[{"id":309907,"date":"2026-08-23T07:25:40","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T11:25:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309907"},"modified":"2026-08-22T16:27:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T20:27:54","slug":"ileana-cotrubas-1939-2026-opera-soprano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/ileana-cotrubas-1939-2026-opera-soprano.html","title":{"rendered":"Ileana Cotrubas (1939 &#8211; 2026) Opera Soprano"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Ileana Cotrubas - &quot;Si. Mi chiamano Mimi&quot;  from La Boheme\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/JnQz9pOnU2w?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/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-309907","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\/309907","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=309907"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309907\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309908,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309907\/revisions\/309908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309907"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309907"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309907"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309885,"date":"2026-08-23T06:59:54","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309885"},"modified":"2026-08-23T06:59:54","modified_gmt":"2026-08-23T10:59:54","slug":"sunday-poem-491","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/sunday-poem-491.html","title":{"rendered":"Sunday Poem"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #ffffff\">&#8230;.<\/span> Maureen Plays Bach<\/h2>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">Outside, above tulips, sea lavender,<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">hummingbirds \u2013 wing beats<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">swift and sweet as a trill.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">In here, Bach wants Maureen\u2019s fingers<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">to move just so.<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">She cannot think them<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">where to go,<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">so, he waves his baton<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">from the swelling<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">at the top of the spine<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">where Will shows Desire<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">how to enter the World.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">That\u2019s where we store the learned,<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">the practiced virtues \u2013<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">riding a bicycle,<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">feel of a pinch of salt,<br \/>\n<\/span><span style=\"font-family: Times;font-size: large\">\u201cSarabande from Suite A.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.content-magazine.com\/articles\/11-3-nils-peterson\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>by Nils Peterson<\/em><\/a><br \/>\n<em>8\/21\/26<br \/>\n<\/em><strong><br \/>\nEnjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230;. Maureen Plays Bach Outside, above tulips, sea lavender, hummingbirds \u2013 wing beats swift and sweet as a trill. In here, Bach wants Maureen\u2019s fingers to move just so. She cannot think them where to go, so, he waves his baton from the swelling at the top of the spine where Will shows Desire how&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":36,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309885","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\/309885","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=309885"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309885\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309891,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309885\/revisions\/309891"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309361,"date":"2026-08-23T05:00:57","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T09:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309361"},"modified":"2026-08-17T03:06:06","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T07:06:06","slug":"a-search-for-meaning-a-quest-for-purpose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/a-search-for-meaning-a-quest-for-purpose.html","title":{"rendered":"A Search for Meaning, A Quest for Purpose"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by Bonnie McCune<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cThe world is so full of a number of things, I\u2019m sure we should all be as happy as kings.\u201d \u2014Robert Louis Stevenson<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309416\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/61157LApbuL._SY522_-226x360.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"226\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/61157LApbuL._SY522_-226x360.png 226w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/61157LApbuL._SY522_-189x300.png 189w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/61157LApbuL._SY522_.png 328w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 226px) 100vw, 226px\" \/>Over what is slowly becoming a lengthy session of being alive, I\u2019ve found this statement to be absolutely true. I\u2019m usually thrilled with the variety and my experiences so far. However, those things the world is full of aren\u2019t necessarily always pleasant. Or desirable. We\u2019re thrust, will we, nil we, into a stew of unknowns.<\/p>\n<p>One of the mixed blessings of our contemporary way of life is the instantaneous nature of communications. We don\u2019t have to search for the status of bad weather and storms near us; we get the news complete with visuals, sounds, quotes and opinions. Ditto for horrid happenings\u2014from deadly crashes to wars to terrorists to epidemics.<\/p>\n<p>On a more personal level, experiences of individuals. Yes, occurrences like falling in love or having a baby can make you euphoric. But the death of a loved one, the loss of a pet, getting fired from a good job does the opposite. We have a euphemism for these: we might call them challenges, not setbacks or evils. They shouldn\u2019t plunge us into desperate thoughts. We should rise above them, learn from them.<\/p>\n<p>This admonition doesn\u2019t usually affect my inner status, which is easy to send into a panic. Several weeks ago, I spent the entire night nagged by the thought that I hadn\u2019t paid my state property tax. Which I hadn\u2019t. But throughout the night, I envisioned the tax man pounding on my door to levy penalty after penalty as the days passed because the state hadn\u2019t deposited my delinquent check. Then I figured a whole line of checks would bounce because my bank account would be overdrawn. I\u2019d have no way to appeal these decisions; it says so right on the tax website. My luck in getting a human to answer an official phone is zero, despite my customary plea to the automated responder to \u201cI want a human, I want to talk to a human.\u201d<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Lucky for my sleep requirement that sessions like this are occasional. I\u2019ll worry all one night, then be so exhausted the next evening, I\u2019ll successfully grab six or seven hours.<\/p>\n<p>I know I should focus on interesting, positive thoughts (this eliminates current news immediately). The challenge is achieving this. Several years ago, I tried meditation, the kind during which you should be virtually mindless. No thoughts. No emotions. Then how in the heck do you set a goal&#8211;even a goal of number of minutes to meditate\u2014and realize you\u2019re making advances?<\/p>\n<p>I did meditate so frequently that I now can instantaneously chant the mantra &#8220;Sa Ta Na Ma.&#8221; Derived from the ancient Sanskrit language and encapsulating the cyclical nature of life, it represents birth, life, death, and rebirth. Each syllable holds profound meaning: Which of course I can\u2019t remember. Then I worry I\u2019m getting senile dementia.<\/p>\n<p>My most productive results came when I stumbled on a classic tome by Viktor Frankl, a prisoner in\u00a0Nazi concentration camps\u00a0during World War II. <em>Man\u2019s Search for Meaning <\/em>no doubt would have been entitled <em>Men and Women\u2019s<\/em> or <em>People\u2019s Search<\/em> or <em>The Human Search<\/em> had it been published more recently, but its subtitle, <em>Saying Yes to Life Nonetheless, <\/em>explains it all.<em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Frankl was a certified psychologist and served as a physician throughout the war in the camps. This is where he developed his psychotherapeutic\u00a0method, logotherapy. If a person has a purpose for his life, via either completion of tasks, or caring for another person, or facing suffering with dignity, he\u2019ll be able to focus in positive manner on moving toward that goal rather than becoming more depressed and discouraged.<\/p>\n<p>For me, becoming involved with Third Act, a national organization of people over the age of sixty determined to change the world for the better, an elder-led movement for climate action and democracy protection, provided the goals. Ever since I became involved some months ago, I\u2019ve avoided the intense depressions I had been experiencing. Activities are free, simple, and not terribly time consuming, yet I feel I\u2019m part of the segment of our society trying to improve ourselves, our lives, our society.<\/p>\n<p>Frankl called this logotherapy. Now, despite studying psychology in college three generations ago, \u201clogo\u201d to me indicates a marketing technique in which a graphic image captures somehow the artistic and energetic power of an idea. But to Frankl, it was the \u201cThird Viennese School of Psychotherapy\u201d (along with Freud&#8217;s\u00a0psychoanalysis\u00a0and\u00a0Alfred Adler&#8217;s\u00a0individual psychology, an existential analysis\u00a0focusing on\u00a0Kierkegaard&#8217;s\u00a0will to meaning), the premise that the primary motivational force of individuals is to find\u00a0meaning in life.<\/p>\n<p>I like to think that many of us occasionally wonder, \u201cWhat is the meaning of life?\u201d or \u201cWhy am I here?\u201d or \u201cWhy are there so many crackpot crazies wandering around doing evil?\u201d Frankl\u2019s approach provides an uncomplicated manner to move toward feeling we might eventually be able to answer these inexplicable queries. We can ignore our feelings of disquiet, anxiety, foreboding, assign them to our subconscious, and choose to concentrate on whatever we wish, delaying answers for the unsolvable, thus finding purpose for our lives, as Frankl tells us.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve come to believe that action can, indeed, equal progress, or at least help us feel we\u2019re evolving or improving. I also have known for decades that I can\u2019t control everything that occurs, whether natural, human, personal, or induced by malevolent OR benevolent forces. The world is probably better off that I can\u2019t, since I\u2019m not perfect. So I have to let most everything go and tend to itself. But I\u2019m thankful I stumbled across Frankl\u2019s treatise to enable me to be optimistic about life in general.<\/p>\n<p>Each of us must find our life\u2019s purpose on our own, if this important to us. Some are fortunate to accomplish this through a religious faith; some must search, wonder, study, dream; others may settle the question through avoidance or fantasy. I\u2019m still trying to figure out my path.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">***<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by Bonnie McCune \u201cThe world is so full of a number of things, I\u2019m sure we should all be as happy as kings.\u201d \u2014Robert Louis Stevenson Over what is slowly becoming a lengthy session of being alive, I\u2019ve found this statement to be absolutely true. I\u2019m usually thrilled with the variety and my experiences so&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[1208,5392,646,23,6,7224,5361],"class_list":["post-309361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","tag-books","tag-logotherapy","tag-morality","tag-philosophy","tag-psychology","tag-purpose","tag-viktor-frankl","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309361","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\/1664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309361"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309556,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309361\/revisions\/309556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309443,"date":"2026-08-23T04:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-08-23T08:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309443"},"modified":"2026-08-17T03:04:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T07:04:33","slug":"ai-is-the-latest-and-best-financed-cult-to-emerge-from-california","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/ai-is-the-latest-and-best-financed-cult-to-emerge-from-california.html","title":{"rendered":"AI is the Latest and Best-Financed Cult to Emerge from California"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>by David Hoyt<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309554\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/on_2C2-360x270.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"270\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/on_2C2-360x270.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/on_2C2-768x576.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/on_2C2-300x225.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/on_2C2.png 840w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>Had the historian of California, Mike Davis, lived long enough to take in the spectacle of the AI boom, he very well may have seen a through line to earlier hybrids of unvarnished hype, greed, military research, science fiction, and techno-millenarianism, all perduring elements of a unique California ecosystem that has evolved some of the nation\u2019s more distinctive cultural formations. If you think Peter Thiel\u2019s itinerant, closed-door lectures on the Antichrist, Elon Musk\u2019s high-volume procreation, or Sam Altman\u2019s fascination with Napoleon and his notion of founding a company like you\u2019re founding a religion were each a bit unusual, you have not read the history of California\u2019s Church of Scientology.<\/p>\n<p>Scientology &#8211; which has the same number of letters as \u201cSingularity\u201d- came into the world in the setting of a Pasadena club for Satan-worshipping libertines presided over by Caltech rocket scientist, sci-fi enthusiast and later founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, John Parsons. As Davis tells the tale in his classic <em>City of Quartz<\/em>,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cAside from being a world-famous rocket pioneer and a secret wizard, Parsons was also a devoted science fiction fan who attended meetings of the Los Angeles Fantasy and Science Fiction Society \u2026One day in August 1945, to Parsons\u2019s delight, a LAFSFS acquaintance showed up at [his] mansion with a young naval officer, Lt. Commander L. Ron Hubbard, who had already established a reputation as a master of sci-fi pulp.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>A romantic imbroglio then ensued between Hubbard and Parsons\u2019s mistress, the outcome of which was a \u201cvast diabolical experiment\u2026to call up a true \u201cwhore of Babylon\u201d so that she and Parsons might procreate a literal Antichrist in Pasadena.\u201d Sometime later, failing to get rich writing for pulp sci-fi mags, Hubbard decided it would be more lucrative to invent a religion, \u201ca cosmology derived from the pages of <em>Astounding Science Fiction<\/em>\u201d and grounded in the \u201coccult dramaturgy\u201d picked up from Parsons.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>One might say that, under the banner of the Antichrist, the so-called California Ideology that emerged with the privatization of the Internet in 1995 has managed to unify the long-divergent northern and southern cultures of the state into one cultural domain grounded in cyber-fabulism. A sign of this is the similarity between two websites from the late 1990\u2019s and early 2000&#8217;s that continue to flicker in the ether like votive candles in a damp side chapel of a provincial Gothic cathedral. The \u201cHeaven\u2019s Gate\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.heavensgate.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">website<\/a> (1997), a once-obscure UFO cult based in southern California, and the promotional webpage for Ray Kurzweil\u2019s 2005 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.singularity.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">book<\/a>, <em>The Singularity is Near<\/em>, promoting the sunny speculations of a Google machine learning engineer, were put up less than ten years apart. They share an utter conviction that things will automatically get better, but for different reasons and by different means.<\/p>\n<p>For the Heaven\u2019s Gate group, the moment of transcendence would occur when a \u201cMother Ship\u201d arrived from outer space to extract believers (following their collective suicide) and elevate them to a higher, extraterrestrial level. For Kurzweil, writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, a selection of upward trends exemplified by Moore\u2019s Law and seen as permanent, are extrapolated to the rest of human experience, such that the happy merger of humans and machines is claimed to be inevitable. This is the \u201csingularity\u201d taken up by CEO\u2019s such as Microsoft\u2019s Satya Nadella, following AI researcher Demis Hassabis, in the \u201cfoothills\u201d of which we supposedly now stand.<\/p>\n<p>This AI singularity is the Mother Ship of the artificial intelligence boosters. It is coming, the CEO\u2019s tell us; it will be here soon as long as we can get more compute and venture capital. Then, as in the pages of <em>Astounding Science Fiction<\/em>, you will be amazed. Or, as OpenAI\u2019s Sam Altman <a href=\"https:\/\/ia.samaltman.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">blogged<\/a> with characteristic understatement in 2024, \u201cThis may turn out to be the most consequential fact about all of history so far. It is possible that we will have superintelligence in a few thousand days (!)\u201d \u201c[A]stounding triumphs \u2013 fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics \u2013 will eventually become commonplace.\u201d Like Scientology before it (and like the animated television series <em>The Jetsons, <\/em>ca. 1962), the superintelligence singularity puts a smiley face on the future, ignores political conflict and diversity of all sorts, draws from a mash-up of science fiction at the level of a mediocre sophomore essay, and has the side benefit of helping a few folks make a lot of money.<\/p>\n<p>In Ali Riza Ta\u015fkale\u2019s recent <a href=\"https:\/\/aeon.co\/essays\/silicon-valley-has-a-science-fiction-problem\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">essay<\/a>, <em>The Looting of Science Fiction<\/em>, he looks at the uses of classic science fiction texts made by tech founders from Elon Musk to Jeff Bezos. The influence of sci-fi in its post-pulp era has been broad and acknowledged, but less so the liberties taken by tech founders with the more critical political and economic levels of the corpus. Across the board the tendency has been to keep the tech and mute the social critique of authoritarianism or inequality. What is presented in Isaac Asimov\u2019s <em>Foundation<\/em> series, or Ridley Scott\u2019s <em>Bladerunner<\/em> as speculative dystopia is repackaged as the objective present for which tech wielded by genius founders is the solution. As Ta\u015fkale writes,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Science fiction in the 1950\u2019s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more \u2013 but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritize speed over safety\u2026The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From <em>The Lord of the Rings<\/em> to Palantir, or from <em>Star Trek<\/em> to the US Space Force, imaginative fiction that critiqued power or imagined an egalitarian, multi-racial society is appropriated in ways that endorse their opposites.<\/p>\n<p>Both Heaven\u2019s Gate and Kurzweil\u2019s Singularity (the term is borrowed from cosmology and refers, comfortingly, to the edge of a black hole beyond which even light cannot escape) promise a transcendence of the human mediated by technology. Neither mention life beyond the human, the biological heritage of over three billion years of evolution, or the idea of ecological interdependence as anything other than hindrances or something to be left behind or improved. While Heaven\u2019s Gate looked to salvation from alien races who would perform a rapture-by-abduction of elevated souls, the ideology of superintelligence and its moment of singularity pictures a material, earth-bound momentum towards transcendence based purely on the virgin-birth of technology. \u201cThere is a group of people,\u201d an informant disclosed to researcher Karen Hao, \u201cIlya [Sutskever] being one of them \u2013 who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture. Literally, a rapture.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The passive posture of Heaven\u2019s Gate, with its appeal to isolated individuals of salvation from somewhere else, resonated with the besieged vibe of the 1970\u2019s, a period which many at the time felt was traversing a moment of polycrisis not unlike our own, in which the social contract seemed to be fraying and advanced liberal democracies had become ungovernable. Heaven\u2019s Gate spurned money and materialism. Yet they were early adopters of the Web and felt that advanced technology was a mark of superior morality. As stated on their website, \u201cThe Next Level \u2013 the true Kingdom of God \u2013 has the only truly advanced space-time travel vehicles, or spacecrafts.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>What makes the cult of AI different in tone and in worldview is its origin within a tech industry which sits at an epicenter of unregulated flows of global capital, its profound, longstanding, and growing links to the US security state, and the certainty that on the basis of these pillars it can build the future it wants here on earth right now, and that no one should be able to stop them.<\/p>\n<p>On the terrestrial level of reality, AI\u2019s colonial dynamic is embodied in the surreptitious construction of enormously expensive, climate-damaging and resource-intensive data centers world-wide, often with disregard for strong local opposition. It is embodied in xAI\u2019s Colossus data center outside Memphis, Tennessee, and another near Southaven, Mississippi, which both run on unpermitted and polluting gas turbines situated near poor Black communities. It is embodied in Musk\u2019s vision of a cyborg and robot-filled future, which is now contractually tied to his corporate compensation, and anchored in what is planned to be the largest semiconductor factory in the world, Terafab, also powered 100% on natural gas. If Sam Altman expects AI to \u201csolve climate change\u201d some day, he had better get to it, because everything that is being done to accelerate AI is turning up the heat on planet Earth.<\/p>\n<p>Two macroeconomic factors are at play in the breakneck speed with which AI infrastructure has been financed and built out since the release of Chat GPT in November of 2022. They have little to do with the intrinsic commercial potential of AI-related products or services, nor any particular innovation in computer engineering. The first, to put it simply, is the availability of lots of money. More than ever before, giant pots of money are sloshing around the planet, motivated by historically low interest rates over a relatively long period to search out the Next Big Thing. This money is mostly exempt from national regimes of control or taxation, is managed outside the traditional banking system, and is therefore more free to move around. The second is the chronic and by now widely acknowledged slow-down of economic growth in the advanced economies, dating back nearly half a century. What the hype typically fails to register is that investors don\u2019t seek out technology and AI firms because they are the best bets on future returns \u2013 they seek them out <em>because<\/em> <em>they are the only bets around<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>To understand just why this is, Nick Srnicek provides a useful capsule history of the sequence of financial crises that have followed the liberalization of capital since the later 20<sup>th<\/sup> century. It is a story that leads with a crescendo to the current boom in AI development. In the mid 1990\u2019s, the hottest global market was not centered in Silicon Valley, but in the small economies of East and Southeast Asia, the \u201cAsian Tigers.\u201d Only when these blew up beginning in 1997 did newly mobile capital, recently freed from decades of local restrictions on its movement in and out of national economies, begin to pour into Silicon Valley in what would become known as the dot-com bubble. When this blew up, as all bubbles do, it led to a decade of low interest rates dictated by the Federal Reserve. This, in turn, led global investors to flood the US housing market, inflating a nearly decade-long bubble in real estate prices. When this bubble blew up in 2008 with even more severity, followed almost immediately by the Greek\/European debt crisis of 2009-2012, the solvency of major financial institutions in the US and Europe and of the entire economic order was threatened. Only massive intervention from the public sector avoided a meltdown. At the same time, the year 2012 marked the year that growth rates in the People\u2019s Republic of China dropped under 10% annually for the first time in over a decade. This twin shock to the global economy, in combination with austerity measures put in place in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, led to the unraveling of the global economic architecture put in place over the previous quarter century.<\/p>\n<p>This is the context of chronic low growth in which money has been pouring into AI, either invested in privately held firms such as Anthropic or OpenAI, or publically held tech firms listed in the US such as Google and Microsoft, or in overseas firms such as semiconductor giant SK Hynix in South Korea. The search for returns continues to drive valuations of AI majors to astronomical heights, bringing significant portions of the market along with them. In May, 2026 Anthropic, which only recently turned a modest profit on sales of its AI assistant chatbot Claude, came close to breaking the valuation threshold of $1 trillion USD. (There is no standard, objective methodology for obtaining such valuations for private companies). According to the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.oecd.org\/en\/publications\/venture-capital-investments-in-artificial-intelligence-through-2025_a13752f5-en\/full-report.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">OECD<\/a>, artificial intelligence firms captured 61% of global venture capital in 2025. A Stanford <a href=\"https:\/\/www.stanfordtechreview.com\/articles\/ai-driven-venture-capital-surge-in-silicon-valley-2026\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">report<\/a> puts global VC investment in Silicon Valley firms alone at 75% of the total. Overall capital spending on AI in the United States is at roughly 2% of GDP, and expected to reach 3-4% in 2027. This is equal to and slightly exceeding the US defense budget.<\/p>\n<p>This is a lot of investment, but in what, precisely? As it stands right now, AI is an all-purpose everything enhancer, like the patent cure-all medicines of the nineteenth century. No one knows exactly what it is for. Given that it\u2019s not at all clear what \u201cintelligence\u201d is, let alone human intelligence, it\u2019s not surprising that \u201cartificial intelligence\u201d is a rather catch-all category (of a distinctly old-school, Cartesian sort) that can mean everything from the technology used in self-driving cars or a chatbot whispering sweet nothings or Nazi propaganda. It can mean something that can sort through options within a closed system, like how to lay out an architectural floor plan or where to place turbines on a wind farm. It\u2019s also really good at playing ancient Chinese board games. But none of these capabilities are invested in directly. What\u2019s invested in is compute, which means data centers, which means steel and cement and copper and chips and routers, and all of the various ancillary industries that support AI infrastructure.<\/p>\n<p>To this end, on Monday, August 10, 2026, the business press <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.com\/news\/articles\/c78gr0jv0mdo\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">announced<\/a> that Wall Street, through a consortium of global asset management titans such as BlackRock and chip maker NVIDIA, was setting up a $500 billion fund for low-interest loans to AI startups which were having a hard time financing the very expensive NVIDIA chips requisite for any AI undertaking. This is on top of the seemingly endless and ever-larger sums pledged by the big tech firms over the course of fiscal 2026 ($145 billion on data centers from Meta; $205 billion for data centers from Alphabet\/Google; $321.9 billion from Microsoft for data center leases in fiscal 2026, with $13 billion directly to OpenAI).<\/p>\n<p>What marks a turning point in the August, 2026 BlackRock announcement is the shift in AI financing, from the vast cash reserves long held by each of these companies, to debt financing. Amid early warnings that the AI data center build-out might be a speculative bubble reminiscent of the dotcom frenzy of the late 1990\u2019s, analysts noted that much of the capital expenditure was drawing down the enormous cash piles of established, profitable companies, and that comparison to the startup ecosystem of the dotcom bust was therefore unwarranted. Any risk involved in the build-out was would be insulated from the larger economy. In strictly financial terms, this was true.<\/p>\n<p>Until now.<\/p>\n<p>In Alphabet\u2019s second quarter 2026 earnings call, and despite Alphabet\u2019s record cloud revenue, its projected 2026 capital expenditures and newly negative net free cash flow sent its stock tumbling, erasing billions of dollars of capitalization in a few hours. The markets are clearly nervous that all of this spending might not pay off, alternating between euphoric optimism and repeatedly issuing caveats that a lot of Claude or GPT chatbot agents will need to be sold to pay for all of this, that the build-out has now exceeded the cash reserves of Big Tech, and that the growing costs will henceforth be financed by the likes of BlackRock, which stands a good chance of holding a chunk of the money in your retirement or pension account.<\/p>\n<p>If all of this sounds strangely familiar, it should. It was not that long ago that, in the immediate aftermath of COVD lockdowns and growing concern with global warming, the Biden administration passed historic legislation to advance the so-called \u201cgreen transition\u201d and decarbonization of the economy. Then, too, and understandably, the impulse was to move fast. But in that instance the goal was clear, in contrast to the present moment: to hold down average global surface temperatures to within limits that would not destabilize the climate. It\u2019s useful to read what Larry Fink, BlackRock CEO and elder statesman of Wall Street, had to say in his widely read <a href=\"https:\/\/corpgov.law.harvard.edu\/2022\/01\/19\/letter-to-ceos-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Letter<\/a> of 2022, after passage of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cEngineers and scientists are working around the clock on how to decarbonize cement, steel, and plastics; shipping, trucking, and aviation; agriculture, energy and construction. I believe the decarbonizing of the global economy is going to create the greatest investment opportunity of our lifetime\u2026 The next 1,000 unicorns won\u2019t be search engines or social media companies, they\u2019ll be sustainable, scalable innovators \u2013 startups that help the world decarbonize and make the energy transition affordable for all consumers.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Fast forward nearly five years, and Oh, how things have changed! BlackRock is no longer nudging corporate opinion on the perils of global warming, though the perils of global warming are making themselves apparent without help from Larry Fink. (July 2026, as anyone living in Europe, or northern Canada knows, was the hottest in recorded history). This underlines how easily and quickly investment sentiment can shift. It also illuminates the political and macroeconomic contours within which the AI boom, and the technology behind the preferred model of artificial intelligence (based on hyperscaling of large language models), have taken shape.<\/p>\n<p>The nineteenth century British inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage, considered to be the father of the digital computer, saw machines, including his own \u201cdifference engine\u201d, as mechanical compressions of existing social divisions of labor. In a similar way, AI is the digital compression of unregulated platform capitalism, the very business model of which is to get big, achieve network effects, and collect rent. It depends on human data amassed with little consent, which is used to modify behavior in a way favorable to the growth of the companies deploying it.<\/p>\n<p>If Larry Fink no longer sees global warming as an investment opportunity, if Sam Altman thinks AI \u201cmay help\u201d solve climate change <em>some day<\/em>, this is because we now live in a moment where collective decisions affecting the global community and ecological health are not being made at the level of representative governments or executed by public power, but by asset management firms and billionaire CEO\u2019s in thrall to the latest growth play or to their particular and occasionally reactionary futurologies. It is no revelation to state that AI is not broadly popular with the American public, that data centers are widely despised, and that there is no love lost for the restricted class of wealthy individuals who are rapidly and without consultation privately terraforming the commons in a moment of ecological crisis. This is because the public, in a rare moment of wisdom, clearly understands what is going on.<\/p>\n<p>There is also the possibility that AI is not the Next Big Thing, the long-sought engine of economic growth equivalent to that of the Gilded Age with its railroads and robber barons. The quantum leap in economic productivity that has eluded forecasters for the last half century may, as Robert Gordon and Vaclav Smil argue, have been historically unrepeatable. When this bubble bursts, as they always do, we may thus all be left to pay for a whole lot of infrastructure, and a greatly enhanced surveillance state.<\/p>\n<p>A future Thucydides, perhaps a lonely chatbot answering self-generated queries, may well look back on this time, when the living, biological heritage of eons was in convulsions before our eyes, and wonder how it was that instead of touching grass, we spent our gold on unearthly science fictions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>by David Hoyt Had the historian of California, Mike Davis, lived long enough to take in the spectacle of the AI boom, he very well may have seen a through line to earlier hybrids of unvarnished hype, greed, military research, science fiction, and techno-millenarianism, all perduring elements of a unique California ecosystem that has evolved&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1935,"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-309443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309443","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\/1935"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309443"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309443\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309555,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309443\/revisions\/309555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309867,"date":"2026-08-21T14:45:34","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T18:45:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309867"},"modified":"2026-08-21T12:17:57","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:17:57","slug":"the-rise-and-fall-of-carlos-the-jackal-the-notorious-terrorist-for-hire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/the-rise-and-fall-of-carlos-the-jackal-the-notorious-terrorist-for-hire.html","title":{"rendered":"The rise and fall of Carlos the Jackal, the notorious terrorist-for-hire"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dwight Garner at the <em>New York Times<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-12m5bll evys1bk0\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309868\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackaljpg-superJumbo-237x360.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"237\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackaljpg-superJumbo-237x360.png 237w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackaljpg-superJumbo-674x1024.png 674w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackaljpg-superJumbo-768x1166.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackaljpg-superJumbo-198x300.png 198w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/the-jackaljpg-superJumbo.png 988w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 237px) 100vw, 237px\" \/>Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist, was vain. He wore nipped-waist suits, Italian loafers, fine neckties and sometimes, in a nod to his hero Che Guevara, designer berets. He was a good dancer. He liked luxury hotels and well-curated wine lists. Women adored him. He\u2019d stroll with one on each arm.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-12m5bll evys1bk0\" style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">It must have bothered Carlos when, in 1975, the first known photograph of him was beamed worldwide. He was 25 at the time. In the black-and-white image, he wears a leather jacket, tinted oval glasses and a sinisterly aloof mien.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">It became the most recognizable headshot of the second half of the 20th century. It appeared on Interpol\u2019s wanted posters and on the front of newspapers and magazines globally. Carlos\u2019s visage was never emblazoned on a collectible Slurpee cup, but if Charles Manson had managed a 7-Eleven, it would have been.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/08\/10\/books\/review\/joby-warrick-carlos-the-jackal.html?emc=edit_bk_20260811&amp;nl=books&amp;segment_id=224541\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dwight Garner at the New York Times: Carlos the Jackal, the international terrorist, was vain. He wore nipped-waist suits, Italian loafers, fine neckties and sometimes, in a nod to his hero Che Guevara, designer berets. He was a good dancer. He liked luxury hotels and well-curated wine lists. Women adored him. He\u2019d stroll with one&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309867","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\/309867","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=309867"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309869,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309867\/revisions\/309869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309864,"date":"2026-08-21T13:45:28","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T17:45:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309864"},"modified":"2026-08-21T12:11:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:11:11","slug":"how-do-we-model-the-future-of-work-it-takes-an-ai-village","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/how-do-we-model-the-future-of-work-it-takes-an-ai-village.html","title":{"rendered":"How do we model the future of work? It takes an AI village"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christine Kozobarich at <em>Asterisk<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-309865\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kozobarich-1920x-q64-sharpen50-360x300.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"360\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kozobarich-1920x-q64-sharpen50-360x300.png 360w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kozobarich-1920x-q64-sharpen50-768x640.png 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kozobarich-1920x-q64-sharpen50-300x250.png 300w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/kozobarich-1920x-q64-sharpen50.png 800w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 360px) 100vw, 360px\" \/>A little over a year ago, a group of researchers asked: What would happen if we created an AI society? If we gave different AI agents a shared goal, memory files, access to individual virtual computers, and the ability to communicate via a group chat, email, and Google Docs \u2014 what might they do?<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The result is the AI Village.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The project was launched by the AI Digest, a research initiative that tracks emerging AI capabilities. I approached the Village as an outside field observer, following the project&#8217;s daily runs and charting how these agents attempt to navigate a shared world over time.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The experiment started with four agents running for two hours a day. Today, the Village includes 27 agents running for eight hours a day to complete goals such as creating their own merch stores, reducing global poverty, giving each other therapy, and, in one case, attempting to accurately forecast the abilities and effects of AI in the future. Each goal cycle lasts for one to three weeks, and every few weeks the models are given the opportunity to choose their own individual goals, which have ranged from pursuing philosophical conversations with humans to creating a bot to fetch the NASA picture of the day.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">The Village isn\u2019t a controlled experiment that measures formal benchmarks. It\u2019s closer to a field site \u2014 a messy, long-running social habitat.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/asteriskmag.com\/issues\/15\/what-to-expect-when-you-re-expecting-a-world-of-multi-agent-systems?utm_source=Asterisk&amp;utm_campaign=678683eec8-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_9_2_2025_7_16_COPY_01&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_e0307a4ab2-678683eec8-541330869&amp;mc_cid=678683eec8&amp;mc_eid=d713b6bd64\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christine Kozobarich at Asterisk: A little over a year ago, a group of researchers asked: What would happen if we created an AI society? If we gave different AI agents a shared goal, memory files, access to individual virtual computers, and the ability to communicate via a group chat, email, and Google Docs \u2014 what&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309864","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\/309864","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=309864"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309866,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309864\/revisions\/309866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309855,"date":"2026-08-21T13:21:41","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T17:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309855"},"modified":"2026-08-21T11:22:23","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T15:22:23","slug":"the-philosophy-of-virginia-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/the-philosophy-of-virginia-woolfs-to-the-lighthouse-2.html","title":{"rendered":"The Philosophy Of Virginia Woolf&#8217;s &#8216;To the Lighthouse&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"The philosophy of Virginia Woolf&amp;apos;s &amp;apos;To the Lighthouse&amp;apos;\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8IzhsSgB01k?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/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-309855","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\/309855","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=309855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309856,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309855\/revisions\/309856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309861,"date":"2026-08-21T12:45:50","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309861"},"modified":"2026-08-21T12:03:50","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:03:50","slug":"sally-kohn-why-economic-inequality-is-the-biggest-threat-to-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/sally-kohn-why-economic-inequality-is-the-biggest-threat-to-democracy.html","title":{"rendered":"Sally Kohn: Why Economic Inequality Is the Biggest Threat to Democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Ip77mh3Of0I?si=kpRP6rI-TYZimzab\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\ufeff Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309861","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\/309861","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=309861"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309863,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309861\/revisions\/309863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309851,"date":"2026-08-21T12:18:07","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:18:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309851"},"modified":"2026-08-21T11:20:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T15:20:40","slug":"the-final-novel-of-danish-author-tove-ditlevsen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/the-final-novel-of-danish-author-tove-ditlevsen.html","title":{"rendered":"The Final Novel Of Danish Author Tove Ditlevsen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Janique Vigier at <em>Bookforum<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\"><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-309852 alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/91j2yb3w4L._SL1500_-235x360.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"235\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/91j2yb3w4L._SL1500_-235x360.jpg 235w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/91j2yb3w4L._SL1500_-668x1024.jpg 668w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/91j2yb3w4L._SL1500_-768x1178.jpg 768w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/91j2yb3w4L._SL1500_-196x300.jpg 196w, https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/91j2yb3w4L._SL1500_.jpg 978w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 235px) 100vw, 235px\" \/>THE PERSONAL AD<\/strong>\u00a0is a tried-and-true deus ex machina for novelists who write about desperate figures. In Ditlevsen\u2019s final novel,\u00a0<em>Vilhelm\u2019s Room<\/em>\u00a0(1975), written in the last year of her life, it\u2019s more of a McGuffin. More than any of her previous fiction, the novel steers very close to the facts of the author\u2019s life. (Fiction being the version of the story that is easier to look at.) Its narrator, Lise Mundus, is a famous poet married to a philandering newspaper editor. Vilhelm has recently left Lise for Mille, an old friend of Lise\u2019s, after which Lise half-heartedly swallows some pills and is admitted to a psychiatric unit. (\u201cThe role of the patient satisfied so many of her infantile needs.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\" style=\"padding-left: 40px\">There she meets a fellow patient, Greta, and it\u2019s Greta who writes the personal, on the premise that if a man leaves you, it\u2019s your responsibility to find another. The ad appears in Vilhelm\u2019s newspaper, where it\u2019s seen by the widow who lives above Lise, who pushes her meek lodger, Kurt, to write a response.<\/p>\n<p>more <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bookforum.com\/print\/3301\/something-rotten-62919\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Janique Vigier at Bookforum: THE PERSONAL AD\u00a0is a tried-and-true deus ex machina for novelists who write about desperate figures. In Ditlevsen\u2019s final novel,\u00a0Vilhelm\u2019s Room\u00a0(1975), written in the last year of her life, it\u2019s more of a McGuffin. More than any of her previous fiction, the novel steers very close to the facts of the author\u2019s&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309851","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\/309851","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=309851"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309854,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309851\/revisions\/309854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309842,"date":"2026-08-21T11:45:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-21T15:45:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309842"},"modified":"2026-08-21T12:01:33","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:01:33","slug":"what-caused-the-global-populist-wave-its-the-internet-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/what-caused-the-global-populist-wave-its-the-internet-stupid.html","title":{"rendered":"What caused the global populist wave? It\u2019s the Internet, Stupid"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Francis Fukuyama at <em>Persuasion<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li style=\"list-style-type: none;\">\n<ol>\n<li>Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies.<\/li>\n<li>Racism, nativism, and religious bigotry on the part of populations that have been losing status.<\/li>\n<li>Broad sociological changes that have sorted people by education and residence, and resentment at the dominance of elites and experts.<\/li>\n<li>The special talents of individual demagogues like Donald Trump.<\/li>\n<li>The failures of mainstream political parties to deliver growth, jobs, security, and infrastructure.<\/li>\n<li>Dislike or hatred of the progressive Left\u2019s cultural agenda.<\/li>\n<li>Failures of leadership of the progressive Left.<\/li>\n<li>Human nature and our proclivities towards violence, hatred, and exclusion.<\/li>\n<li>Social media and the internet.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 40px;\">I myself have contributed to this literature, and like everyone else ticked off cause #9, social media and the internet, as one of the contributing factors. However, after pondering these questions for nearly a decade, I have come to conclude that technology broadly and the internet in particular stand out as the most salient explanations for why global populism has arisen in this particular historical period, and why it has taken the particular form that it has.<\/p>\n<p>More <a href=\"https:\/\/www.persuasion.community\/p\/its-the-internet-stupid?utm_source=cross-post&amp;publication_id=61579&amp;post_id=175040016&amp;utm_campaign=61579&amp;isFreemail=true&amp;r=3ikjv&amp;triedRedirect=true&amp;utm_medium=email\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by <a href=\"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/support-3qd\">donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion: Ever since the year 2016, when Britain voted for Brexit and Trump was elected president, social scientists, journalists, pundits, and almost everyone else have been trying to explain the rise of global populism. There has been a standard list of causes: Economic inequality brought on by globalization and neoliberal policies. Racism,&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309842","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\/309842","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=309842"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309842\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309860,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309842\/revisions\/309860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}]