by Mike Bendzela

In “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” Herman Melville’s effusive review of the Massachusetts writer’s collection of short tales, Mosses from an Old Manse, Melville utters, under a cloak of anonymity (“a Virginian Spending July in Vermont”) one the most homo-erotic bits of praise imaginable for another male writer: “[He] shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul”! Reclining in his Vermont “hay-mow” with Hawthorne’s volume, the smitten Virginian notes “how magically stole over me this Mossy Man!” Indeed! Melville knew of what he spoke — of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories, that is, many of which have become classics, such as “The Birth-Mark” and “Young Goodman Brown.”

I mention all this not just because it’s awesome but because I want to pilfer Melville’s torrid statement to say this of Southern old time music:

“It shoots its strong Appalachian roots into the chilly soil of my Northern soul”!

I use Clifftop here as an avatar for this last essay excursion into how the culture of the American South has had a life-changing effect on me: Its myriad old time tunes have possessed me for about twenty-five years now. Clifftop, West Virginia is the location of Camp Washington-Carver, site of a yearly festival of old time fiddle and banjo music, the Appalachian String Band Music Festival. This festival is rustic, acoustic, genuine, low-tech, and — happily — takes place on top of an actual doggone 2500-foot hilltop, surrounded by dense deciduous forest. I’ve been to this mecca of old time only twice, the two trips twenty-two years apart, for a total of about seventy hours of non-stop jamming; but it’s effect on me has been profound, sort of like Saul of Tarsus seeing the Risen Christ, or something like that. Read more »

by Peter Topolewski

Before the violence in the movie Bugonia moves center screen—and the narrative takes a not completely unexpected left turn—it’s made clear Teddy’s paranoia and consuming conspiracism and violent nature all have roots in childhood trauma. Things like child molestation and the hospitalization of his drug addled mother.

Oh gawd, you think, another movie explaining away awful behavior with a hellish upbringing. Seen it a million times, it’s boring already.

Boring in a movie, maybe, but that’s real life. Except it’s not only trauma that explains rotten behavior. Everything up to this moment in time explains everything about you, everything you’ve done, you’re about to do, and ever will do. This according to Robert Sapolsky, neuroscientist and author of Determined. You have no free will, your actions are determined by your genes, your environment, and your experiences. You have control over none of them.

His book, a couple years old now, has been well reviewed and discussed right here on 3 Quarks Daily, and there’s no need to do so again. The book feels like a mess at times, but an enjoyable one. And the choices—yes choices—Sapolsky made while writing the book are fascinating, the details of the science both enlightening and staggering, his purpose for writing it never more vital. And the implications are a trip. There’s no reason to carry on with this, but I have no choice but to go on, no more choice than I had to stop reading Determined, no more choice than Sapolsky had writing it.

Did he write it? Read more »

Car in a parking lot with frost on the ground.

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by TJ Price

I came to Andrés Barba as I come to many authors—via recommendation. A very good friend was the first to mention Barba’s work—specifically, Such Small Hands—during the course of a fun back-and-forth of “Have You Read?” My friend proposed Such Small Hands at first assuming I was familiar, but when I admitted ignorance, she was surprised, and exhorted me most adamantly that I would love it; that it was one of her very favorites. It is hard to turn down a recommendation like this, especially when my friend’s taste in fiction is as varied as it is impeccable.

Such Small Hands, for quite awhile, however, was just a slim, neatly labeled spine tucked between others on the shelf—those of much more imposing measurement. The book was quite tidily printed—had a handsome cover and a very aesthetically pleasing presentation—and the title itself instantly evoked for me the closing line of one of the more famous E. E. Cummings poems: not even the rain / has such small hands. 

Thankfully, my friend is not one of those people who will take offense to delay—a blessing in any relationship for which mutual taste in reading is foundational. Months passed. Maybe a year. But in a fit of pique one night, having endured a drought of uninspiring genre fare, I picked out the book and opened it. In a matter of an hour, I’d read the book, closed it, turned out the light, and went to sleep, as I so often do after reading.

I have not had such howling terrors populate my dreams as I did that evening. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Scott Samuelson

When I turned fifty, I went through the usual crisis of facing that my life was—so to speak—more than half drunk. After moping a while, one of the more productive things I started to do was to write letters to people living and dead, people known to me and unknown, sometimes people who simply caught my eye on the street, sometimes even animals or plants. Except in rare cases, I haven’t sent the letters or shown them to anyone.

Writing personal letters without any designs has been psychologically helpful. After venting any rage or confusion, I’ve found that what I have to say generally boils down to two things: I love you and I’m sorry. In the face of my mortality, it’s been good to be reminded of the strength of those two sentences and the connections built on their foundation. There’s something more than proper or quaint in addressing someone at the start of a letter as “Dear.”

Because our current president occupies more of my mental space than I’d prefer, he’s one of the people I’ve written a letter to. Dear Donald Trump. Then I ticked off a laundry list of grievances, going all the way back to the 80s.

When it finally dawned on me that I was addressing him as a figure rather than as a person, I began to wonder if I could talk to him human to human. Here’s a snippet of what I went on to write:

I’m having real troubles believing that you think of similar things as I do when you think about what makes life worth living. Am I wrong? For instance, that cry inside John Coltrane’s tone and Dolly Parton’s voice—do any songs at all break your heart with their beauty? Or what about friendship? When I recently visited a dear old friend of mine who lives in Brussels, my whole being flooded with joy when I saw his face at the airport. Do you have any such friends? What about a first love, a sweet pure love before puberty, before you even longed to kiss her (much less grab her by the pussy)—do you still dream of her? When you see, say, the first little daffodil after what has felt like three straight months of February, do you feel glad to be alive?

I continued like that in search of how we might connect over a fundamental good, away from the political shitshow that he’s in part responsible for. Read more »

by Thomas Fernandes

In the natural world, predation may mark the end of life, but it doesn’t signal the end of ecological interactions. The hunt, with all its challenges and shifting interactions, is not an end in itself, it only creates the opportunity to feed. O    nce the kill is made, two main strategies emerge: feeding quickly and leaving, or holding on to the remains for a few days to draw multiple meals from them. The carcass, meanwhile, becomes a contested prize, attracting stronger competitors seeking a free meal, blurring the line between hunter and scavenger. Solitary cheetahs, for instance, lose nearly half their kills to lions and hyenas. After this struggle, as time and heat accelerate decomposition, the remaining flesh soon turns inedible to most animals. From that inedibility emerges an opportunity for species able to thrive on what others must abandon. Scavenging, in this sense, occupies a shifting niche, rich in energy but scarce and unpredictable, a prize that few species can afford to rely on.

Among vertebrates, vultures stand alone as obligate scavengers, living almost entirely on the flesh of the dead. This diet exposes them to hazards that most animals evolved to avoid through evolutionary adaptations: pathogens, toxins, and chemical byproducts from decaying tissue. Humans, too, evolved pathogen avoidance, a behavioral response that manifests as disgust toward bodily fluids, rotting meat, or anything in contact with them. By association with the unclean, vultures are generally portrayed as vicious and malevolent, or simply ignored, despite their endangered state:  11 of the 16 species of African and Eurasian vultures are classified as Critically Endangered or Endangered, according to the IUCN Red List. Observing vultures challenges both our innate disgust response and our understanding of how scavengers adapt to extreme diets.

When we think of vultures, we imagine a single bird, when in fact they encompass a surprising diversity. There are two distinct vulture lineages that diverged 69 million years ago: New World vultures in the Americas and Old-World vultures in Africa, Europe, and Asia. The Old-World vultures tend to eat larger carcasses, including large ungulates such as hippopotami, horses, and buffalo. New World vultures, in contrast, feed on smaller prey, such as monkeys, rodents, and birds. Read more »

Sughra Raza. First Snow. Dec 14, 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Bill Murray

One Monday in 1883 Southeast Asia woke to “the firing of heavy guns” heard from Batavia to Alice Springs to Singapore, and maybe as far as Mauritius, near Africa.

“So violent are the explosions that the ear-drums of over half my crew have been shattered,” one ship’s captain wrote. “I am convinced that the Day of Judgement has come.”

Barometers traced a pressure wave that circled the earth. Not for days or weeks did people understand the cause: that the Krakatoa volcano had erupted from the sea. Now in our own time, political shock waves have been sent out. Western democracies must interpret their impact urgently.

During the lifetimes of everyone born this year, the world will surely become a harder place to live. The main causes are two: ever faltering human politics, and even longer-term human climate tampering.

The climate part grows so gradually that it’s hard to rouse people to the ramparts. The politics part comes from a new cycle of populist nationalism. We saw how that worked out in Europe last century. It’s hard to believe we’re already at it again, but here we are.

It’s tragedy but truth that the climate part only goads the politics part. Climate disruption leads to refugee flows, and they reinforce xenophobia.

Which sets up the mid-2020s as a 1968 or a 1989, the end of a time of complacent stability, of relative governability, and the beginning of churning disruption. The mid-2020s are a tinderbox, and Donald Trump was elected by people who enjoy playing with matches.

If Krakatoa was a natural catastrophe, Trump’s presidency is a political one, the trigger of America’s current fit of government-by-destruction. An accelerant, releasing long-gathering American political decay and imperial overreach. Read more »

Until the Night Drops

Fog lifting off of the river
Frogs in a chorus of croaks
Moon lit up —just a sliver
A fire that the unknown has stoked

Chuck Berry singing Johnny be Good
his guitar lighting fires in our heads
greenhorns working out would-could-should
fresh ones a sunbeam had fed

Look at how she climbs
Look at how she shines
Look at how when she shows up
She makes the dark stop

Look at how she blooms
Look at her at noon
She makes the heart pump
She makes the buds pop

Men standing under a lamppost
waiting there for Godot
—someone who may just be a ghost
for all a mere mortal may know

—but lying here in the morning
light seeping over the hill
Sun-God riding her big bright horse
early when the chatter is nil

Look at how she rides
Look at how she glides
Look at how she rises
over the treetops

Look at how she burns
Look at how she turns
overhead all day
until the night drops
—until the night drops

by Jim Culleny
March 1, 2011
Song rendition link:
Stream Song: Until the Night Drops-1st Take by Jim Culleny | Listen online for free on SoundCloud

(Songs that immediately follow Jim’s recording
are not associated with it)

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by Malcolm Murray

As I discussed AI with my cabdriver on a recent trip to Vienna, I was reminded of the fact that the German word for AI is Künstliche Intelligenz. This shares an etymological root with the word Kunst, German for Art. This made me realize that of course we have that in English too, the “Art” is right there in Artificial Intelligence, we have just overlooked it.

The words have diverged over time, from their common Proto-Germanic root, but I think their commonality is an interesting perspective to consider. Given the breadth of likely impact of AI on society, we need to analyze it from many different lenses and perspectives. So apply the “art lens” and being more cognizant of the “Art” in Artificial Intelligence could be helpful for making sense of some of the dissonant patterns AI presents us with.

First, we have the strange and somewhat discombobulating fact that AI is, as Ethan Mollick famously pointed out, neither software nor people. It is something else, a third category, with elements of both. We are used to people, and Kahneman and others have taught us how the ways in which they are fallible and make mistakes. They are flexible, but have many biases. We are used to software and we know its strengths and weaknesses. It delivers predictable performance, but with a limited range. What we have not yet encountered is fallible software. Like Ethan says, this is a new category which will take time to get used to. This partly explains enterprise adoption which is still slow, since that third category does not have a natural home in an organization. Processes will have to be changed drastically to allow this third category to fully come to its right. Seeing AI as more as of an art than a science helps put this in the right perspective. Read more »

by Derek Neal

If one on the goals of art is to wake us up, to remind us what it is to be alive, one of the main ways of doing this is by bringing us as close to death as possible. This is why suicide is such a fruitful and, paradoxically, invigorating artistic subject. For the suicidal character approaching death, sensations are heightened, and life becomes fecund and tactile. One scene that captures this is in Francois Ozon’s Under the Sand (2000), just before Charlotte Rampling’s husband (Bruno Cremer) disappears into the ocean while she naps on the beach. The film never explains the husband’s disappearance—never confirms that it’s suicide—but the evening prior, the camera follows Cremer as he gathers firewood in the forest surrounding their vacation home.

He picks up a few sticks, then pauses at a tree and feels its bark, runs his hand down its trunk, as if he wants to feel the rough surface one more time before dying. The camera follows him as he passes behind another tree, then something unexpected happens: the shot stops on the tree while Cremer passes out of view, lingering in sharp focus on the nooks and crannies of the tree bark, showing the viewer just how wondrous a tree is, if only we could stop to see it. This is also a great example of Deleuze’s concept of “time-image,” when a film emphasizes time or duration rather than the movement of characters and plot. We then return to Cremer, who has crouched down and turned over a rotting log. Hundreds of ants scurry around—so much life, right there!—in juxtaposition to Cremer, alone in the forest.

This contrast of the isolated individual and the group is a recurring theme in Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry (1997) as well. Paul Schrader famously imagined a man in a yellow cab as a symbol of loneliness and alienation, but Kiarostami took this idea even further—what if an entire movie was just a man in a car, driving around? That’s Taste of Cherry. The film is a series of vignettes as the main character (Homayoun Ershadi) motors around the outskirts of Tehran picking up one passenger after another, not as a taxi driver, but in search of a person he can convince to do a special job. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

The last few years I have been deep in the world of artificial intelligence. Using it. Reading about it. Learning from people who are experts.

What follows are 15 random thoughts about AI. What it means for us, what the future might look like, and different things I’ve reflected on recently. Some are negative. Some are positive. Use them as thoughts for reflection, or if nothing else – a little entertainment. 

(Disclaimer: I am not a professional. These are the opinions of an amateur that’s interested (and skeptical) of AI. Please keep that in mind.)

1) Right now, every incentive is to make AI look like it is absolutely necessary.

This is the first idea I want to start with. These days, the only economic news that seems to matter is how companies are adding AI to their products. 

Just follow the incentives. There is more money to be made (and invested) when companies overstate the value of AI. Just something to consider the next time news of the latest AI accomplishment makes you feel anxious.

That said-

2) More people should be using AI.

Think about people that hated on the internet. Or a couple thousand years ago, that were skeptical of books. We reflect on that now and laugh. 

How horribly outdated, we say. 

But that’s exactly what’s happening with AI right now. Most people aren’t using it for anything substantial. The obvious risk here? That those people refuse to learn a technology that will eventually become necessary, and get left behind as a result.

(Imagine not knowing how to access the internet now.) 

If you aren’t using AI for anything, start. Even just once a week going back and forth with ChatGPT can start to build the skillset. 

3) The school system will be forever changed.

I think of schools and how inefficient they are. (The “modern” school system was designed to fit into an industrial society.) 

But what if each student had their own AI-powered teacher? What if we got rid of our “go as fast as the slowest student” system – and replaced it with “go as fast as your custom-made AI teacher lets you?”

Each student would learn in the way that was perfectly suited to them. Not just the average intelligence of their class.

The implications of this could be huge. School less as a place of learning, and more as a place for kids to socialize.  Read more »

by Richard Farr

My family jokes that I can break a computer by looking at it; God knows, I’ve tried. They also say that I hate technology, and would rather have lived two hundred years ago — wooden table, candle, quill pen — but that’s a slight exaggeration. Once in a blue moon I will acknowledge that some aspect of our vaunted progress is real. Speaking of computers: my new Chromebook has a great screen, a great keyboard, does everything I want, is more secure and more stable than any PC or Mac, and was $249. Amazing. 

But my mellow is rapidly harshed when, as so often, I perceive a yawning gap between the hype surrounding a technology and its performance. Or perhaps it’s more that I’m depressed by the thirst with which so many of us guzzle the hype, unable or unwilling to countenance the possibility that a new app or gizmo we’ve been instructed to consider marvellous might actually be saving less time and trouble that it costs.

Back in the 1990s I spent an hour or three every day with this thought, because 27.9% of my productive potential and probably yours was being vacuumed up into the business of installing, uninstalling, reinstalling and then screaming at the latest iteration of ****ing Windows. Was this perhaps the single worst consumer product ever to have become unjustifiably popular? Not quite! Adding insult to injury, once the cursed Frankensoftware was up and lurching I’d typically spend most of the precious minutes before the next crash using it to support Word — which, from the viewpoint of a working writer, was even worse: a nightmare of bloat and overkill and thoughtlessness, like a ten gallon espresso cup made of wool. The free market being the miracle that it is, Microsoft managed to create enough of a monopoly with Word that using an alternative was for many years not a real option, and thus did it become the QWERTY keyboard of the modern era. Read more »

by Barry Goldman 

At the time of this writing, Thanksgiving week 2025, the Trump administration has launched 21 strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific and killed 83 civilians. According to the administration, the US military has legal authority to conduct these strikes. That authority is outlined in a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel, the OLC. But the memo has not been released to the public. It is a secret memo.

We have seen this movie before. Twenty-some years ago, there were secret memos from the OLC that authorized the CIA to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Those became known as the “torture memos.” These OLC documents are likely to become known as the “murder memos.” The process that generated them is the same.

As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Md.) said:

[T]he decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision. It is a lot of legal mumbo jumbo.

No one should be surprised.

They told us a story about this process when I was in law school. It seems once upon a time many years ago a lawyer told J. P. Morgan there was no legal way he could do something he wanted to do. Morgan said, “I don’t know as I want a lawyer to tell me what I cannot do. I hire him to tell me how to do what I want to do.” The lesson was clear. Morgan was one of the richest men in the world. He could hire any lawyer he wanted, and he could pay more than anyone else. If this lawyer didn’t want to do the job, Morgan would find someone else who did. Law is no different from any other field. The Golden Rule applies: Whoever has the gold makes the rules. Read more »