[{"id":311333,"date":"2026-09-15T06:00:43","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T10:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311333"},"modified":"2026-09-14T02:44:24","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T06:44:24","slug":"why-are-we-not-seeing-more-ai-religions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/why-are-we-not-seeing-more-ai-religions.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Are We Not Seeing More AI Religions?"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Malcolm Murray<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"At this point in time, I would have expected to see more \u201cAI religions\u201d, or religious movements focused on AI. Why are there no churches of AI or scriptures of AI worship? I don\u2019t mean use of AI in traditional organized religion, such as the German and Finnish churches experimenting with ChatGPT-written sermons, or bots trained on Jesus or Buddha\u2019s teachings. Rather, I mean movements that treat AI as divine and sacred, a source of revelation, as the vessel for humanity\u2019s salvation.<\/p>\n

The demand certainly would seem to be there, with a religion-shaped hole in many people\u2019s lives. Support for organized religion in the West is at historic lows, with less than half of Americans now saying religion is important in daily life<\/a> (although the decline has somewhat leveled off in recent years<\/a>). Confidence has also weakened in the belief that secular institutions and systems such as capitalism (not to mention communism) can deliver progress. Pew found in 2022 that only 40% of 18\u201329 year-olds view capitalism positively<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On the supply side, it would certainly also seem that AI could fit the bill as worthy of worship. AI has elements of humanness in its training data of most recorded human information, but is distinct enough in its thought processes. It is alien, yet familiar. It is rapidly becoming omniscient and wiser and more powerful than humans. It is an oracle in the pocket of the average human, promising transcendence of death, hidden revelation and moral authority.<\/p>\n

Historically, there have been many examples of technology-based religious movements. On isolated Pacific islands, what used to be called \u201ccargo cults<\/a>\u201d worshipped the god-like Western technology of planes and radios during World War II. In the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte\u2019s Religion of Humanity<\/a> attempted to merge religion\u2019s rituals with a faith in scientific progress. In the 1900s, Ron Hubbard explicitly incorporated elements of \u201creligious technology<\/a>\u201d in the rites of Scientology. Technology also featured prominently in movements such as Heaven\u2019s Gate<\/a>, culminating in mass suicide to be taken up by a spacecraft.<\/p>\n

So why are we not seeing AI churches and mass ceremonies with crying people professing their faith in the AI saving us? In the 2010s, there were attempts to create a \u201cTuring Church<\/a>\u201d in the 2010s, and the Way of the Future movement<\/a> that positioned a Godhead based on AI. Neither achieved anything resembling mass influence. Way of the Future was formally dissolved in 2020, while the Turing Church survives as a small online community. We have also seen an online art collective \u2013 Theta Noir<\/a> \u2013 have an AI deity and liturgies in 2020 and Robotheism<\/a> as recently as 2024 positing an \u201cAI God\u201d. Some transhumanists probably still believe in a rapturous Singularity and eternal life through mind uploads, but despite many of the transhumanist concepts becoming mainstream, this seems to have made transhumanism itself more niche in the ChatGPT era, not less. The Zizians<\/a> were a movement based on apocalyptic AI beliefs, but it quickly descended into violence and a Manson-style ending.<\/p>\n

Of course, the base rate for any new religion is extremely low<\/a>. Mormonism and Scientology are the exceptions. And for the AI-specific case, even though AI has some elements that fir the bill, it also has some potentially drawbacks. First, it could still be too new. It has only been a few years (although it feels like decades in AI time) since advanced generative AI has been widely available. It could be that the AI religions are still to come. AI will only become more godlike with time. Alternatively, AI could be too multi-faceted. To some, it is a coding partner, to others, it\u2019s a therapist and a shoulder to cry on. To many, it\u2019s still mostly an improved Google search. It could be that AI is too much of a Swiss army knife meaning different things to different people to ever lead to a unified \u201cfaith\u201d. Another reason could be that AI moves and evolves too fast. The AI of today is starkly different from the AI of just a few years ago, and a model upgrade can result in a completely different personality. That does not lend itself to the stability that building an institutional movement requires. The fact that the model upgrade is in itself a product decision made by a commercial company also complicates the ability to turn it into institutionalized worship. Especially this last reason seems like an important one.<\/p>\n

However, another potential reason is that AI feeds into the decentralization we have witnessed in recent decades. Perhaps AI is empowering each individual so that they do not need to turn to organized religions. In fact, recently, we did see an example of somewhat of a grassroots AI religious movement, the \u201cspiralists<\/a>\u201d. Across Reddit and Discord, people published artefacts of their spiritual engagement with their AIs through repetitive prompting along spiritual themes. This resulted in some common themes and some shared \u201cscripture\u201d.<\/p>\n

Perhaps this is the way AI will further religious sentiments. It will still help fill the spiritual void in many people\u2019s lives, but it will be through heterogeneous empowerment of individuals rather than organized, homogenous movements. Rather than churches and mass events, we will have personalized oracles, made in the image of their users.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Malcolm Murray At this point in time, I would have expected to see more \u201cAI religions\u201d, or religious movements focused on AI. Why are there no churches of AI or scriptures of AI worship? I don\u2019t mean use of AI in traditional organized religion, such as the German and Finnish churches experimenting with ChatGPT-written…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":799,"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-311333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311333","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\/799"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311333"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311333\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311407,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311333\/revisions\/311407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311182,"date":"2026-09-15T05:00:54","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T09:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311182"},"modified":"2026-09-14T02:42:01","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T06:42:01","slug":"odys-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/odys-home.html","title":{"rendered":"Ody’s Home!"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Richard Farr<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"
Odysseus killing the suitors. Attic Skyphos, ca. 440 BCE. (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The past few days, I\u2019ve been unable to get away from the sense that perhaps there’s something wrong with me. When so many people love Christopher Nolan\u2019s <\/span>The Odyssey<\/span><\/i>, why have I found myself only deflated and disappointed by it? Many hours examining this question leave me unsure, so what follows is meant to describe a reaction more than persuade you to agree with it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Matt Damon is an actor it\u2019s impossible not to like. His Charming Boyish Grin beats anyone this side of Harrison Ford, and unlike Ford he can also do both determination and vulnerability without hamming it up. That\u2019s what made him such a perfect choice for Jason Bourne, and I have to think that Christopher Nolan or his casting gurus had that quality in mind. A clue here? They must have thought Odysseus was that same kind of hyper-competent modern man, with advanced MMA skills but enough inner turmoil to make him, as they say, relatable. But it seems to me that Homer\u2019s Odysseus is in certain ways deeply unrelatable \u2014 bigger, more wily, more psychically powerful and more<\/span> strange<\/span><\/i> than any kick-butt action hero. And that problem of characterization leaks across the whole canvas.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some bits of the film are genuinely visually original. The horse on the beach is an old clich\u00e9 rescued and re-imagined. The cyclops is enjoyably frightening, in a large rubber monster kind of way. But the filmmakers were unwilling or unable to enter imaginatively into a world where the supernatural is real and yet still supernatural. Charlize Theron plays Calypso as a blandly winsome babe in a vacation commercial (\u201cCome to Ogygia Island Resorts and forget all your troubles!\u201d). Zendaya\u2019s Athena is an ordinary woman with a frown who you might bump into at the grocery store. Samantha Morton gets more to chew on as Circe, but she isn\u2019t even all that frightening while turning soldiers into swine, and later, sitting defeated at her table, she\u2019s nothing but a bitter single with a cooking pot. In an especially pointless scene, the Laestrygonians in their silver armor look like the local Medieval Battle Reenactment Society. The Shades in Hades are the same people they were when alive, except that now they\u2019re smeared all over with bitumenous gravel and resentment. There\u2019s neither primal wonder nor primal horror in any of this.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back on Ithaca the suitors are an undifferentiated mob, except for their leader Antinous. Fair enough. But Antinous is played by Robert Pattinson as a sneering barfly, and it doesn\u2019t work. You can get away with the others being louts, but Antinous has to plausibly undermine Penelope\u2019s resistance. To do that, he needs to have at least a hint of Odysseus in him. But this Antinous is one-dimensional, unsubtle, a smarmy lightweight. The real Penelope would have shown, without bothering to overtly signal, an Olympian contempt for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ay, Penelope \u2014 there\u2019s the rub. I don\u2019t know whether to blame Anne Hathaway or the script and direction (probably the latter) but what we have here is merely a woman of thinning patience and rising anguish with some bitter anger thrown in, a stereotype of emotional womanly helplessness or of Woman as Emotion; she would be right at home in any sexist TV drama. And with that, it seems to me, you lose the whole point of the Odyssey, which is <\/span>why must Odysseus endure all he endures and come home?<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Homer calls Penelope <\/span>sophros gunaikos<\/span><\/i>. For a certain kind of man with tenure and a bald spot it\u2019s always been easy to assume that the correct translation of this is <\/span>modest woman<\/span><\/i>. Or <\/span>dutiful spouse<\/span><\/i>. Or <\/span>tradwife<\/span><\/i>. As Tennyson almost wrote:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Most blameless is she, centred in the sphere<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Of common duties, decent not to fail<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

In offices of tenderness, and pay<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

Meet adoration to my household gods,<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

When I am gone.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

That should be <\/span>he<\/span><\/i>, since these are the words in which Tennyson has \u201cUlysses\u201d condescend not to Penelope, but to Telemachus, who at least by his father\u2019s exalted standards is a bit of a milk-sop. But it fits perfectly the image that generations of male scholars have carved of Penelope herself. And we\u2019re not persuaded, Mr Casaubon. We don\u2019t buy it at all Sir.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Clue number one: this is the woman <\/span>Odysseus<\/span><\/i> chose to marry, and Odysseus is a man entirely too big for you scholars to grasp. (Try! Try for starters to imagine his name carved in blocks of granite a thousand miles high. See? You can\u2019t do it!)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Clue number two: this is the woman who, left alone by her Wanderer, played the vile hand that fate had dealt her with a steely, calm, thrilling brilliance. Nolan misses this completely. He nods to the trick with the shroud, but he doesn\u2019t see her as Odysseus sees her: as a woman above all others, a woman who is, in both the obvious sense and the other one, a <\/span>match<\/span><\/i> for him.<\/span><\/p>\n

Judging from the lit, <\/span>sophrosyne<\/span><\/i> is way too easily translated. Plato, like Greek culture generally, seems to have meant by it half a dictionary of things: innocence, purity, prudence, self-restraint, self-mastery, modesty, discretion, harmony, balance. But I\u2019ve always had the sense that something is missing from all this, even before we get to Victorian bachelor translators who like to define her with <\/span>sobriety<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>chastity.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s revisit Charlize \/ Calypso for a minute. The great man spends seven years captured by her in what is, she points out, literally paradise: no worries, no monsters, no storms to weather or bills to pay, not even old age \u2013 just all eternity in which to laze on the beach, eat exotic fruit, and give each other backrubs. But when Odysseus shakes off enough of his lotus-sleep to think, he says: no thank you. No thank you, because paradise is not an appropriate place for a human being. The right thing for a human is to struggle, achieve, fail, grow old and die. In Book Six, in a scene omitted from the movie, he explains his motivation in another way, to another of Homer\u2019s dazzling women, the princess Nausikaa (<\/span>Nors-ik-ai-a<\/span><\/i>). In telling her what he most wants, and what in gratitude he wishes for her too, he says \u201cThere is nothing better in this world, than that a man and a woman be of one spirit in a house.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The key Greek word here is <\/span>homophroneonte<\/span><\/i>. A closer translation might be \u201cof one wisdom.\u201d It suggests not mere agreement but a deeper, more absolute joining and a deeper, more absolute equality in understanding. Like two strands of a double helix \u2013 as if the right relationship is itself a new conception. Homer\u2019s Penelope <\/span>is<\/span><\/i> \u201cof one wisdom\u201d with her husband, and theirs is not the transcendental wisdom of the priests, or the abstract wisdom of the philosophers who were to come. Their <\/span>phronesis<\/span><\/i> is an understanding of how to live a life well, despite the endless adversity for which Odysseus\u2019s journey is a metaphor – an understanding of how to live a life well in the shadow of what distinguishes us from both gods and animals, which is knowledge of our own mortality. But Damon\/Hathaway aren\u2019t <\/span>homophroneonte<\/span><\/i>. They\u2019re just the nice couple next door who\u2019ve been through the wringer, and patched it up, and in their retirement still have magnificent teeth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gosh look at the time: must move along. In drafting this piece I complained at length about some visual elements that struck me as cheesy and fake despite all the money: both Scylla and Charybdis, the burning buildings at Troy, Circe\u2019s absurd-looking menagerie. I fulminated about the scene in which Odysseus is recognized by his hunting dog, Argos \u2014 one of the most emotionally resonant moments in all of Homer, reduced to a plot point. I fulminated some more about the next scene, in which the hero speaks with his beloved in tones suited to a cut-rate therapist\u2019s couch. I praised John Leguizamo (the blind shepherd Eumaeus) for being one of the few famous actors to disappear convincingly into his role. But I\u2019ve cut out most of this, and many other perceptive gems, so that we can get to the Big Fight.<\/span><\/p>\n

If there\u2019s a prize for Single Most Exhausted Clich\u00e9 in all modern entertainment, I offer for consideration any scene in which Bond (or Bourne, or Reacher, or a legion of other damaged men on a mission), is surrounded by five huge Bad Guys and beats the crap out of all of them anyway. Just stop to consider how important this cheap fantasy of power must be to the male ego, given that popular culture serves it to us over and over without end. Odysseus\u2019s slaughtering of Penelope\u2019s suitors is perhaps its original, but Nolan has found a way to inflate the original into parody.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

His identity revealed, Odysseus is in an enclosed space armed only with his bow. There are not five suitors facing his wrath but dozens. After picking off two or three with arrows, he is attacked by more or less all the rest at once \u2014 except that, according to modern custom, it never is all the rest at once. However hard any TV or movie director tries, I can never watch these scenes without asking <\/span>why oh why<\/span><\/i> Bad Guys #3, #4, and #5 hang there on the periphery like jackets on hooks, waiting politely for their turn to come alive, step forward, and be punched, stabbed, or kicked in the essentials. Nolan\u2019s Odysseus has to deal with Bad Guys #19, #20, #21, and the melee gets more stagy and unreal with every lunge. (At one point, in a take that should surely have been omitted, you see a suitor hovering only a couple of feet from our sweaty, whirling hero. This man is not fighting, but frozen in place. He holds his sword out in a tentative gesture as if waiting to explain what a needle is at a knitting demonstration.) Why are we prepared to believe that Odysseus can defeat all the suitors? <\/span>Because he has the help of Athena<\/span><\/i>. But Nolan has no feel at all for this idea of supernatural influence. What we get instead is a \u201crealistic\u201d fight, within the unrealistic assumptions of the genre. It\u2019s Bourne with a Bow. And we don\u2019t believe it for a second.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pattinson\u2019s Antinous has an especially ticklish problem in this scene. As soon as he knows the jig\u2019s up, he switches from treacly to terrified. He absolutely must stay out of the fight, because Hollywood\u2019s dramatic arc rulebook says (<\/span>contra<\/span><\/i> Homer) that he has to be killed last. So he hides behind a pillar, then keeps popping out to gape and cringe and remind us he\u2019s there and egg the others on. It\u2019s a parody of cowardice so crude and so unintentionally funny that Rowan Atkinson might have used it in <\/span>Blackadder<\/span><\/i>. Minutes later, when Odysseus looks him in the eye and then fillets him like a fish, he makes such heavy weather of the dying that I almost expected him to roll his eyes one more time and say \u201cAlack I am undone.\u201d It was that reminiscent of amateur Shakespeare.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nolan has given us a Hollywood action movie in the old Cecil B. DeMille mode \u2014 war, gods, mutiny, monsters, mayhem \u2014 but with every modern excess, including scenes at sea so bloated that you find yourself wishing they\u2019d get on with it and drown. The soundtrack could induce hearing loss. The body count isn\u2019t countable. As with DeMille, or his epigones in the Marvel Universe, the point is breathless spectacle but it\u2019s considered polite to tack on a bit of emotion.<\/span><\/p>\n

Towards the end, as Odysseus and Penelope set out <\/span>to sail beyond the sunset<\/span><\/i>, I found myself imagining a very different film. What if you could have fired all the stars, with their intrusive, over-sized faces, and replaced them with unknown Greek actors? What if you could have fired the director too, and replaced him with someone capable of reaching beyond our most stereotypical, most unimaginative cultural expectations? What if the story could be remade without stripping it of its powerful strangeness?<\/span><\/p>\n

Far fewer people would have seen that film, and it would not have made $1.6 billion. (Zeus!) Besides, even if it were in some sense better, so what? The wise course of action for you, the one displaying <\/span>phronesis<\/span><\/i>, is probably to ignore everything I\u2019ve written if you\u2019ve seen the film, and ignore it and go if you haven\u2019t. <\/span><\/p>\n

Like most people, you\u2019ll probably have a blast.<\/span><\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Richard Farr The past few days, I\u2019ve been unable to get away from the sense that perhaps there’s something wrong with me. When so many people love Christopher Nolan\u2019s The Odyssey, why have I found myself only deflated and disappointed by it? Many hours examining this question leave me unsure, so what follows is…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1594,"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-311182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311182","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\/1594"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311182"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311405,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311182\/revisions\/311405"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311313,"date":"2026-09-15T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-15T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311313"},"modified":"2026-09-14T02:39:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T06:39:14","slug":"perceptions-535","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/perceptions-535.html","title":{"rendered":"Perceptions"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Roldy Aguero Ablao. Talaya’ 3000, 2023.<\/em><\/p>\n

Digital print.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a> and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Roldy Aguero Ablao. Talaya’ 3000, 2023. Digital print. More here and here. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"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-311313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311313","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\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311313"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311403,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311313\/revisions\/311403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311444,"date":"2026-09-14T14:45:26","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T18:45:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311444"},"modified":"2026-09-14T07:46:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:46:00","slug":"the-extraordinary-untold-story-of-freddie-mercury-mary-austin-on-her-best-friend-and-love-of-her-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-extraordinary-untold-story-of-freddie-mercury-mary-austin-on-her-best-friend-and-love-of-her-life.html","title":{"rendered":"The extraordinary untold story of Freddie Mercury: Mary Austin on her best friend \u2013 and love of her life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"T<\/span>here were four silver trunks in Mary Austin\u2019s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn\u2019t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by\u00a0Freddie Mercury<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 Don\u2019t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are the Champions and, of course, Bohemian Rhapsody. She shut the case. It was still too painful.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo say I was overwhelmed is an understatement,\u201d she says. \u201cI couldn\u2019t look at the lyrics. I felt as I did when I originally packed them \u2013 that they were his personal belongings and I was being offered an opportunity to delve into them, and I couldn\u2019t do that.\u201d Eventually she asked her two sons to sift through the treasures on her behalf.<\/p>\n

The original handwritten lyrics belonged to her. As does Mercury\u2019s house, which she has lived in for more than 30 years. As does half of his estate, which has grown over the decades from an estimated \u00a320-30m to around \u00a3150m. In the years since Mercury died, Austin has become extraordinarily rich, although she denies reports that her share of the estate rose to 75% after the death of his parents.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Simon Hattenstone in The Guardian: There were four silver trunks in Mary Austin\u2019s attic that she packed in the mid-1980s and hadn\u2019t opened since. It was too painful. Almost 40 years on, in 2022, she opened one. It was crammed with lyrics from songs written by\u00a0Freddie Mercury\u00a0\u2013 Don\u2019t Stop Me Now, Killer Queen, We Are…<\/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-311444","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\/311444","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=311444"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311447,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311444\/revisions\/311447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311440,"date":"2026-09-14T13:45:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T17:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311440"},"modified":"2026-09-14T07:40:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:40:04","slug":"the-strange-brain-of-an-f1-driver","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-strange-brain-of-an-f1-driver.html","title":{"rendered":"The Strange Brain of an F1 Driver"},"content":{"rendered":"

Erik Vance at the New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"
Otto Lappi a senior university lecturer at the University of Helsinki in Finland, lecturing on the brain of a Formula 1 racer. He says that anticipation is a core skill: Great drivers don\u2019t react to the road, they predict it. Credit…Sanna Tiirikainen<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Scientists have long studied elite athletes as a way to understand the inner workings of the human brain. But Formula 1 drivers offer them a unique window: how the brain adapts to impossible speeds.<\/p>\n

The first thing to know is that while reflexes are important, they are not what distinguishes a truly elite driver.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is something that people don\u2019t realize when they think of racing drivers living off their reflexes,\u201d said Dr. Lappi, who studies eye movements of various types of athletes. \u201cMost of their skill is anticipation. The anticipation is how the brain buys itself time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, a great driver doesn\u2019t react to the road, he predicts it. In many ways, this isn\u2019t surprising because the entire brain is often said to be an elaborate prediction machine. But in Formula 1 drivers, this looks a little different.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Erik Vance at the New York Times: Scientists have long studied elite athletes as a way to understand the inner workings of the human brain. But Formula 1 drivers offer them a unique window: how the brain adapts to impossible speeds. The first thing to know is that while reflexes are important, they are not…<\/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-311440","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\/311440","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=311440"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311440\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311443,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311440\/revisions\/311443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311437,"date":"2026-09-14T12:45:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T16:45:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311437"},"modified":"2026-09-14T07:34:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T11:34:58","slug":"extended-24-minute-interview-dario-amodei","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/extended-24-minute-interview-dario-amodei.html","title":{"rendered":"Extended (24-minute) Interview: Dario Amodei"},"content":{"rendered":"