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3 Quarks Daily

@3quarksdaily.bsky.social
10 followers 1 following 171 posts

We are a highly acclaimed daily online magazine of original, intellectual essays on a wide variety of subjects. We also post curated links to interesting items at other websites every day. We take Saturdays off.

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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 2h
3QD ORIGINAL By Marianne Janack
3quarksdaily.com
Universe 25 and the Problem of Utopia
The distinction between utopias and dystopias is often murky. In Ursula LeGuin’s story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”, a utopian society is built on suffering; Lois Lowry’s
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 3h
3QD ORIGINAL By Christopher Hall
3quarksdaily.com
“Wenn Die Blatter trieben:” Autumn in Rilke
Rilke by Leonid Pasternak Certain essays hit you like a thunderbolt. As someone who has suffered from episodes of debilitating anxiety, I found Freud’s concept of the death-drive a
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 4h
3QD ORIGINAL By Lei Wang
3quarksdaily.com
The Money of the Mind
A Drop of Dew Falling from the Wing of a Bird Awakens Rosalie Asleep in the Shade of a Cobweb, Joan Miro The money of the mind is attention, I read recently in the first line of a
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Project CETI Founder David Gruber: Can AI Talk to Whales?
Project CETI Founder David Gruber: Can AI Talk to Whales?
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
I Lost Myself When I Lost Hong Kong
Tiffany Huang at Electric Lit: In Shanghai, I told myself I found my future husband while wandering past the mottled bark of plane trees under spring canopies in the French Concess
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Why is robotics a different RL problem than LLMs?
Perry Dong and Chelsea Finn at Github: People have been imagining robots working alongside humans since the dawn of storytelling. In 2026, that vision feels closer than ever. Physi
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Alice Oswald On Poetry
Alice Oswald On Poetry
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
I am a top drone pilot in the Ukrainian Army – this is what it is really like
Kratos (a call sign) at New Scientist: On the front line, we spend 90 per cent of our time underground in bunkers because of the threat of enemy drones. Every time you go outside,
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
A Manifesto by Alice Oswald
Fiona Sampson at The Guardian: The poet Alice Oswald is no stranger to thinking in public about her art. She was Oxford professor of poetry until 2023, and her lectures are availab
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Marilyn Monroe at 100
Graham McCann at the Dublin Review of Books: In ‘An Arundel Tomb’ Philip Larkin reflected on the shallowness that settles like a mist over the deepest graves of the modern age, and
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Friday Poem
I Saw Myself I saw myself a ring of bone in the clear stream of all of it and vowed always to be open to it that all of it might flow through and then heard “ring of b
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Elena Blanco in The Yale Review: I first read Patricia Highsmith’s novels in the fall of 1994. I was twenty and living in a room in her house in Tegna, Switzerland, that was plaste
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Librarians on Libraries
From The New York Times: This year, Americans are marking the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding. The nation’s librarians are celebrating a milestone too: the 150th birthd
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Tim Sommers
3quarksdaily.com
Knowledge Lost in Information (Implanted Beliefs, part 2)
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Robert Jensen (@robertjensen.bsky.social)
3quarksdaily.com
Founding Rapist: Judging Thomas Jefferson by the Standards of His Time
Conclusive evidence is in from new DNA tests: Thomas Jefferson fathered children with Sally Hemings. To put it more bluntly: The primary author of the Declaration of Independence a
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Anti-Zionism: A Jewish History
Shaul Magid in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Anti-Zionism is not new among Jews; in fact, it was arguably created by Jews. Over its long history, Jewish anti-Zionism has taken m
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
The Dot and the Swarm: Benefitting from the Bitter Lesson
Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing: I generally think I have done a good job anticipating the direction and pace of AI over the few years I have been writing this Substack, but I th
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Robert Wright: AI Alignment Is a Moral Problem, Not a Technical One
Robert Wright: AI Alignment Is a Moral Problem, Not a Technical One
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
The Original Bitch
Eleanor Johnson in Harper’s Magazine: The most enduring and influential monstrous bitch is the she-demon Lamashtu. She shape-shifts, appearing in different bodily forms at di
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
They Kept Outsiders Away for 500 Years but Their World Is About to Change
Ben Ryder Howe at the New York Times: Over the last 500-some years, the Guna have proved uniquely successful at keeping intruders at bay, at times through violence. Since fighting
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
John Berger: From Life
Zach Gibson at the LARB: IN 2009, BRITISH ARTIST, writer, and broadcaster John Berger (1926–2017) donated his personal archive to the British Library. Though he was 82 at the time
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
On Annie Dillard
Grace Glass at n+1: Annie Dillard was born the day Hitler died, eighteen days after FDR died, as if in her the whole history and destiny of America was reincarnated, triumphant, su
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Thursday Poem
Remember Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the stronge
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
A Digital Cell Predicts Which Drugs Will Be Most Effective in Deadly Breast Cancer
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: Tailoring cancer treatments is a science and an art. The same type of tumor can behave very differently from one person to the next, and a drug that
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Mircea Eliade – The Nature of Religion
Mircea Eliade – The Nature of Religion
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Jim Hanas (@www.loureedsnephew.com)
3quarksdaily.com
Remembrance of Things Post-
I met Derrida in Memphis in 1993. We were standing by a pool and he was smoking a cigar. I’m sure I was smoking a cigarette. I was twenty-four. The encounter was brief, the pro for
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
3quarksdaily.com
This Week’s Photograph
Just something I saw while taking a walk near the train tracks in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Not sure what these tiles are for. Do you know? Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help kee
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
The Rolling Stones Recording Sympathy for the Devil 1968
The Rolling Stones Recording Sympathy for the Devil 1968
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Reasoning With Jürgen Habermas
Emilie Prattico at Aeon Magazine: The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), his seminal work originally published in German, made an argument about something concr
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Maria Tatar has spent her career tracing evolution of folk, fairy tales, explaining why they still matter
Liz Mineo at The Harvard Gazette: After completing her undergraduate studies at Denison University and the University of Munich, she earned her doctorate from Princeton University
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
The End of Reading and the Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
Anthony Gottlieb at Literary Review: The rumoured demise of books has produced plenty of books. In 1985, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death explained how the showy values of
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
The astonishing collective impact of household energy shifts
From New Scientist: It is 1:12 am in March 2030. In a suburban cul-de-sac there’s no movement except a hungry fox scavenging for bin snacks. At number 16, electrons begin to flow s
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Scott Aaronson on the Impact of AI on Science and Mathematics
Scott Aaronson on the Impact of AI on Science and Mathematics
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
What three recent essays tell us about race relations in America
Eboo Patel at Persuasion: The debate about DEI has shifted. It is no longer principally about the problem of demonizing straight white people. It is now about how much DEI demeans
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Wednesday Poem
Brown Small Bird The nightingale will always be a mythical bird. Did you ever see one outside poetry? The nightingale is named into anonymity, like a Monk, like the celebrated g
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Blond Ambition
Moira Donegan in Bookforum: SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Crew members and other actors would wait around for hours, wondering when—or if—Marilyn Monroe would show up. Some days, especially
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
A Contrarian View of How Consciousness Evolved
Emily Cataneo in Undark Magazine: The human body is a master at regulating itself. For example, if your blood pressure rises precipitously, it will cause your arterial wall to str
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Ashutosh Jogalekar
3quarksdaily.com
The Last Experiment
As the relentless march of AI in science continues, I found myself pondering the other day whether there ever would be a time when a human scientist would do the last human experi
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By David Greer
3quarksdaily.com
Pebbles
To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour. —William Blake, from “Auguries of Innocence” I c
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Brooks Riley
3quarksdaily.com
Catspeak
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Review of “The Complex” by Karan Mahajan – a superb family saga set in Delhi
James Smart at The Guardian: We learn about the murder of the Chopra clan’s shifty, crude, charismatic patriarch Laxman in the opening pages of The Complex. Twenty-five years have
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
What a landmark new study reveals about the origin of bats
Sydney Goitia-Doran at the Washington Post: A landmark study has revealed a new understanding of where bats likely originated 65 million years ago — in Europe, rather than in Asia,
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Carlo Rovelli: Free Will Is Real and Physics Can Prove It
Carlo Rovelli: Free Will Is Real and Physics Can Prove It
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Mahmoud Khalil: Imprisoned for no crime, I discovered my arrest was a message
Mahmoud Khalil at Equator: On the night of 8 March 2025, Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate of Columbia University and a lawful permanent resident of the US, was arrested by pl
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Tuesday Poem
September 1, 1939 I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulat
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Why is Ringo Starr still performing at 86? Because he can
Timothy Bella in The Washington Post: No one has ever looked cooler in front of a beach background on Zoom than Ringo Starr. He has it all: The gold-rimmed, double-bridged sunglas
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
How Would AI Actually Kill All Humans? Here Are the Top 5 Scenarios
Toby Walsh in Singularity Hub: Earlier this month, artificial intelligence researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic after just four months. In an announcement on X, he stated
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Dwight Furrow (@durrow.bsky.social)
3quarksdaily.com
Book Review of “To Taste: On Cooking and the Good Life” by Scott Samuelson
It’s not intimate, it’s philosophy. That sounds like something ChatGPT would say but there is truth in it. Philosophical writing is seldom intimate. When philosophical writing styl
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3QD ORIGINAL By Carlota Figueroa
3quarksdaily.com
Help! There’s A Demon In My RAM!
Maxwell’s Demon (image obtained from this Trinity College Dublin post) Picture this: it’s Friday at 10:30 pm, and you have an 11:59 pm deadline that you thought was much easier tha
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3 Quarks Daily @3quarksdaily.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
3quarksdaily.com
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Winter Clouds, Boston, December 2025. Digital photograph. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
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