Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How to Be a Poet (to remind myself) 1. Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill\u2014more of each than you have\u2014inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. 2. Breathe with unconditional…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310780","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\/310780","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=310780"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310780\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310781,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310780\/revisions\/310781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310776,"date":"2026-09-02T07:57:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T11:57:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310776"},"modified":"2026-09-02T07:57:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-02T11:57:12","slug":"takeaways-from-salima-hashmis-memoirs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/takeaways-from-salima-hashmis-memoirs.html","title":{"rendered":"Takeaways from Salima Hashmi\u2019s Memoirs"},"content":{"rendered":" Ambica Gulati in\u00a0Queen of Treasures:<\/em><\/p>\n These pages taught me more about South Asia, art, peace, humanity, and the burden and nostalgia of shared roots than any history lesson I\u2019ve read earlier. Like her famous father, Hashmi creates magic with words. But words carry weight, and she learned this early at home. As a woman donning many hats, raised to be her own person, she has the skills to add colour, shape, and form to the ideas that take root in creative individuals.<\/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":" Ambica Gulati in\u00a0Queen of Treasures: The elder daughter of celebrated poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Salima Hashmi chronicles the many colourful dimensions of her life in these unputdownable books. Her life isn\u2019t just a shadow of her iconic poet father or her firebrand mother, but an intersection of passion, peace, and humane values set against the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310776","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\/310776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310776"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310776\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310779,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310776\/revisions\/310779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310766,"date":"2026-09-02T07:31:28","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T11:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310766"},"modified":"2026-09-01T18:35:45","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T22:35:45","slug":"olaf-stapledons-last-and-first-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/olaf-stapledons-last-and-first-men.html","title":{"rendered":"Olaf Stapledon\u2019s ‘Last and First Men’"},"content":{"rendered":" Matthew De Abaitua at the MIT Reader<\/em>:<\/p>\n In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the \u201cAnglesey vision\u201d that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had \u201ca sudden fantasy of man\u2019s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.\u201d<\/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":" Matthew De Abaitua at the MIT Reader: Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, \u201cLast and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,\u201d in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity\u2019s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of…<\/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-310766","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\/310766","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=310766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310769,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310766\/revisions\/310769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310575,"date":"2026-09-02T06:00:38","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T10:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310575"},"modified":"2026-08-31T03:38:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T07:38:11","slug":"good-bones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/good-bones.html","title":{"rendered":"Good Bones"},"content":{"rendered":" by Lei Wang<\/strong><\/p>\n Maple syrup is made by boiling down the much more watery maple sap, the stuff that actually comes from the trees and is only 2% sugar. It takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. My college writing professor used this as a metaphor for the writing process. By this measure, I have 15 pages of my book instead of 600.<\/p>\n I used to think good writing was about beautiful, ornate language; my early blog was full of embellished sentences that meant very little. Someone in my translation class called this act of needless prettifying (as when a translator commits the crime of making the original text fancier than it is) \u201cgilding the yam.\u201d (As opposed to gilding the lily, which is more of a fashion crime.) Then I got over beauty, entered the camp of meaning. But how to determine what is truly meaningful, when so much can be? And thus another writer not inaccurately described my essays as \u201ca smart person sits you down to teach you about life but gets distracted 18 times along the way.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard not to gild the yam. I still want to make a flurry of connections in an ADHD pastiche. I have often been better at spontaneous stir-fries than a focused dish; bibimbap is for lazy people. And now I have too many food metaphors.<\/p>\n So much of writing is decision-making: thousands of moments of determining what is actually important instead of trying to stuff everything in. Too much fat in writing is not just overenthusiasm, but usually a sign of something more insidious. For me, it has something to do with trying to prove something, wanting to Show My Work. \u201cLook at my effort!\u201d I want to say, which hasn\u2019t mattered since high school math class. True brilliance is not diffuse light but the pointy kind.<\/p>\n I have spent the last month in a little cabin in the woods trying to be pointy. How do I turn 600 pages into 150 pages of semi-syrup? What is actually essential? What, to use another metaphor from the above-mentioned writing professor, is my David, the figure in the marble that is only revealed when the inessential is carved away? In a cabin, I\u2019m also reminded, of course, that I need very little to live. The David is enough, not more shoes and pudding.<\/p>\n Not everything is important, which sometimes feels unfair. I used to hate putting people and ideas into boxes in journalism, but this is what we all do; we can only try to make the boxes better.<\/p>\n Declarations of meaning are vulnerable. To make pronouncements instead of hedges and caveats. Having a strong opinion opens you up for rejection but also rewards you with an identity, which is something I still have to learn in relationships.<\/p>\n I am currently ambiguously dating a clown whose clown teacher has many rules, because even clowns need constraints. One of the rules is \u201cMore, more, more!\u201d Always be giving the audience more. And yet the teacher\u2019s advice was that actually, for him, more more more could be less less less. He could do with fewer movements on stage; the movements, while outwardly very showy, were actually hiding something more important, something better.<\/p>\n I think of Antoine de Saint-Exupery taking two years to perfect every line of The Little Prince<\/i>, which is only 16,000 words total.<\/p>\n And yet writing is not actually carved from a single block of marble. According to Matt Bell\u2019s craft book on writing, <\/i>Refuse to Be Done,<\/i><\/a> sometimes we first have to make a map the size of the city before we can make a map the size of a map. (This is also the premise of a Borges short story.)<\/p>\n I tried to keep this column shorter than usual, under a thousand words, when I usually venture into the 2500-word range, as if more is more. Which brings us back to another instruction from my college writing teacher<\/a>, who would not abide our crossing the word limit on any assignment. She defended her decision via a line from Wordsworth praising the limited form of the sonnet: \u201cNuns fret not at their convent\u2019s narrow room.<\/a>\u201d For it is within their tiny rooms that they meet God, the biggest thing possible.<\/p>\n If you truly couldn\u2019t kill your darlings completely, she suggested attaching a cemetery document with scraps of your favorite deleted phrases, may they rest in peace.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Constraints aren\u2019t just of time and space.<\/p>\n For my best friend<\/a>, her difficulties in writing came from working under the wrong psychological constraints. Every time she sat down to write, she would be asking, \u201cDoes the sentence sound smart? Does it sound prestigious? Am I writing about things that people will pay money to read?\u201d It was not only until she started asking the right question\u2014\u201cam I actually interested in this material?\u201d\u2014that she was able to make progress. And it\u2019s not a one-time question, but a continuous re-calibration. (Now she also runs an AI start-up doing the very same thing, giving AI agents the right constraints so they channel their enormous intelligence into something pointedly useful, instead of doing a lot of busy work.)<\/p>\n Of course, as Oliver Burkeman and Leo Tolstoy would attest, everything comes down to being infinite beings living in finite lives. It\u2019s impossible to really finish anything, but we make do.<\/p>\n The clown told me secondhand something some Buddhist monks had told him: when uncertain about something, as one is with many things in life, why not take the path that is more full of love or whatever it is you most value? Then you are not making many decisions; you are making just one decision. No one can really see the road far ahead, but you are putting one foot in front of the other, and each foot is pointing towards the ultimate direction. That\u2019s the only way anything gets done anyway.<\/p>\n RIP<\/p>\n A contradictory writing-as-food metaphor, via Jack Gilbert:<\/p>\n \u201cThe spirit dances, comes and goes. But the soul is nailed to us like lentils and fatty bacon lodged under the ribs. What lasted is what the soul ate.\u201d<\/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 Lei Wang Maple syrup is made by boiling down the much more watery maple sap, the stuff that actually comes from the trees and is only 2% sugar. It takes 40 gallons of maple sap to make 1 gallon of maple syrup. My college writing professor used this as a metaphor for the writing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1806,"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-310575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310575","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\/1806"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310575"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310575\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310633,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310575\/revisions\/310633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310554,"date":"2026-09-02T05:00:07","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T09:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310554"},"modified":"2026-08-31T03:35:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-31T07:35:10","slug":"fabulism-what-moderate-democrats-dont-get-about-the-gaza-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/fabulism-what-moderate-democrats-dont-get-about-the-gaza-war.html","title":{"rendered":"Fabulism: What Moderate Democrats Don’t Get About The Gaza War"},"content":{"rendered":" by Christopher Hall<\/strong><\/p>\n About this time ten years ago, I was making a wreck of myself by paying an absurd amount of attention to the politics of a country I\u2019m not even a citizen of. Every morning would begin with an inspection of Nate Silver\u2019s 538 to see where the polls were; was it still a sure thing Clinton was going to win in two and a half month\u2019s time? I was no fan of Clinton, and I\u2019m still not, but the alternative was unthinkable. 538 remained cautiously optimistic on this front, but other sources were nowhere near as circumspect. DailyKos, I recall, pegged Clinton\u2019s chances at 90%. At the cusp of the Trump Era \u2013 and despite the brief, ineffective Biden moment, the past ten years can\u2019t really be described as anything but \u2013 I was relying on the chiromancy of the pollsters to have a better sense of what America\u2019s palm read. Of course, for most of them, they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n Well, now the unthinkable is our daily bread, and I am no longer obsessed with the polls. My already shaky belief in the Democrats as a functioning political entity entirely collapsed after the failure of the Harris campaign, a moment when farce and tragedy became indistinguishable. I, of course, would prefer that they take over Congress in the midterms, but if they happen not to, my shoulders already have a shrug pre-loaded. This is deeply irresponsible, given the damage that the Trump administration is currently inflicting with utterly malign purpose on the Canadian economy. But I can\u2019t help myself; the words \u201clost cause,\u201d with all their historical weight, inevitably come to my mind when it turns its focus southward.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s one area where I have been paying some attention, it\u2019s been toward the brewing civil war<\/a> \u00a0within the Democratic party itself. The primary nominations of a few progressives have been enough, it seems, to send moderate Democrats into apoplexy, and they can be heard shouting their rallying cry of \u201cNot Electable\u201d across the land.<\/p>\n Again and again, the Gaza War has emerged as a litmus test<\/a> for candidates. Israel and Gaza are deeply embedded in the American political consciousness at this point, and that leads to the level of cognitive dissonance in at least some moderate Democrats where they might assert that \u201ccriticism of Israel has no place in the Democratic party\u201d and then, seconds later, engage in precisely such criticism<\/a>. \u00a0(Even if we accept that Carville misspoke and meant to say \u201cantisemitism,\u201d it\u2019s at least telling that in at least some part of his consciousness antisemitism and criticism of Israel are necessarily aligned.) Of course, the attitudes of any given country towards any foreign conflict may be proxies for issues closer to home. In suggesting that that is the case here, I hope I won\u2019t be taken to suggest that Americans don\u2019t really care about the slaughter of thousands of civilians. What I mean to say is that, if the Gaza War is indeed acting as a litmus test at the moment, it is part of a story concerning a dueling set political visions that have dominated American politics in the 21st<\/sup> century.<\/p>\n Recall that, in the heady early days of the Iraq War, a clear divide was staked between those who were in what was called the reality-based community\u00a0<\/a>and those who weren\u2019t:<\/p>\n The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”<\/p>\n The \u201caide\u201d here \u2013 suspected of being Karl Rove \u2013 is articulating a vision of American power that has, in true colonial boomerang fashion, rebounded into domestic affairs. The Gaza War thus becomes a proxy for a much older and broader issue: the ability or inability, simply put, to put accurate names to what reality delivers to us. If you can\u2019t call what was clearly and obviously a genocide a genocide, you will not be able to effectively combat those who think Tylenol causes autism, who don\u2019t think climate change is real, and who don\u2019t believe the US constitution grants birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n \u201cReality-based community\u201d here was spoken in contrast to the \u201cfaith-based communities\u201d that were a key component of Bush\u2019s domestic policy. It may be that current crisis is only the most recent modulation of a divide that\u2019s exited since America\u2019s birth, between the secularism inherent in its construction and the fundamentalist drives of significant portions of its population. But it is a least clear that we are in a new key. The core political divide in 21st<\/sup> century America is between fabulists and anti-fabulists, and moderate Democrats are failing to be able to make clear that they are among the people who can name things for what they are. <\/em><\/p>\n Fabulism, as a literary genre (this is where the current matter links with my overall interest in speculative fiction), attempts to integrate elements of fantasy into what is an overall realist frame. The core of the matter is that reality never quite goes away or becomes irrelevant, but is rather shaped and altered by elements more commonly found in fable and fairy tale. The writer picks and chooses, and the genre as a whole is, one could say, a metaphor for the ways in which we incorporate fantasies and illusions into our everyday lives. This isn\u2019t to truck in the very old idea that fantasy is inevitably harmful to readers \u2013 not just children, but of all ages. But it is certain that fantasy needs to know its place, purpose and time \u2013 just like reality needs to.<\/p>\n The political fabulist is better than a simple liar, as they are lying to an audience fully primed to be receptive, even if its members live on a spectrum between full acceptance and simple, perhaps ironic pleasure in the tale being told. This is the essence of the fabulism of this moment: it allows those invested in it to add or subtract just as much reality as they wish to, and that ratio may vary from moment to moment. But with that said, the nudge-wink rhetoric of the Bush years, with all its subliminal hints that it never really took seriously the idea that there were WMDs in Iraq, has evolved into superliminal demands that the world is precisely what MAGA says is it, and damn the degeneracy of those who gainsay it.<\/p>\n If shared consensus about reality has been broken in America, it\u2019s because a sizable enough chunk of the population has become deeply practiced at unseeing<\/a>\u00a0reality. Democrats may not need to adopt every item on the Democratic Socialist of America\u2019s wish list, but they must at least show they aren\u2019t on the slide of the neo-imperial imaginary.<\/p>\n Of course, political fabulation is just another form of giving the people what they want \u2013 or what you can convince them they want. This goes some way to explaining its success, and it would be na\u00efve to suggest that Democrats of any flavour are free from either its influence or the temptation to employ it. What Freud called the pleasure principle, our basic drive towards satisfaction and away from anything unpleasant, only gives way to the reality principle reluctantly; as he says in Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning, <\/em>\u201cThe replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, with all the psychical consequences involved\u2026is not in fact accomplished at all once; nor does it take place simultaneously all along the line.\u201d We can engage in this form of fantasization and all the repression that it entails even as we are aware that it does not stand up to reality testing.<\/p>\n Democrats cannot continue to state that Israeli would not, could not, and did not commit crimes, when it would, it could, and it did. It cannot rely on a broken moral calculus that finds that counter-atrocity is a fair response to atrocity. These are abandonments of the reality principle when it is most crucially needed, when matters of deep ethical concern are at hand. It is a fundamental problem, of course, because the political reality principle demands renunciation of what\u2019s most wanted. If we think Americans are no longer capable of this, we\u2019ve essentially conceded the future to Trump and his emergent avatars.<\/p>\n The basic libidinal economy of American politics \u2013 maybe all politics \u2013 depends on a constant exchange between fantasy and reality, and a disturbance of the equilibrium can have the deepest consequences, even if the disturbance is never symmetrical. A majority of Americans, including a lot of Republicans, oppose data centers<\/a>, but start talking about \u201csurveillance capitalism\u201d and you\u2019ll get a lot of glazed eyes and potentially hostile looks. What I\u2019ve been most impressed with in the progressive and socialist candidates is that, contrary to expectations indoctrinated into us that say that left-wingers are fatally compromised by utopianism and other such miasmas, they mostly seem pretty down-to-earth. Zohran Mamdani is the archetype here, and his brand of \u201cfix-the-potholes\u201d socialism seems, for the moment, to be working.<\/p>\n That litmus test that so many moderate Democrats are failing goes well beyond foreign policy in general or towards the Middle East in particular, and it goes beyond any contemplation of the influence of\u00a0entities like AIPAC. Again, I am not particularly worried about the future of the Democratic party; so far as I\u2019m concerned, given its stunning inability to learn anything from its mistakes, it can go the way of Whigs. We talk a great deal about the breaking of consensus in the age of social media, but I\u2019d hazard that democracy depends on something deeper than mere consensus. There must be an indexical ability functional among a large enough portion of the population that people subject to all forms of ideological fantasies can still point at a thing and say \u201cThere it is.\u201d If we shouldn\u2019t delude ourselves about the possibility of illusion-free politics, or be jaundiced about the uses of fantasy, the fact remains clear: reality must be on the ballot.<\/p>\n Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Christopher Hall About this time ten years ago, I was making a wreck of myself by paying an absurd amount of attention to the politics of a country I\u2019m not even a citizen of. Every morning would begin with an inspection of Nate Silver\u2019s 538 to see where the polls were; was it still…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1798,"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-310554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310554","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\/1798"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310554"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310631,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310554\/revisions\/310631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310763,"date":"2026-09-02T04:00:02","date_gmt":"2026-09-02T08:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310763"},"modified":"2026-09-01T13:09:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T17:09:14","slug":"catspeak-483","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/catspeak-483.html","title":{"rendered":"Catspeak"},"content":{"rendered":" by Brooks Riley<\/strong><\/p>\n Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Brooks Riley Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"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-310763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310763","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\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310765,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310763\/revisions\/310765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310743,"date":"2026-09-01T14:45:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T18:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310743"},"modified":"2026-09-01T04:37:28","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T08:37:28","slug":"william-t-vollmann-pens-a-3000-page-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/william-t-vollmann-pens-a-3000-page-novel.html","title":{"rendered":"William T. Vollmann pens a 3,000\u2011page novel"},"content":{"rendered":" Christopher Coffman at The Conversation<\/em>:<\/p>\n His projects grapple with weighty matters such as\u00a0global poverty<\/a>,\u00a0the history of North America<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0climate change<\/a>. Few of his roughly 25 books run under 500 pages. About half try to keep his readers engaged for several hundred beyond that. Many of them supplement the text with photographs, epigraphs, glossaries, family trees, sketches, timelines, variant tables of contents, alternating fonts and notes to the reader. The essay \u201cRising Up and Rising Down<\/a>,\u201d his philosophical and journalistic inquiry into the nature of violence, clocks in at over 3,000 pages across seven volumes.<\/p>\n But to those who might argue that this is the worst time to put a monster of a novel into print since\u00a0the days before Johannes Gutenberg created<\/a>\u00a0the movable-type printing press in the 15th century, I would say that Vollmann\u2019s approach is needed now more than ever.<\/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":" Christopher Coffman at The Conversation: The 67-year-old author has spent his career going big, in every sense, and I would not be the first to describe his approach to his art\u00a0as uncompromising. His projects grapple with weighty matters such as\u00a0global poverty,\u00a0the history of North America\u00a0and\u00a0climate change. Few of his roughly 25 books run under 500…<\/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-310743","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\/310743","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=310743"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310746,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310743\/revisions\/310746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310739,"date":"2026-09-01T13:45:18","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T17:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310739"},"modified":"2026-09-01T04:33:46","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T08:33:46","slug":"robot-olympics-reveal-humanoids-rapid-progress-and-flaws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/09\/robot-olympics-reveal-humanoids-rapid-progress-and-flaws.html","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Robot Olympics\u2019 reveal humanoids\u2019 rapid progress \u2014 and flaws"},"content":{"rendered":" Kaia Glickman in Nature<\/em>:<\/p>\n The games highlighted how fast humanoid robots \u2014\u00a0which use artificial intelligence to learn, plan and execute real-world actions<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 are advancing. But they also demonstrated that the machines have a long way to go before they\u2019ll be used by humans for practical tasks.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I ask you which is harder \u2014 folding laundry or doing a backflip \u2014 most people will say folding laundry is way easier,\u201d says Karen Liu, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California. \u201cBut for humanoids, doing a task that we do in our daily lives is actually way harder than a backflip.\u201d<\/p>\n More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/hashmi.jpg\")
The elder daughter of celebrated poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Salima Hashmi chronicles the many colourful dimensions of her life in these unputdownable books. Her life isn\u2019t just a shadow of her iconic poet father or her firebrand mother, but an intersection of passion, peace, and humane values set against the cultural and historical turbulence of Pakistan. The memoirs are rich with stories of a purpose-driven intellectual amid the brutal Partition, Faiz\u2019s exile, censorship, and resistance.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/31329172115._SL300_FMavif_.avif\")
Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, \u201cLast and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,\u201d in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity\u2019s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future. \u201cLast and First Men\u201d eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as \u201can essay in myth creation.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/whale-bones-360x212.jpg\")
(title after the Maggie Smith poem)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/gilded-yam-360x308.webp\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/40d61678-16da-4058-b2b6-ebb7dd4bf180-1-819x1024.png\")
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/Screenshot-2026-09-01-103640-360x231.png\")
The 67-year-old author has spent his career going big, in every sense, and I would not be the first to describe his approach to his art\u00a0as uncompromising<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/d41586-026-02713-z_53174412-360x240.png\")
A human-sized robot sprinted faster than any human has before. Another jumped more than 3 metres in the air to break a record. And a third faced off against a human Olympian during a table-tennis showcase match. These were scenes from the second annual World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing, at which robots\u2019 physical capabilities were put to the test.<\/p>\n