seeks to do the same for the vast landscape of our DNA. Ever since the Human Genome Project, scientists have painstakingly traced the myriad DNA mutations that contribute to health and disease. But that quest has&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311563"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311566,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311563\/revisions\/311566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311555,"date":"2026-09-17T08:34:30","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T12:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311555"},"modified":"2026-09-17T08:36:46","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T12:36:46","slug":"thursday-poem-530","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/thursday-poem-530.html","title":{"rendered":"Thursday Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><em>\u00a0\u00a0 The first known account of surfing was written during the 1640s<\/em><\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><em><br \/>\nin what is now Ghana. Surfing was independently developed from<\/em><\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><em><br \/>\nSenegal to Angola. Africa possesses thousands of miles of warm,<\/em><\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><em><br \/>\nsurf-filled waters and populations of strong swimmers and sea-going<\/em><\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><em><br \/>\nfishermen and merchants who knew surf patterns and crewed surf-<\/em><\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><em>canoes<br \/>\ncapable of catching and riding waves upwards of 10 feet high.<br \/>\n<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0\u2014Kevin Dawson<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Kahalu\u2019u Bay, Hawaii<\/h2>\n<p><span class=\"excerpt_line\">1. Our ways with water are ancient &amp; invincible:<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">In the 17th century, kids on the Gold Coast<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">ride longboards that are twelve feet long, scaling the crests<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\"><br \/>\nof waves, aimed at oceanic zones unreachable<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">otherwise, outside such strange &amp; elegant mastery,<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">this lilt &amp; lean &amp; lightest touch. \u201cCounting the seas,<br \/>\n\u201d<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">they would call it, this blue vision, this sense of when to<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">paddle in, forge ahead or exit, to commune with gods<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">who cultivated kingdoms there, in the dark frenzied motion<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">just offshore, where our eyes meet the edge of the eternal.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"excerpt_line\">2.<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">The perpetual fear is contamination: swimming pools, drinking<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">fountains, the touch of a hand that is mostly water. The brain too:<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">Lightning and rain. Surf-canoes were made from cottonwood trees<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">said to be sacred, to hold the souls of children who had not yet<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">arrived. Ancestors walked through the world below. The board<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">was a bridge. Language is only one way we walk across.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span class=\"excerpt_line\">3.<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">The city in the sky Daniella paints<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">has a dance studio, plant nursery, bodega,<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">used bookseller, two children floating<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">as they play Go Fish, a mom-and-pop outfit<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">called Surf Shack, where you buy boards<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">that sail through the air like seraphim.<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">The streets are named for birds<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">of prey. The water levitates like everything<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">else, and there is no word in the common<br \/>\n<\/span><span class=\"excerpt_line\">tongue for falling.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>by Joshua Bennett<\/em><br \/>\n<em>from <\/em>We the People of the United States<br \/>\nSeptember 17, 2026<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0\u00a0 The first known account of surfing was written during the 1640s in what is now Ghana. Surfing was independently developed from Senegal to Angola. Africa possesses thousands of miles of warm, surf-filled waters and populations of strong swimmers and sea-going fishermen and merchants who knew surf patterns and crewed surf-canoes capable of catching and&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/36"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311555"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311562,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311555\/revisions\/311562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311285,"date":"2026-09-17T06:00:29","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T10:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311285"},"modified":"2026-09-14T03:43:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T07:43:03","slug":"horseshoe-and-shit-left-and-right-up-and-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/horseshoe-and-shit-left-and-right-up-and-down.html","title":{"rendered":"Horseshoe And -Shit: Left And Right, Up And Down"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Jochen Szangolies<\/strong><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_311286\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-311286\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-311286 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LandtagswahlSachsenAnhalt2-360x251.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"251\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LandtagswahlSachsenAnhalt2-360x251.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LandtagswahlSachsenAnhalt2-768x536.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LandtagswahlSachsenAnhalt2-300x210.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/LandtagswahlSachsenAnhalt2.png 806w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-311286\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Distribution of mandates in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament. Image Credit: Landesamt f\u00fcr Statistik Sachsen-Anhalt<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p align=\"left\">Last Sunday, on the sixth of September, for the first time in more than 80 years, a far-right extremist party won the majority of votes in a German state election, and has a realistic chance at leading the state government of Saxony-Anhalt. (They had previously won the majority in the 2024 Thuringian state election, but had no chance of forming a government because none of the other parties would join them in a coalition.) While narrowly missing the absolute majority, at 43.8% they very nearly equaled the combined result of the CDU, SPD, Gr\u00fcne, and Linke (of 44% according to the preliminary count). In particular, the conservative CDU, party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has lost more than half their share of the vote compared to the last election. These losses are attributed by many to vastly unpopular reform plans and a general perception of failing to meaningfully engage with the needs and concerns of the majority of the electorate (mostly those having to work for money, instead of having money work for them). Merz holds the historically lowest approval rating for any German Chancellor: around <a href=\"https:\/\/ilium.de\/zustimmung\/kanzler\/friedrich_merz\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">80% of Germans<\/a> are dissatisfied with his performance.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">There are, as always in such a situation, conciliatory voices: perhaps the work of government might demystify (\u2018entzaubern\u2019) and expose a party that has little to offer except inflammatory rhetoric and beer hall populism. Perhaps the promises made on the campaign trail will evaporate in the harsh light of political reality. Perhaps disillusioned voters will turn away again from a party that fails to deliver. Perhaps, that is, no <i>Bad Thing<\/i> will happen. I deeply hope this optimism will prove true. But I do believe it is misguided: in Germany, a democracy explicitly engineered to prevent a repeat of fascist terror, a \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.deutschland.de\/en\/news\/afd-wins-state-election-in-saxony-anhalt#:~:text=The%20AfD%2C%20which%20is%20classified%20as%20confirmed%20right%2Dwing%20extremist%20by%20the%20Saxony%2DAnhalt%20State%20Office%20for%20the%20Protection%20of%20the%20Constitution\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">confirmed right-wing extremist<\/a>\u2019 (\u2018gesichert rechtsextrem\u2019) party will most likely lead a state government. That <i>is<\/i> the Bad Thing, happened.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Germany, here, is not an isolated case. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Democratic_backsliding\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Democracy has been on retreat<\/a> in large parts of the world. Autocrats, and particularly right-wing populist movements <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/politics\/2026\/jun\/24\/nearly-quarter-votes-europe-now-cast-far-right-parties\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">in Europe<\/a> and beyond, are on the rise. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, narratives of \u2018the end of history\u2019 and the victory of liberal democracy seemed to herald an era of global democratization. But history seems to stubbornly continue. So how did we get here from there?<\/p>\n<p>Erik Hoel, neuroscientist and occasional cultural commentator at his substack <i>The Intrinsic Perspective<\/i>, pinpoints <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theintrinsicperspective.com\/p\/what-the-heck-happened-in-2012\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the year 2012<\/a> as the turning point for many long-running trends, especially in regard to a shocking decline of mental health, particularly pronounced among teenagers and young adults.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_311287\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-311287\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-311287\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Number_of_countries_experiencing_autocratization_and_democratization_1900\u20132019-360x240.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"240\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Number_of_countries_experiencing_autocratization_and_democratization_1900\u20132019-360x240.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Number_of_countries_experiencing_autocratization_and_democratization_1900\u20132019-768x512.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Number_of_countries_experiencing_autocratization_and_democratization_1900\u20132019-300x200.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Number_of_countries_experiencing_autocratization_and_democratization_1900\u20132019.png 900w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-311287\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Countries in democratizing vs. autocratizing episodes. Image credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Number_of_countries_experiencing_autocratization_and_democratization,_1900\u20132019.svg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Vanessa A. Boese, Staffan I. Lindberg, Anna L\u00fchrmann<\/a>, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p align=\"left\">And indeed, looking at long-running trends of autocratization vs. democratization, we again find the approximate turning point in the year 2012. Is this an accident, or is there something more behind it? I think that the possibility of a link here is at least worth investigating.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Now, if there is a correlation between <i>A<\/i> and <i>B<\/i>, and you suspect this to be more than chance, you can either look at possible ways that one causes the other, or you can look for a common cause of both. While it is not completely implausible that democratic backsliding has effects on mental health (mine certainly took a hit last Sunday), nor that a widespread mental health crisis fuels at least some form of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the causal story seems weak in either case. Autocratization may lead to mental health decline, but what explains the rising autocratization? Declining mental health might make one vote against the current order, but why is mental health declining in the first place?<!--more--><\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">Hoel points to 2012 as the year that (in the US, at least) more than 50% of people owned a smartphone for the first time. But he (perhaps more wisely than I) largely neglects to provide a causal narrative, although he does single out the rise of online debate around \u2018woke\u2019 topics and the resulting backlash. Nevertheless, it is not immediately clear why widespread smartphone ownership should have such psychologically devastating consequences, nor foster antidemocratic sentiment. Smartphones provide many blessings: the near-instantaneous access to essentially all the world\u2019s knowledge would have been beyond the wildest dreams of any scholar of the past. Yet, the correlation is hard to ignore.<\/p>\n<p align=\"left\">So, is our current malaise the little screen we all carry around in our pockets? I don\u2019t think this gets it quite right. The smartphone is the vector, but not the infection itself. Rather, I think it is a loss in the means of identity-formation due to social-media driven fractionalization of society that is at least a contributing cause in both trends. Let me explain.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\">Antisocial Media<\/h2>\n<p>Social media sells itself on the promise of connecting everyone to everybody else. In theory, we carry all of our connections with us, all the time. Nobody is ever more than a few clicks away. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.weforum.org\/stories\/2022\/11\/friendships-less-is-now-more\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Yet while in 1990<\/a>, 33% of Americans reported having 10 or more close friends, in 2021, that number had sunk to nearly a third. Conversely, the share of people having no close friends at all quadrupled, from 3% to 12%. Evidently, social media isn\u2019t increasing social relationships.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_311288\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-311288\" style=\"width: 288px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-311288 size-medium\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-288x360.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"288\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-288x360.jpg 288w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-819x1024.jpg 819w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-768x960.jpg 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-1229x1536.jpg 1229w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-1638x2048.jpg 1638w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-240x300.jpg 240w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/ali-choubin-K0vCSA2JkXc-unsplash-scaled.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 288px) 100vw, 288px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-311288\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">You may be eating alone, but that doesn&#8217;t mean you can&#8217;t tell the whole world about it. Image credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/de\/@alichoubin?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ali Choubin<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/de\/fotos\/eine-person-die-ein-foto-von-essen-auf-einem-tisch-macht-K0vCSA2JkXc?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Unsplash <\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Everybody knows the scene: couples or families, maybe at lunch, ostensibly together, yet all lost in their own screens. Everybody\u2019s probably been part of such a scene. I certainly won\u2019t throw the first stone. But that just speaks to a change in social relationships, not necessarily a decline\u2014true, every change seems corrosive from within the axioms of the old order, but nothing new would be born without it.<\/p>\n<p>Yet even on social media, we\u2019re engaging less with one another. In fact, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americansurveycenter.org\/newsletter\/how-social-media-made-us-less-social\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">less than half<\/a> of users report connecting with close friends online regularly. Looking at my own timeline on facebook (yes, I\u2019m old now), most posts aren\u2019t from my own friends, nor from groups or people I follow, but whatever The Algorithm judges to be relevant to my interests. Authority over who I connect with, what is presented to me, has largely been ceded to an impersonal force, rather than being the result of my own choices and relationships.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed, once one starts looking for it, many aspects of online media seem almost deliberately designed to isolate, rather than connect. (I\u2019m not pretending that this is a shockingly original insight, but it is necessary to provide some ground work here.) Echo chambers lock us into spirals of self-amplifying opinions, with people of different views often effectively experiencing a different world online. Online shopping removes the need to go out and interact with another person to cover your daily needs (and wants). Online dating makes romance a matter of matching profiles rather than the gradual budding of connection through shared experiences. (Tinder, incidentally, was released in 2012.) Relationship rates are declining, particularly among <a href=\"https:\/\/www.americansurveycenter.org\/commentary\/gen-zs-romance-gap-why-nearly-half-of-young-men-arent-dating\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">young adults<\/a>. Most related discourse online seems centered on \u2018red flags\u2019 to avoid, outsourcing real engagement to shallow metrics and \u2018no-gos\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>This isn\u2019t (just) middle-aged griping about the decline of <i>proper<\/i> cultural values. My contention is that this increasing isolation robs us of one of our central means of fostering a sense of individual identity, and thus, makes us vulnerable to the shallow identity constructs\u2014race, nation, sex, and other surface-feature based groupings\u2014peddled by the right, while leaving us starved for self-recognition and meaning.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\">Identity Groups<\/h2>\n<p>I have <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2024\/04\/finding-your-self-desire-paths-in-identity-space.html\">previously remarked on<\/a> how identity formation is a problem that has come much more to the foreground in modern times. Identity used to be largely a solved problem\u2014although very badly so. Essentially, you were defined by the circumstances of your birth, and were unlikely to ever veer far beyond them. The son of a lord would be a lord himself, the daughter of the cobbler married early and tasked with tending to home and children. This was, let me emphasize once again, a terribly unjust way of structuring society, and responsible for many of the greatest moral tragedies in human history, from exploitative colonialism to the systematic marginalization and mistreatment of women.<\/p>\n<p>Modernity has started to make some inroads on the injustices fostered by this system. While we are obviously very far away from a truly \u2018equal and fair\u2019 society, there is greater social mobility\u2014although here, too, trends have <a href=\"https:\/\/www.suttontrust.com\/news-opinion\/all-news-opinion\/new-report-reveals-social-mobility-is-flatlining-across-wealthier-countries\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stalled or reversed<\/a> in more recent times. But this essential progress also opens up the question of identity anew: what used to be given from birth, now has to be found or created. Again, that\u2019s a good thing on the whole. But the problem is that the fractionalization of society due to online media is depriving us of our best tools to make our own identities.<\/p>\n<p>On the most elementary level, identity is a means of comparison: I\u2019m like that, but not like this. Thus, the groups we associate with\u2014and those we distance ourselves from\u2014play a large role in who we consider ourselves to be. I\u2019m a nerd; I\u2019m not a football fan. But if social media disrupts the complex web of interactions that helps us situate ourselves in the world, and replaces it with shallow, impersonal echo chambers where the only thing we ever really see is our own warped reflection, what else could be the outcome other than that we turn to the most shallow means of identification\u2014skin color, sex, nationality, creed?<\/p>\n<p>The right has an easy narrative about who you are: you\u2019re one of us if you tick the right boxes. Those that don\u2019t look like you are the others. You\u2019re not like them; in fact, they\u2019re a threat to who you are. Over and done with. In comparison, the left has a much harder task: drawing circles around identities that exclude others won\u2019t do, if we intend to foster an inclusive, equal and tolerant society. A lot of this has to do with the <i>negative <\/i>goals of many left-wing movements\u2014negative in the sense that if a certain goal is reached, the underlying unifying force dissipates. Hence, a left with any hope of stemming the tide of increasing autocratization will have to find\u2014or rekindle\u2014a new, positive means of identity formation against the isolating influence of online interaction.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\">Of Wolf And Sheep<\/h2>\n<p>It\u2019s a rule of thumb of mine that if I judge the merits of an organization, group or movement, I look at what their \u2018success condition\u2019 means for their own continuation. In general, if achieving its goals means that a movement disbands, there\u2019s a good chance that they\u2019re at least coming from good intentions. (Of course, many bad deeds are done with the best of intentions.) A movement of that kind can\u2019t be self-serving, since the \u2018self\u2019 they embody is what ceases to exist once they achieve what they set out to. So, for instance, a society for saving some endangered species simply becomes superfluous once that species is actually saved.<\/p>\n<p>On the contrary, a movement that seeks to install a particular type of people into a superior position\u2014say, blond and blue-eyed\u2014is inherently self-serving: they want to rule, and that\u2019s what defines them. If they succeed, they persist as the ruling class. Their ends lie within, not beyond them. That also means that belonging to this group, you\u2019re not in danger of facing your identity collapsing once their aim is achieved. Thus, such a group confers a strong sense of identity, which is attractive in a time where identity-formation is difficult. There\u2019s a ready-made, off-the-shelf answer to the otherwise difficult question of who you are and what your place in the world is.<\/p>\n<p>This is, I think, a key difference between left- and right-leaning movements. It\u2019s in the end why the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Horseshoe_theory\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ends of the horseshoe<\/a> don\u2019t meet: while both left- and right-wing discourse can be discriminating, right-wing movements discriminate based on intrinsic characteristics, while left-wing movements discriminate on the basis of discrimination. One often hears cries of hypocrisy when left-leaning persons or organizations resort to exclusionary language or tactics (\u2018don\u2019t talk to Nazis\u2019, etc.), but the difference is in the origins of this exclusion\u2014while you can\u2019t change the way you were born, your gender, sex, orientation, or skin color, nobody needs to be a fascist. The intolerance of the left is generally intolerance of intolerance. Unfortunately, that is also why many left-leaning movements fail to foster a strong and lasting sense of identity: there is no Antifa if there\u2019s no fa, for instance. Whereas if the fascists win, they\u2019ll continue to be fascists.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_311289\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-311289\" style=\"width: 360px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-311289\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-360x270.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"270\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-360x270.jpg 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-1024x768.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-768x576.jpg 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-1536x1152.jpg 1536w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-2048x1536.jpg 2048w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/iuliu-illes-puhv2IW99M4-unsplash-300x225.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-311289\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Wolves and sheep can live together, but it might require a few thousand years of domestication. Image credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/de\/@illes_cristi?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">iuliu illes<\/a> on <a href=\"https:\/\/unsplash.com\/de\/fotos\/eine-herde-schafe-die-nebeneinander-stehen-puhv2IW99M4?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Unsplash<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>I have heard this cast illuminatingly like this: if you\u2019re equally open to wolf and sheep, that is, to the predator and the prey, you won\u2019t end up with a nicely equal society of wolves mixed with sheep; you\u2019ll end up with fat, happy wolves. Neutrality isn\u2019t neutral in a situation slanted in one party\u2019s favor. It\u2019s a question of power differentials: discrimination, or exclusion, becomes oppression once it operates along a power gradient. It is not oppressive to, say, tax the rich, even though it is certainly discriminatory. You should absolutely side with the sheep over the wolves, even if you want a society for both. Accusations of \u2018reverse racism\u2019 or \u2018reverse sexism\u2019 and the like are just the same false equivalence. The horseshoe theory is horseshit. (Of course, this doesn\u2019t mean that one can\u2019t condemn acts of left-wing terrorism, or that there can\u2019t be oppressive left-wing governments. As already noted, good intentions don\u2019t necessarily make for good deeds, and strains of the authoritarian left question the certainly simplistic narrative set out above. Nothing\u2019s ever easy.)<\/p>\n<p>Thus, the factors that make the left (by and large) what it is are those that disadvantage it in our social media-isolated society. It isn\u2019t so much the content or the messages that we receive via the screens perpetually in our pockets, it\u2019s the style of connection that they foster that contributes to the rise of simplistic identitarian narratives. And those are the domain of the right. What does this mean for those of us who would prefer an egalitarian, tolerant society?<\/p>\n<p>Another way to find likely causes of an event is to look to those who stand to benefit: they have, at the very least, a vested interest in making it happen. That doesn\u2019t entail conspiracy: as the great <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/VAFd4FdbJxs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">George Carlin once observed<\/a>, you don&#8217;t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. And it should come as no great shock when it is pointed out that those who have benefited the most in the past decade are the rich and ultra-rich. The ultra-rich, of course, are also the ones that both run the infrastructure of online life, and increasingly the driving force behind the political shift to the right.<\/p>\n<p>Does that mean that I think social media was engineered in order to drive a wedge between interpersonal relationships? No: such developments are <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2025\/07\/the-empty-throne-emergent-conspiracies-and-causal-cherries.html\">almost always evolutionary<\/a> rather than deliberate. Power first and foremost wants more power, and nothing but opportunistic embrace of developing trends is needed as explanation. But this gives us the direction in which the finger of blame should actually point: not left, not right, but up. Society is not a line spanning from left to right extremes, it\u2019s a pyramid, and while the squabbles between all those of us at the bottom see us increasingly isolated, those same squabbles line the pockets of those in the thin top wedge.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s sometimes said that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is to convince us he doesn\u2019t exist. But the greatest trick of the rich and powerful is to convince one corner of the pyramid that it\u2019s the other corner that\u2019s responsible for all their woes, and not the exploitation of those who work to create value by those who extract it. But there\u2019s a way to resist both the rise of a right driven by fractured identity-narratives and find a positive, identity-forming narrative for the left: a return to the notion of class as a valid identity. Rather than infighting at the bottom, a united working class can resist the direction in which power is actually exerted\u2014from the top. The notion of class cuts across the divisions in society on which right-wing narratives find purchase, and unites those on the receiving end of the steepest power gradient in society. And even if the ultimate end may again be the dissolution of class in a class-less society, it is so only by pushing the boundary outwards until there is nothing left on the other side\u2014until the line between the \u2018haves\u2019 and \u2018have-nots\u2019 vanishes by everybody becoming \u2018have-enoughs\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>That may, of course, be an idealized hope for the foreseeable, or indeed any future, but still, there is a twin chance for the left here: find a new identity-narrative in the reinvigoration of class, and resist the ongoing digital fractionalization of society. We need to seize the means of identity production.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Jochen Szangolies Last Sunday, on the sixth of September, for the first time in more than 80 years, a far-right extremist party won the majority of votes in a German state election, and has a realistic chance at leading the state government of Saxony-Anhalt. (They had previously won the majority in the 2024 Thuringian&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[7269,2714,2082],"class_list":["post-311285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","tag-democratic-backsliding","tag-identity-politics","tag-social-media","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311285"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311285\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311418,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311285\/revisions\/311418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311339,"date":"2026-09-17T05:00:01","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T09:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311339"},"modified":"2026-09-14T03:36:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T07:36:56","slug":"ben-lerners-transcription","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/ben-lerners-transcription.html","title":{"rendered":"Ben Lerner&#8217;s &#8220;Transcription&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Derek Neal<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright wp-image-311340\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lerner-transcription.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"302\" height=\"464\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lerner-transcription.jpg 650w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lerner-transcription-234x360.jpg 234w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/lerner-transcription-195x300.jpg 195w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 302px) 100vw, 302px\" \/>I read Ben Lerner\u2019s new novel, <em>Transcription<\/em>, in one day. I started reading it on my iPad at around 7:30 am as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating a piece of cake that my partner had made. Later, I continued the novel during my lunch break as I ate leftover sausage and rice. Near the end of the workday, after I had finished all my meetings, I finished the novel, then I rode my bike home, looked at my phone for a bit, ate some chocolate covered coffee beans, drank a glass of orange juice, and started writing. I don\u2019t feel like I have much to say about Lerner\u2019s novel except that it\u2019s largely about screens and food, so it\u2019s fitting that I mostly read the novel on a screen while eating. Is this profound? No, not really. Lerner\u2019s novel, I feel, is not so profound either. It\u2019s an internet novel, and a pandemic novel, and there\u2019s a lot of doubling (as in his other novels), but it all feels rather lightweight. When I got to the end of the 144-page book\u2014which is mostly dialogue\u2014I thought, hey, this is Sebald-lite! There\u2019s a revealing anecdote that connects previous events in the novel to the Nazis, but whereas in Sebald\u2019s <em>Austerlitz<\/em> I felt actual shock and terror at the revelation of Austerlitz\u2019s past as a Jewish child escaping the Germans, here I simply acknowledged Lerner\u2019s cleverness. Part of the reason is that Lerner\u2019s intelligence can feel like a parlour trick, and it\u2019s perhaps not surprising that Lerner is a former debate champion, that activity that prizes the appearance of intellect and erudition over any real substance or conviction.<\/p>\n<p>When Lerner\u2019s narrator walks around Providence, Rhode Island without his phone and has \u201can unusual experience of presence,\u201d he tells us that \u201cthe landscape [was] made strange, the stones stonier,\u201d\u2014yes, I thought, we\u2019ve all read Shklovsky, but the point isn\u2019t to tell us about defamiliarization, it\u2019s to make us feel it! When Lerner writes, after drinking wine, that it was like \u201ca medicine or poison,\u201d then mentions \u201ca medicine <em>and<\/em> a poison,\u201d I thought, yeah, we all know about the pharmakon, too, but thanks for reminding us! Just now, rereading the opening pages to refamiliarize myself with the novel (it\u2019s been a while since I wrote that opening paragraph), I came across a mention of \u201cbare life,\u201d where Lerner\u2019s narrator describes two people sleeping on the sidewalk, along with a few other people smoking and arguing outside a medical clinic. Bare life, bare life\u2026where had I heard that one before? A quick Google search informed me I was right in thinking that it referred to a philosophical concept\u2014by God, that\u2019s Giorgio Agamben\u2019s music! The thing is, Lerner has a defense ready for my accusations, because the character of Thomas\u2014a 90-year-old former professor of the narrator, whom the narrator interviews in the novel\u2019s first section\u2014operates solely according to these literary references and linguistic tricks, and Lerner makes it clear that he\u2019s both a genius and a blowhard. The two are not incompatible, everything contains its opposite, etc. We can play this game forever, but what\u2019s the point?<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s focus on something I did appreciate in the novel, which is the way Thomas, who is German, speaks. His English is unnatural and sounds exactly like someone who has become highly proficient in English as an adult, which is something I haven\u2019t seen fictionalized often, and what I find to be Lerner\u2019s greatest strength\u2014his sensitivity to how people actually talk. In the opening section of the novel, Thomas asks the narrator, \u201cYou take more coffee?\u201d rather than something like \u201cWill you have more coffee?\u201d. His question sounds strange to us, partly because of the word \u201ctake\u201d but also due to the lack of an auxiliary verb or an inversion of the subject and verb; instead, Thomas uses the same word order as a declarative statement. Other examples include, \u201cYes, but you are recording?\u201d (rather than \u201care you recording?\u201d) and \u201cIt is late for the literal, no?\u201d (rather than \u201cisn\u2019t it late..\u201d). Thomas also adds \u201cyes\u201d and \u201cno\u201d to his questions, and if you <a href=\"https:\/\/youtu.be\/g60mXgoV--4?si=URLlrxNeMnZ8Jsxw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">look up a video of Alexander Kluge on YouTube<\/a> (whom Thomas is said to be based on), you will hear his English speech peppered with numerous instances of \u201cyeah\u201d in between sentences.<\/p>\n<p>The other distinctive feature of Thomas\u2019 speech is his overuse of the present simple tense. About wine, he says, \u201cI give it up for now\u201d (rather than \u201cI\u2019m giving it up\/I\u2019ve given it up\u201d); about the interview and the importance of recording he says, \u201cOtherwise we repeat ourselves\u201d (rather than \u201cwe\u2019ll repeat\u201d); in a story that happened over 20 years prior, he freely mixes past and present tenses, when it would be more natural to consistently use the past tense.<\/p>\n<p>This fidelity to authentic spoken language makes me wonder about the writing of <em>Transcription<\/em> itself. In the fictional world of the novel, Lerner\u2019s narrator later reconstructs the interview with Thomas from memory as he\u2019s dropped his phone in the sink and lacks a recording device, but how did the real Lerner actually write Thomas\u2019 dialogue? I can\u2019t help but wonder if he had recordings of Kluge that he used as a model\u2014perhaps even reproducing them verbatim\u2014creating a heady vortex at the center of the novel, where Thomas\u2019 speech is reconstructed from memory in the fictional world but transcribed from a recording in real life. It would be fitting due to Lerner\u2019s interest in doublings and reproductions; it&#8217;s just too bad the question of how the novel was written is more interesting than the novel itself.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Derek Neal I read Ben Lerner\u2019s new novel, Transcription, in one day. I started reading it on my iPad at around 7:30 am as I sat at my kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating a piece of cake that my partner had made. Later, I continued the novel during my lunch break as I&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1338,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311339","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311339","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1338"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311339"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311416,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311339\/revisions\/311416"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311412,"date":"2026-09-17T04:00:41","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T08:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311412"},"modified":"2026-09-14T03:34:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T07:34:14","slug":"this-weeks-photograph-98","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/this-weeks-photograph-98.html","title":{"rendered":"This Week&#8217;s Photograph"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/790226567_10164657070079425_5819300692483918798_n.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-311413\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/790226567_10164657070079425_5819300692483918798_n.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"746\" height=\"1118\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/790226567_10164657070079425_5819300692483918798_n.jpg 746w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/790226567_10164657070079425_5819300692483918798_n-240x360.jpg 240w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/790226567_10164657070079425_5819300692483918798_n-683x1024.jpg 683w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/790226567_10164657070079425_5819300692483918798_n-200x300.jpg 200w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 746px) 100vw, 746px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Tiny (about 1 mm diameter) stink bug eggs and newly hatched nymphs on a plant on my balcony. More specifically, they are very probably Asian brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys).<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Tiny (about 1 mm diameter) stink bug eggs and newly hatched nymphs on a plant on my balcony. More specifically, they are very probably Asian brown marmorated stink bugs (Halyomorpha halys). Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":834,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/834"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311412"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311415,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311412\/revisions\/311415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]