[{"id":311038,"date":"2026-09-07T08:15:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T12:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311038"},"modified":"2026-09-07T08:15:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T12:15:16","slug":"chasing-the-ideal-dog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/chasing-the-ideal-dog.html","title":{"rendered":"Chasing the Ideal Dog"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hannah Berger at the Paris Review<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings Dominion. It\u2019s the kind of place where animals and vegetables get sorted out. When I told a shearing friend I was heading there, he told me he\u2019d just been there, too, for \u201csheep stuff.\u201d The crest of an orange roller coaster peeked through the trees as I parked beside several RVs, all of them accompanied by some form of outdoor pen. Just inside the Farm Bureau Center, the doormats were already covered in fur.<\/p>\n

I was attending a two-day conformation dog show, where more than four hundred purebred dogs were competing to determine which one adhered most closely to an ancestral ideal.\u00a0Shows like this date back to 1859, when a gunsmith named W. R. Pape organized a competition judging fifty or sixty gun dogs\u2014pointers and setters, bred to hunt\u2014at the corn exchange in Newcastle upon Tyne. Winners got guns. Today, their descendants, plus nearly two hundred other breeds, bred solely for display, compete in fluorescent event spaces for big ribbons.<\/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":"

Hannah Berger at the Paris Review: The Meadow Event Park in Doswell, Virginia, lies on a few hundred acres of flat land abutted by farms and an amusement park called Kings Dominion. It\u2019s the kind of place where animals and vegetables get sorted out. When I told a shearing friend I was heading there, he…<\/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-311038","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\/311038","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=311038"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311041,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311038\/revisions\/311041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310967,"date":"2026-09-07T06:00:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T10:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310967"},"modified":"2026-09-07T01:39:18","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T05:39:18","slug":"the-future-of-the-firewall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/the-future-of-the-firewall.html","title":{"rendered":"The future of the Firewall"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Jeroen Bouterse<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Brandmauer <\/em>\u2013 the political \u2018firewall\u2019 against the German far-right party Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland <\/em>\u2013 is under duress. It has been clear for a while that the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6th<\/sup> would make government formation there without the AfD either difficult, extremely difficult, or arithmetically impossible. As I submit this column, it looks like the second.<\/p>\n

Politicians and commentators are frantically reflecting, not just on the processes driving the electoral successes<\/a> of the far right and on the future of democracy, but also on the wall metaphor. Some get technical. Asked about the durability of the Brandmauer <\/em>in an interview with Der Spiegel<\/em>, Saxony\u2019s prime-minister Michael Kretschmer started lecturing<\/a> on how fire-resistance is measured. \u201cF60, for example, means that the building component can remain structurally sound for 60 minutes in the case of fire.\u201d The journalist felt compelled to interject: \u201cwhere are you going with this?\u201d<\/p>\n

In a volume of essays<\/a> on the Brandmauer<\/em> published this summer, almost all contributions happily explore the image. Some of them even refer, somewhat boldly, to that other wall that is among Germany\u2019s core political memories. The Berlin Wall is the symbol of a failing political system, scared that its people would abandon it. It is also famous for falling at the hands of those people. Journalist Stefan Aust draws the lesson most directly: \u201cjust like the \u2018anti-fascist protection wall\u2019 did not save the GDR from the democratic collapse of socialism, the Brandmauer <\/em>will not save the country from [the AfD].\u201d<\/p>\n

That it is imagined as a wall has now come to imply that the days of the taboo against the AfD may well be numbered. At best, its effect is temporary. That was Kretschmer\u2019s point, of course; firewalls slow the fire down, but something else is needed to stop the actual fire. Still, this growing consensus on the limits of the Brandmauer <\/em>does not answer the question of whether German politics presently needs something else in addition <\/em>to the firewall, or something else instead <\/em>of the firewall. Let\u2019s try to answer that question here.<\/p>\n

Excluding parties is somewhat undemocratic \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

Opponents of the Brandmauer <\/em>like to complain<\/a> that excluding democratically elected parties from power is an undemocratic move. In a constitutional sense, this is of course false: there is no right to be included in a coalition. On the contrary: parties have the democratic right to follow their own judgment as to whether, how, and with whom they collaborate. If they make questionable decisions in the process, it is up to the voters to punish them. Christian Ude, former mayor of Munich for the social-democratic SPD, calls the recent history of the liberal FDP into memory. Abandoning coalition talks, its leader Christian Lindner quipped he would rather \u201cnot govern than govern badly\u201d, and (with some delay) voters granted his wish: the FDP since lost all its seats in the federal and many state parliaments.<\/p>\n

This line of response \u2013 the prerogative of parties to choose their own coalition partners, and the agency of the electorate \u2013 is 100% correct. Still, I would submit that there are softer meanings of \u2018undemocratic\u2019, which do extend to the absolute exclusion of a democratically elected party from cooperation or coalition formation.<\/p>\n

First, in a multi-party democracy where generally no party wins an absolute majority, negotiation and compromise are essential: every party has the right to refuse to deal with any other, but if all of them refuse to deal with all others, democratic government is impossible. Every categorical exclusion moves the system in the direction of that point of crisis. Second, because of the necessity of establishing majorities through negotiation, representatives excluded from the relevant platforms (especially coalition formation) are less powerful than representatives included in them. This weakens their constituents and undermines the democratic principle that all citizens are represented equally.<\/p>\n

In the Netherlands, the conservative-liberal party has successfully excluded a larger progressive party from coalition negotiations by simply refusing to talk to them. Reasons have never been clearly stated, and are widely understood to have been purely opportunistic. It remains true that the conservative-liberals are simply exercising their own democratic right to be irresponsible cynics. At the same time, the progressives are rightfully indignant about being excluded arbitrarily from a process essential to a sustainable democracy.<\/p>\n

\u2026 but acceptable if it keeps the far right at bay \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

From the perspective of democratic ethics, then, categorical exclusion of a duly elected party requires reasons to outweigh the (softly) undemocratic nature of the exclusion itself. The most immediate such reason would be that the party in question is itself antidemocratic. This is indeed the usual argument against the AfD.<\/p>\n

However, can this kind of argument be entrusted to parties that are locked in a zero-sum struggle for seats, and that have incentives to suppress competition? Established parties can easily jump on the revolutionary rhetoric of newcomers, and draw overexcited conclusions that subtly work in their collective self-interest. In its early days, the Green party was painted by many politicians from the older parties as dangerously anti-parliamentarian. For that reason CDU politician Johannes Beermann has warned that: \u201conly the referee can use red cards; not the players\u201d. He recalls that after chancellor Angela Merkel decried the 2020 election of Thuringia\u2019s prime minister with both CDU and AfD support, and called for it to be reversed, Germany’s constitutional court ruled 5-3 that she had overstepped<\/a>. She should not, the court found, have used her position and resources as chancellor to intervene against a specific party.<\/p>\n

It is good, as this ruling effectively did, to insist on a clear distinction between neutral arbiters and interested players. However, the players have some responsibilities \u2013 and corresponding rights \u2013 of their own. Whether the AfD shelters antisemites, full neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists out to overthrow the republic, and whether it does so to an extent that makes it (or parts of it) plainly illegal, is a matter for the courts. But there is also the question of whether the AfD\u2019s policy platform itself constitutes a threat to democracy and democratic values. That is not something I would want a judge to decide, but also not a question I would want to leave unanswered.<\/p>\n

\u2018Remigration\u2019 goals that could affect millions (although admittedly the most sinister schemes<\/a> don\u2019t make it to the official state<\/a> or federal<\/a> platform); effectively choosing Putin\u2019s side in his war of aggression against Ukraine; withdrawal from the Euro and the Schengen treaty \u2013 these are just a few of the more prominent AfD propositions. Whether their sum amounts to \u2018no more than\u2019 a radical political agenda \u2013 one that is immoral and disruptive, but consistent with popular sovereignty \u2013 or whether, rather, its realization would alter Germany and Europe in a way that jeopardizes the long-term survival of liberal democracy; this question is one of political judgment.<\/p>\n

To my mind, we are dealing unequivocally with the second case: democratic government in Europe would be in grave danger were its most important country to defect from its defense and its underlying values. However, my reasons for believing that the AfD\u2019s platform is a threat to democracy do not add up to an argument to outlaw it. What they do imply, is that I would encourage other political players to use any rule in the book against them. The AfD is owed nothing except<\/em> its considerable constitutional rights. Other parties are entitled to make whatever tactical decisions keep it as far away from power as possible.<\/p>\n

\u2026 which it doesn\u2019t do anymore \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

In short, I believe the Brandmauer <\/em>is justified in principle, even if it is a softly undemocratic instrument: it is an attempt by political players themselves to structure the playing field in a way that decreases the effective power of a rival, but one that does not diminish that rival\u2019s constitutional rights and is justified by the radical threat it poses.<\/p>\n

Is it successful, though? The AfD has indeed been kept out of the executive branch on both the state and federal level. Though collaboration on the local level does take place, last year some researchers<\/a> concluded that other parties tend to avoid it there too (although clear data are hard to come by). In short, it \u2018works\u2019 in the sense that the taboo is still in operation. However, if the goal has been to disincentivize voters to pick the AfD, then it has failed. In last year\u2019s federal elections, the AfD doubled its vote share from 10.4% to 20.8%. Presently, its support in nation-wide polls<\/a> is nearer 30%.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the political costs are rising. They are mostly borne by the conservative CDU, which has had to resign itself to coalitions and policies that are too left-wing for its comfort. This undermines the credibility of the CDU as a party that can deliver to conservative, bourgeois, or right-wing interests, and drives many of them to what is now the main alternative on the right. This mechanism makes the Firewall counterproductive<\/a> insofar as its incentives to voters are concerned.<\/p>\n

Some frame the dilemma in somewhat heroic terms: \u201cone cannot produce good politics anymore, because one has to protect the survival of democracy\u201d, writes Reiner Haseloff (until recently prime-minister of Saxony-Anhalt for the CDU), together with journalist Robert Burdy. From the left, the calculation will look different: after all, why would the social-democratic SPD voluntarily go along with socio-economic policy choices that go against its own promises, and that would hurt it electorally? Should it act against its own interests? Should it in turn agree to what it believes is \u2018bad politics\u2019, just to make life easier for the CDU?<\/p>\n

In my na\u00efve moments, I think things might be slightly easier if the SPD did precisely that. However, the more dispassionate conclusion is that tensions within the coalition are themselves a symptom of the way in which the Brandmauer <\/em>warps the political landscape. It is extremely hard to correct through regular political negotiations for the fact that almost a quarter of seats in Parliament are untouchable. Again, the natural state of a multi-party democracy is one of exchange, cooperation, and compromise; the presence of a large block that is \u2018artificially\u2019 excluded from these mechanisms destabilizes the whole system.<\/p>\n

\u2026 so let\u2019s remodel it \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

In January 2025, close to the elections that would lead to his current chancellorship, opposition leader Friedrich Merz tested the reach of his own party\u2019s \u2018incompatibility resolution\u2019 against the AfD. He tabled a motion on stricter migration measures which he said he would push \u201cregardless of who agrees with them<\/a>\u201d. He made a point of<\/a> not coordinating with the AfD, but also signaled that he was prepared to let the motion pass with their support, which would be crucial if (as he could reasonably expect) SPD and Greens would not support it. This happened as Merz had planned it, but he had not planned for what followed. Nation-wide protests burst out, his predecessor Angela Merkel weighed in<\/a>, and Merz came out of the episode with a sizable scratch on his political nose. His attempt to loosen the CDU\u2019s position regarding the AfD had failed.<\/p>\n

I believe Merz was onto something. The formal resolutions in which the CDU has pledged not to work with the AfD already left room for his interpretation. They mostly speak<\/a> of rejecting \u201ccoalitions and similar forms of collaboration\u201d with the AfD (as well as with Die Linke<\/em>, but this restriction is an internal party compromise, explained with far less vigor and policed less enthusiastically). The Thuringia crisis of 2020, which I referred to briefly above, established a stricter interpretation. The election of an FDP state minister whom the CDU supported, but for whose election AfD votes had been crucial, led to outrage within the CDU. The party quickly clarified there could be \u201cno collaboration with the AfD \u2013 neither in a direct, nor in an indirect way\u201d. In this version of the Brandmauer<\/em>, consolidated by the 2025 events, the CDU never allows itself to rely on AfD seats for parliamentary support even if that support is unsolicited.<\/p>\n

This form of the Brandmauer<\/em> is the most undemocratic one (in the soft sense defined above). It does not serve the overriding purpose of keeping the AfD in check electorally, and is becoming so much of a political burden on the center-right that it accelerates the erosion of the democratic center as a whole. What it still does, is limit the direct power and influence of AfD representatives, and decrease the party\u2019s chances of holding executive power. It could be argued that these benefits still outweigh the electoral harm. However, as the AfD crawls closer to absolute majorities in some states, this line of argument has weakened considerably.<\/p>\n

Though steering away from this situation may itself be costly, I believe a less demanding version of the Brandmauer<\/em> is necessary. The most modest alteration would be to accept parliamentary support from the AfD for individual policy proposals, but to reject material compromises with it.<\/p>\n

\u2026without forgetting why it exists.<\/strong><\/p>\n

There are risks in relaxing the prohibition, too. For one, a slippery slope is conceivable. If AfD votes become available in principle, what would stop politicians from subtly courting them? If their votes could secure a political victory at an important moment, maybe some small offer could be made in return? If ad hoc compromises are on the table, why not more encompassing deals? And how big is the step from there to power-sharing?<\/p>\n

The Netherlands provides the cautionary tale here, by tumbling down that entire slope<\/a> only recently, and dizzyingly quickly at that. The dam broke in 2023, when the conservative-liberal party got tired of having to look to its left for political deals, blew up the centrist coalition it was leading, and declared it would be open to governing with the far right PVV. A colossal strategic error, which directly increased the attractiveness of the PVV to right-wing voters, catapulted it to victory in the elections, and resulted in it leading<\/a> the next (short-lived) governing coalition.<\/p>\n

The electoral rationale of a cordon sanitaire <\/em>or Brandmauer<\/em> is to incentivize right-wing voters to seek representation by a non-extremist right-wing party. Germany is currently failing to provide those incentives, because the Brandmauer <\/em>makes it harder for its main moderate right-wing party to succeed. However, the Dutch example illustrates how easy it is to fall from there into the opposite error, with the same outcome. In opening the door to collaboration with the far right without principled limitations, the conservative-liberals increased the perceived effectiveness of a vote for the PVV.<\/p>\n

At present, the CDU is still avoiding the Dutch mistake: its most prominent politicians express their objections<\/a> to the AfD with sufficient passion to make it believable they will not suddenly treat it as a normal partner. However, it should give pause that Merz\u2019s controversial motion<\/a> contained migration measures which AfD politicians were pleased to say<\/a> looked copy-pasted from their own proposals.<\/p>\n

Migration is the far right\u2019s wedge into mainstream European politics. The median has shifted far in recent years, with performative border controls inside the EU now being a normal phenomenon, and with even centrist governments examining options to fly immigrants to \u2018return hubs\u2019 in Uganda or Rwanda. It is understandable that traditional parties want to deliver on what appears to be the main concern<\/a> driving the rise of the radical right; but it is equally vital that on that core issue, they don\u2019t blur the distinction between themselves and the fringe. Germany should have a serious debate on how porous the wall needs to be, but it should also keep in mind what it is there to protect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Jeroen Bouterse The Brandmauer \u2013 the political \u2018firewall\u2019 against the German far-right party Alternative f\u00fcr Deutschland \u2013 is under duress. It has been clear for a while that the state election in Saxony-Anhalt on September 6th would make government formation there without the AfD either difficult, extremely difficult, or arithmetically impossible. As I submit…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":607,"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-310967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310967","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\/607"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310967"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311013,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310967\/revisions\/311013"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310995,"date":"2026-09-07T05:00:44","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T09:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310995"},"modified":"2026-09-07T01:34:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T05:34:04","slug":"how-facts-are-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/how-facts-are-made.html","title":{"rendered":"How Facts Are Made"},"content":{"rendered":"

by W. Alex Foxworthy<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"Recently, following an assignment that required AI use, a student asked me whether it was true that every question she asks a chatbot uses up a whole bottle of water. Like so much information today, she received this claim via a social media video. The video apparently cited a newspaper article which cited a real study. She had also heard people all around her, both in real life and online, talking about the huge amounts of water these systems use. Of course, she could get more information by searching online, asking a chatbot, asking friends and teachers or listening to the many podcasts discussing the issue. In other words, my student has no shortage of information, but what she doesn\u2019t have is a solid way to judge its accuracy, how much confidence a given claim deserves, nor which sources can be trusted. Though many students are now \u201cdigital natives,\u201d in the sense that they have grown up with smartphones and tablets, it has been my experience that they are not skilled in navigating the bewildering and fast growing world of information available to us all.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

At the same time, there seems to be a deepening distrust in institutions and authorities as well as widespread disagreement on the factual basis of some of the most important issues in the public discourse. More than ever, I hear from students who don\u2019t see the value of a \u201cwell-rounded\u201d education nor in spending time in courses that aren\u2019t directly tied to their career paths. Artificial intelligence has made the question of what an education offers even more urgent, as we now have machines that deliver confident answers on almost any subject (some right and some wrong) and produce content far faster than people can check it. Taken together, these observations have forced me to think about what my role in this educational process is really for. Particularly when it comes to teaching non-science majors, I think what science has to offer are ways of thinking that can be applied across many domains. The framework key to it all is something we now describe with the shorthand \u201cscientific method\u201d: how human beings have learned to test claims about the world and preserve what survives rigorous testing. Of course, most science courses already cover the scientific method: ask a question, form a hypothesis, test it, analyze the results, and draw a conclusion. But the treatment is often superficial, students don\u2019t arrive in my classroom with an intuitive understanding of what it really means, and I think we leave out much of what makes the process work. This essay is my attempt to lay out what the five steps leave out, using my student\u2019s question as an illustrative example.<\/span><\/p>\n

Most of us still judge claims using capacities that long predate any formalized scientific process. Instinct provides responses shaped by natural selection over many generations. Newborn babies turn towards the breast without being taught, and we withdraw rapidly from painful stimuli. These responses help us survive, but they do not necessarily give us a deep or unbiased understanding of the world. Individual experience adds a faster layer of learning. However, it can sometimes be misleading as we tend to credit whatever preceded a good outcome, whether or not it actually caused it. Experience also has difficulty revealing a cause that acts slowly over years or only changes the probability of an outcome. A third method we rely on is tradition: what \u201ceveryone\u201d knows and what your people always do. Through oral traditions, written language, and other durable forms of communication, communities can preserve knowledge beyond what any individual could work out. However, they can hold on to errors quite securely as well. Often a traditional practice and its explanation come bundled together, and an apparently successful practice lends credibility to an untested explanation. <\/span>Bloodletting persisted<\/span><\/a> for centuries despite challenges to its usefulness. A patient\u2019s recovery after being bled could seem to confirm the treatment, even when the patient would have recovered without it. A fourth way of knowing is argument using reason and logic. These methods allow people to examine ideas and argue for or against them in ways that inherited practices may resist. However, just because something makes sense doesn\u2019t mean that it\u2019s true. Even valid reasoning cannot establish that its starting premises are correct. Even today, science continues to rely on experience, reasoning, and knowledge passed down by others. Much of the scientific process comes down to how we check our knowledge.<\/span><\/p>\n

The typical science textbook\u2019s answer to this is the experiment. Students are taught to come up with an idea, test it against the world, and use the results to refute or support it. However, this sounds like nothing more than checking your assumptions, which raises an obvious question. Haven\u2019t people always checked their assumptions? An ancient carpenter might think a plank was long enough to span an opening, then measure both and discover that it was too short. He could even lay the plank across the opening and see for himself. If experimentation means only comparing an expectation with reality, it is hard to imagine that people waited until the seventeenth century to try it. What I think is missing from this picture is that ordinary observation quite often supports an incorrect explanation. For example, Aristotle held that heavier bodies fall faster in proportion to their weight. In fact, if you drop a stone and a leaf, the result seems to support the general idea that heavier objects fall faster. Watching the sun cross the sky similarly gives the impression that it is moving around a stationary Earth. The world as it presents itself to naive observation is often misleading.<\/span><\/p>\n

The scientific process doesn\u2019t just hold that claims should be checked. Instead, the check must be carefully arranged so that we have a meaningful chance of finding the claim wrong. Sometimes we build the comparison by removing what confounds the question: for example, removing the air so that air resistance doesn\u2019t obscure the relationship between weight and falling motion. Other times, investigators find comparisons in the natural world that allow them to distinguish between competing explanations. Darwin tested explanations of organismal descent, variation and geographic spread through careful observations in the natural environment, alongside his experimental work. As Darwin stated in a letter, \u201call observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service.\u201d The important thing is not simply to look carefully at nature, but to seek observations for which competing explanations predict different results.<\/span><\/p>\n

The investigator\u2019s own expectations can also interfere with a comparison. An influential early example of a precaution against this problem was the British trial of streptomycin for tuberculosis, reported in 1948. Treatment assignments followed a sequence based on random numbers, concealed in sealed envelopes. Investigators could not know a patient\u2019s assignment before the patient was accepted into the trial. Even a random sequence could have been undermined if doctors knew the next assignment and used that knowledge to decide whom to enroll. Concealing it helped prevent them from consciously or unconsciously steering particular patients toward one group. The procedure protected the comparison from the preferences of the people conducting it, including doctors who understandably hoped to help their patients.<\/span><\/p>\n

These precautions developed over centuries, but carefully arranged comparisons existed long before the seventeenth century. In sixth-century Alexandria, John Philoponus described a straightforward test of Aristotle\u2019s account of falling bodies: drop two objects of very different weights from the same height. If they fell faster in proportion to their weights, an object twice as heavy should cover the distance in half the time. Philoponus reported that their falling times differed only slightly, and that with one object twice the weight of the other, the difference could be imperceptible. He did not conclude that weight makes no difference at all; he still held that heavier bodies generally fell faster. But he identified a prediction that observation contradicted, without yet having a complete replacement for the theory. Philoponus\u2019 criticism survived because other people copied, studied, and translated his works. Galileo knew and discussed his arguments, although the extent of their direct influence on his discoveries remains uncertain. The scholarly traditions that preserved Aristotle\u2019s work also preserved objections to his ideas. Both carefully arranged tests and the sharing of criticism therefore existed long before the seventeenth century. What required further development was the organization of these activities into a sustained practice. Preserving an account allows someone else to examine and repeat the investigation, but that opportunity matters only if people actually take it up. Regular meetings, correspondence and eventually scientific journals helped investigators find one another\u2019s work and gave them reasons to test it.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Royal Society<\/span><\/a> offers an example of how those arrangements developed. Founded in London in 1660, it grew out of informal gatherings of people interested in investigating nature and applying what they learned to practical problems. Members met regularly to conduct demonstrations and discuss results, while correspondence brought observations from farther afield. Its motto, <\/span>Nullius in verba<\/span><\/i>, is usually translated as \u201ctake nobody\u2019s word for it.\u201d Regular meetings gave that ambition a practical form: an investigator could describe an experiment before people who could question both the procedure and the interpretation. Henry Oldenburg, the Society\u2019s secretary, maintained an extensive network of correspondents and in 1665, he began publishing <\/span>Philosophical Transactions<\/span><\/i><\/a>, bringing reports of ongoing investigations to readers who had neither attended the meetings nor received the original letters. This was one of the first scientific journals and represents a major step along the path to the modern scientific process. Making findings publicly available meant that other scientists could consider the ideas, criticize them, and run their own independent tests.<\/span><\/p>\n

Publication also offered a practical incentive to share, as a dated account could establish who had first reported a discovery. In seeking public credit, an investigator exposed the claim to examination by others, including competitors. Readers could question the methods, attempt to reproduce the result, or propose a different explanation. These arrangements encouraged scrutiny, but publication alone could not guarantee that anyone would check a result or correct an error. Then, as now, our confidence in a finding should grow as it survives examination by people using different methods and approaching the question with different expectations. For someone encountering a claim in a news story or social media video, much of that examination will necessarily have been done by others. My student cannot inspect a data center or repeat every calculation behind its reported water use. But she can learn to ask what was measured, whether others can inspect the methods, whether independent investigators obtain similar results, whether the comparisons are fair, and what the accumulated evidence supports. These five questions help reveal how thoroughly a claim has been checked and how much confidence it has earned and we can apply each of them to her bottle of water.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Before doing so, we need to determine what type of claim we are examining. Public controversies often combine questions about what is happening, predictions about what will happen, and judgments about what should be done. These questions are connected, but they require different kinds of answers. Climate change, for example, involves both empirical questions and judgments about how to respond. Whether the planet is warming is an empirical question: we can compare temperature measurements taken over time, while checking whether changes in instruments, locations, or methods could account for the apparent trend. What causes the warming is also an empirical question, although answering it requires more than establishing that temperatures have risen. We need to compare possible explanations and ask which best accounts for the observations. Predicting future warming adds assumptions about future emissions and how the climate will respond. Evidence can constrain those predictions, and their accuracy can be assessed as observations accumulate. Deciding what risks to accept, how quickly to act, and who should bear the costs also requires judgments about priorities and obligations. People can agree about the physical evidence and still disagree about those choices. Good decisions require us to understand both the evidence and its uncertainties. My student\u2019s question about AI and water use contains a similar mixture. How much water a particular system uses to complete a specified task is an empirical question. How much water data centers will use in 2030 is a forecast that depends on assumptions about construction, demand, and technological change. Whether that use is excessive requires us to consider what the water would otherwise support and how we value the competing uses. Determining who receives the benefits and who bears the costs involves empirical investigation; deciding whether that distribution is fair requires a further judgment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Evidence about water use can inform these decisions, but a measurement alone cannot settle them. A lower estimate of water use might weaken one objection to a proposed data center while leaving concerns about the distribution of benefits unanswered. Equally, a company\u2019s poor treatment of a community would not establish that a particular estimate of its water use is accurate. We need to examine each claim closely enough to know what evidence would support it and what remains to be decided.<\/span><\/p>\n

Question 1: What exactly was measured? <\/b>My student\u2019s claim sounds specific: one question uses one bottle of water. But \u201ca question\u201d is not a standard amount of computational work, and \u201cwater use\u201d can, somewhat non-intuitively, include several different things. Before checking the number, we need to establish which system performed what task, under what conditions, and what the calculation counted. One prominent source of the bottle comparison was a study released in 2023 by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, and the University of Texas at Arlington. <\/span>Riverside\u2019s announcement<\/span><\/a> described an estimated half-liter of water for approximately twenty to fifty questions and answers. That estimate included water consumed both in cooling the data center and in generating its electricity. The researchers were calculating a footprint from energy demand and water-use information, rather than measuring water flowing through a pipe each time someone entered a question. Even on its own terms, this was a bottle spread across multiple exchanges. A 2024 <\/span>Washington Post<\/span><\/i><\/a> calculation put a 100-word GPT-4 email at 519 milliliters, assuming 140 watt-hours of electricity. Neither calculation establishes a fixed water cost for asking any chatbot anything. The electricity required is one input; the water consumed per unit of electricity and the cooling arrangements are others. Changing those inputs changes the answer. To assess an estimate, we need to inspect the assumptions as well as the arithmetic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Google reported<\/span><\/a> that the median Gemini Apps text prompt in May 2025 consumed an estimated 0.26 milliliters of water, or about five drops. It derived this estimate from measurements of its serving infrastructure\u2019s energy use and the previous year\u2019s average of data-center water consumption per unit of energy. This water figure covered onsite consumption, excluding water consumed in generating electricity. It described the median text prompt, rather than the average across all requests or the demands of image and video generation. That result provides evidence that onsite water consumption for a text response can be very small. However, it does not establish the full water footprint of every chatbot request. One possibility is that some of the difference between Google\u2019s figure and the earlier estimates are the result of efficiency gains. However, we can\u2019t easily make this comparison because the systems, tasks, dates, and accounting methods differ. These differences also do not make every estimate equally credible. We still need to examine how well the inputs are supported. The answer depends substantially on what the number describes. Are we counting only onsite water consumption, or electricity generation too? One specified task, a typical request, or an entire conversation? Once the claim is clearly defined, we can ask whether its methods and supporting evidence are available for anyone else to examine.<\/span><\/p>\n

Question 2: Can other people inspect it? <\/b>Once we are clear on what a claim means, we need to examine how its authors arrived at it. What did they observe directly? What did they calculate or assume? Could someone else follow the procedure and identify a mistake? The public record gives people something more substantial to examine than the author\u2019s assurance that the work was done carefully. <\/span>Google\u2019s technical paper<\/span><\/a> illustrates both the usefulness and the limits of disclosure. It describes how the researchers combined energy measurements with water-use information, allowing readers to identify what the estimate includes and what it leaves out. But it does not provide outsiders with the underlying operational records needed to reproduce the full calculation independently. We can examine the reasoning while recognizing that some of the evidence remains under the company\u2019s control. For a company reporting on its own environmental impact, that distinction matters: it has access to valuable information and an obvious financial interest in how the findings are understood.<\/span><\/p>\n

A reader of a published explanation might find an arithmetic error, question an assumption, or notice that a conclusion extends beyond the systems actually studied. Access to the underlying data permits further questions about how observations were selected and whether the reported summary represents them fairly. Disclosure creates opportunities for these different kinds of checking. In 2021, an <\/span>Oregonian<\/span><\/i> reporter requested records of Google\u2019s water use in The Dalles, Oregon. The city withheld them on trade-secret grounds and, after the district attorney ordered their release, sued to prevent disclosure. <\/span>A settlement in December 2022<\/span><\/a> required the city to release annual water-use records for 2012\u20132021 and to provide comparable information in response to future requests. Residents\u2019 ability to examine the company\u2019s demands on their water system depended on a reporter pursuing the records and a legal process securing access to them. Those records could not settle every question about whether a data center benefited the community. They could, however, establish part of the factual basis for that discussion. Without them, residents had fewer ways to assess assurances about resource use or allegations of harm. Withholding evidence does not establish that a claim is false, but it limits the confidence outsiders can reasonably place in it.<\/span><\/p>\n

My student need not personally audit every source she encounters, but she can ask whether the evidence is available to people capable of examining it. That leaves a further distinction to consider: making scrutiny possible is one achievement; having independent investigators actually undertake it is another.<\/span><\/p>\n

Question 3: Has anyone independent checked it? <\/b>A claim can appear in a newspaper, dozens of videos, and hundreds of social media posts while still resting on one calculation that hasn\u2019t been independently verified. Independent checking requires someone to examine the work, repeat the investigation, or approach the question through an alternative method that could reveal errors in the original result. Peer review, while far from perfect, provides an opportunity for some of this investigation. My students often leave the textbook explanation of the scientific method without understanding the difference between an article that has been gone through by an editor and one subject to peer-review – examined by researchers with relevant expertise in a field pertinent to the claims. In a peer-reviewed research journal, reviewers assess whether a paper\u2019s methods and results support its conclusions. They can identify overlooked alternative explanations, questionable analyses, and claims that go beyond the evidence. But reviewers usually examine the work as presented to them; they do not repeat the full investigation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Important errors may therefore become apparent only when someone attempts the investigation again. In 2015, the <\/span>Open Science Collaboration<\/span><\/a> attempted to replicate one hundred studies from psychology journals. While 97 percent of the original studies reported statistically significant results, shockingly – only 36 percent of the replications did. Furthermore, the replicated effects were only about half as large on average. A result falling short of statistical significance does not by itself establish that no effect exists, but these findings showed how much uncertainty could remain after publication and peer review.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Independence is important because investigators can share mistakes as well as insights. With regard to my student\u2019s question, several calculations that all assume the same electricity demand could agree closely even if that assumption were wrong. Confidence grows more when different approaches, with different opportunities for error, produce compatible results. Repeating a procedure can show whether its result recurs, whereas approaching the problem with a different procedure can help establish whether the result depends on an unnoticed feature of the original setup.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regarding datacenter water use, there are independent and somewhat converging results, though the full picture remains a bit muddy. In February 2025, an analysis published by <\/span>Epoch AI<\/span><\/a> estimated roughly 0.3 watt-hours for a typical GPT-4o text query, using assumptions about the model\u2019s computational requirements and the hardware serving it. Google subsequently reported 0.24 watt-hours for its median Gemini Apps text prompt, based on measurements within its own infrastructure. These concerned different systems and were not replications of the same experiment. Nevertheless, their rough agreement nevertheless provides some support for the narrower conclusion that ordinary text requests can require only a few tenths of a watt-hour. We can now return to the electricity assumption behind the Washington Post\u2019s bottle-per-email estimate: 0.14 kilowatt-hours, or 140 watt-hours. That is roughly five hundred times the electricity in these later estimates. The systems, tasks and dates differ, so this comparison does not necessarily establish that the original calculation was wrong for the task it described. It does show why we should not carry that assumption forward as the electricity required for any chatbot response. However, this is still only evidence about electricity. To calculate the associated water consumption, we need to know how a particular data center is cooled and how its electricity is generated.<\/span><\/p>\n

For my student who is frequently exposed to claims of very high water usage by AI, the practical question is whether the sources repeating a number have contributed any additional checking. Did someone inspect the assumptions? Obtain new measurements? Try another method? Ten articles tracing back to the same study still leave us with one study. What increases confidence is additional work that had a meaningful chance of finding something wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n

Question 4: Does the comparison support the conclusion? <\/b>Earlier, we saw how ordinary observation can appear to confirm incorrect explanations. Numbers can mislead us in a similar way, even when they are accurate. Hearing that a data center consumes millions of liters of water sounds alarming, especially when I compare it with my personal water use. But most of us have little intuitive understanding of water use at an industrial scale, or how AI datacenter water use compares with other industries. We need a comparison appropriate to the question before we can decide what the number means. A per-prompt estimate tells us about the resources required for a task, whereas an annual total tells us about aggregate demand. If each request uses half as much water but the number of requests quadruples, total consumption doubles. Improving efficiency and increasing consumption can therefore occur together.<\/span><\/p>\n

We also need to use consistent definitions to enable accurate comparisons. Water withdrawal means taking water from a source; some of it may subsequently be returned. Water consumption is the portion unavailable for immediate local reuse, often because it evaporates. Comparing one industry\u2019s consumption with another\u2019s withdrawals can create a large apparent difference simply by changing what is counted.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory<\/span><\/a> estimated that United States data centers directly consumed about 66 billion liters of water in 2023, with nearly 800 billion additional liters attributed to generating their electricity. These modeled estimates cover all data centers, including uses beyond AI, and imply a combined operational footprint of roughly 870 billion liters that year. For comparison, the <\/span>U.S. Geological Survey<\/span><\/a> estimated that irrigation in the United States consumed approximately 100 trillion liters of water in 2015. That is more than one hundred times the estimated annual data-center footprint, even including electricity generation. The estimates concern different years and methods, so this comparison establishes their approximate relative scale rather than a precise current ratio. This national comparison still cannot answer the questions faced by a particular community. Water available elsewhere in the country does not relieve a shortage in the town\u2019s own watershed, and a facility\u2019s small national share does not establish that its local effects are small. For my student, the question is whether the comparison answers her concern. A few drops per request cannot settle the question of an industry\u2019s total demand. A large annual total cannot establish the consequences for a particular community. We need to choose the comparison according to what we want to find out, and keep that question fixed when interpreting the result.<\/span><\/p>\n

Question 5: What survives when evidence accumulates? <\/b>As evidence accumulates, we can begin to ask more demanding questions of an explanation. Does it account for findings from different populations and methods? Does it explain when an effect appears, how its strength varies, and when it disappears?<\/span><\/p>\n

The evidence linking smoking to lung cancer illustrates this process. Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill published <\/span>an influential study in 1950<\/span><\/a> comparing the smoking histories of patients with and without lung cancer. They subsequently began following British doctors over time, reporting <\/span>initial mortality findings in 1954<\/span><\/a>. The different designs approached the question from opposite directions: one looked back from illness to previous exposure, while the other recorded smoking habits before observing subsequent deaths.<\/span><\/p>\n

The statistician Ronald Fisher questioned whether smoking itself caused the cancer. Perhaps an inherited predisposition made people both more likely to smoke and more susceptible to the disease. <\/span>Fisher also worked as a consultant to the tobacco industry<\/span><\/a>, which promoted this alternative explanation. His financial relationship deserved scrutiny, but the possibility of a common cause was a question that evidence needed to address. The causal link between smoking and cancer gained strength as findings accumulated – the association appeared across many studies; risk increased with the amount and duration of smoking; and <\/span>people who stopped smoking subsequently had lower risks<\/span><\/a> than those who continued. Any competing explanation had to account for these patterns and Fisher\u2019s explanation did not. The accumulated evidence undermined the claim that an inherited predisposition could explain the association without smoking itself causing harm. Genetic differences could influence susceptibility without explaining away the harmful effects of smoking.<\/span><\/p>\n

Returning to my student\u2019s question, the evidence supports several conclusions with different degrees of confidence. The claim that every chatbot question consumes a bottle of water cannot be sustained as a general rule. Google\u2019s study provides evidence that onsite water consumption associated with a text prompt can be a fraction of a milliliter, although that estimate excludes water consumed in generating electricity and does not describe every kind of AI task. Could the omitted electricity-related water bring the figure back up to a bottle? We can explore that possibility with a calculation, provided we make its assumptions clear. Google reported 0.24 watt-hours for its median text prompt. If we apply Berkeley Lab\u2019s estimated U.S. data-center electricity factor of 4.52 liters of water per kilowatt-hour, generating that electricity would consume about 1.1 milliliters. Adding Google\u2019s onsite estimate gives about 1.3 milliliters in total. This is an illustrative calculation, not a measurement of Gemini\u2019s full footprint: the electricity supplying Google\u2019s systems may differ from the national average used here. Under this assumption, however, including electricity generation increases the estimate several times over while leaving it far below a 500-milliliter bottle. The omission matters, but it does not by itself rescue the bottle-per-question claim. We still cannot assign a precise footprint to my student\u2019s particular request.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the industrial scale, the Berkeley Lab estimates indicate growth in direct water consumption between 2014 and 2023. Our comparison with irrigation places data-center demand in a broader national context. Neither finding establishes what a particular community can sustainably supply. That requires local evidence about water availability, competing demands, and the facility itself. My student can therefore become less confident in the bottle-per-question claim without concluding that every concern about data centers is unfounded. She can also recognize uncertainty about a particular request without treating all estimates as equally plausible. The aim is to reach the most specific conclusions the evidence supports, and to know which questions remain open.<\/span><\/p>\n

The scientific process described in this essay is extremely powerful and underlies much of human progress – but correction depends on people having the opportunity and incentive to examine claims. It does not happen automatically, and the process can be lengthy and complicated. My student is not training to become a scientist. I cannot expect her or the average citizen to inspect every claim they encounter, look through detailed methods and primary sources, and seek out additional evidence from peer-reviewed research. Even understanding one paper can require substantial expertise, and knowing how it fits with everything else published on the subject requires a great deal more. Scientists themselves depend on other researchers to gather and evaluate that larger record. So we\u2019re left with a practical question. When my students are confronted with issues like these, where should they actually look for more information?<\/span><\/p>\n

Different kinds of publications serve different purposes. Understanding these can help us to decide where to focus when looking for information. A primary research paper reports a particular investigation. A preprint makes a manuscript available before formal peer review. Neither, by itself, tells us how well the findings have survived subsequent scrutiny. These are not good places to start for someone outside of the field who is trying to get a good overview or understanding of the consensus positions. <\/span>A systematic review<\/span><\/a> addresses a defined question by searching for relevant studies according to explicit rules, assessing their limitations, and considering what they establish together. A meta-analysis can combine sufficiently comparable results statistically. These methods help reviewers examine a body of evidence without simply selecting the studies they find most persuasive. Their reliability still depends on the search, the selection rules, and the quality of the underlying research. These caveats aside, for many questions, an accessible summary of a well-conducted review is therefore a useful place to begin. <\/span>Cochrane<\/span><\/a> provides plain-language summaries of its health research reviews. <\/span>National Academies consensus reports<\/span><\/a> assemble expert assessments of scientific and technical questions and undergo independent review. <\/span>The IPCC\u2019s assessments<\/span><\/a> draw together climate research and explicitly distinguish findings by their degree of confidence. These publications offer readers a way to benefit from work that would be difficult to repeat individually.<\/span><\/p>\n

Relying on expertise is reasonable for busy humans with finite time and energy. However, we should not blindly trust any organizations based on their perceived authority or reputation alone. What matters is why that expertise deserves our trust: whether conclusions are supported by evidence, exposed to independent criticism, and revised when better evidence arrives. Reputations and practices can change, so the same five questions apply to reviews and reports: what did they examine, what can others inspect, how independently have their conclusions been checked, do their comparisons support what they say, and what does the accumulated evidence establish?<\/span><\/p>\n

I want my students to leave a science course with more than the ability to select a correct answer on multiple choice exams. I want them to have some understanding of why an answer deserves their confidence, and what evidence might change it.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by W. Alex Foxworthy Recently, following an assignment that required AI use, a student asked me whether it was true that every question she asks a chatbot uses up a whole bottle of water. Like so much information today, she received this claim via a social media video. The video apparently cited a newspaper article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1939,"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-310995","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310995","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\/1939"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310995"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311011,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310995\/revisions\/311011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":311005,"date":"2026-09-07T04:00:50","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T08:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=311005"},"modified":"2026-09-07T01:26:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T05:26:39","slug":"poem-by-jim-culleny-95","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/poem-by-jim-culleny-95.html","title":{"rendered":"Poem by Jim Culleny"},"content":{"rendered":"

Architecture and Light<\/h2>\n

What would architecture be without light,
\nor light without architecture, man-made
\nor that which emerged over eons:
\nincredible trellises of trees,
\ntheir intricate frames of chiaroscuro
\non light-slanted walks under
\nshifting limbs while leaves flash and flutter
\nthrough the architecture within skulls,
\nsynapse nets of Rorschach shadows,
\ntheir night-borne lightning or, for that matter,
\nthe hidden boney structure that holds it all erect
\nas it steps into stairwells enriched
\nby radiated thought and sun?<\/p>\n

Jim Culleny, 2\/21\/22<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

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

Architecture and Light What would architecture be without light, or light without architecture, man-made or that which emerged over eons: incredible trellises of trees, their intricate frames of chiaroscuro on light-slanted walks under shifting limbs while leaves flash and flutter through the architecture within skulls, synapse nets of Rorschach shadows, their night-borne lightning or, for…<\/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":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-311005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311005","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=311005"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311008,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311005\/revisions\/311008"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310956,"date":"2026-09-06T13:17:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T17:17:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310956"},"modified":"2026-09-06T11:19:00","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T15:19:00","slug":"wendell-berry-1934-2026-novelist-poet-farmer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/wendell-berry-1934-2026-novelist-poet-farmer.html","title":{"rendered":"Wendell Berry (1934 – 2026) Novelist, Poet, Farmer"},"content":{"rendered":"