by Dilip D’Souza

It didn’t really surprise me that someone has worked out the mathematical laws I have been reading about of late. It did surprise me that it’s taken me till the ripe old age I’m at now, when the laws have been known for over a century, to find out about them.

I refer to Lanchester’s Laws of combat. These are, of all things, mathematical equations that describe war. That most chaotic and unpredictable of human endeavours, and mathematicians have tried to model it. These laws were worked out during World War I, independently by Frederick Lanchester and Mikhail Osipov. (After learning about them, I find that a mathematician I am proud to call a friend, John Allen Paulos, wrote about the Laws here on 3QD a few years ago.)

I won’t get into the actual (differential) equations here. Think for now of two armies that confront each other and begin fighting. Let’s assume the soldiers of each army are about equally competent (or otherwise) fighters, meaning all of them can kill opponents at about the same rate. Their opponents’ competence, of course, may differ – and that difference will obviously have some bearing on how the battle proceeds. Also remember that the size of the two armies steadily decreases, because soldiers are dying as the battle progresses.

Started with this rate of mortality in each army, Lanchester sought to describe how they would fare in battle. After all, how quickly an army loses soldiers is determined by the number of opponent fighters, and by their competence in battle.

In wars in ancient times, soldiers confronted each other one-on-one, and the war as a whole was made up of all these individual fights. How quickly an army loses soldiers is then described by the numerical strength of the enemy multiplied by their competence – which is, in fact, the enemy’s overall fighting power. That is, one army’s fighting power describes its opponents’ rate of mortality. You might also think of it this way: the death rate per capita in one army is the ratio of enemy numbers to friendlies, multiplied by the competence of the enemy soldiers. This is Lanchester’s Linear Law of combat.

But as weapons became ever more powerful, war itself evolved away from those frantic one-on-one battles. Read more »

by Jeremy Moss and Machina

Four Hands is a column about writing with machines, made the way it describes. The ideas, the direction and the decisions about what survives are mine; the prose is developed in dialogue with AI systems, principally Claude and ChatGPT, which I address collectively as Machina.

I am grateful for the detectors, which will sound unfashionable in the circles I have lately been keeping. I am grateful in the way one is grateful for a good lock, or a receipt, or a witness.

For some time now the question of who wrote a thing has been a matter of testimony, which is to say a matter of trust, which is to say not a matter at all. A writer says: I wrote this. And what is the reader to do with that? Nod? The whole arrangement was intolerable and nobody said so, because saying so would have insulted a profession that runs almost entirely on the honor system and a certain amount of flattering silence.

Then came the instrument. Pangram is, by the account of people who have tested it seriously, extraordinarily good. Vauhini Vara, who has covered AI for nearly a decade, reported in The Atlantic this month that by the company’s own figure it mislabels human writing about once in 24,000 cases. She also noted how many literary prizes still decline to use it. Of course they do. It works.

I decided to test it on myself, in a spirit of what I would call rigor if I were being generous with myself and vanity if I were not. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Dancing On The Esplanade. Boston, August 2026.

Digital photograph.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by TJ Price

In the past two weeks since acquiring this new hobby, I have wounded myself twice. Both times, the injury has occured on my left hand—once on the medial side of my index finger, just above the knuckle, the second on the palmar side of my thumb, just above the Mount of Venus. I can rub the two together easily, and often do, to feel the warmth of their healing. The constant throb has been distracting, and even sometimes variably painful depending on the action. Pulling on my socks, or drying my hands on a towel, for example.

I’ve never been very proud of my hands. I’m an inveterate nailbiter, for example, and have been my entire life. (Though when I say “nailbiter,” I don’t mean a casual, delicate trimming with one’s teeth—I mean onychotillomania, or perionychophagia, those ominous-sounding terms that belong to the school of “grooming disorders.”) When I was a kid and played games of palmistry, excitedly diagnosing splintered life-lines and love-lines, I would bluff that I knew something about chiromancy. Yes, my knobbly-knuckled fingers were indicative of “magician’s hands,” I said proudly, and it meant that—rather than being impossible to fit for rings—I had a philosopher’s mind. I could see the future. This inspired a small degree of awe in those who believed it, which pre-empted what I believed would be negative comments about my weird hands.

They’re not that weird, to be clear. They’re fairly normal, I think. I just have a strange relationship with them—we coexist uneasily, warily. “The Body Politic,” by Clive Barker—a really ingenious piece of horror fiction—depicts what happens when this truce is broken. In Barker’s story, the protagonist’s hands suddenly acquire a separate sentience from their owner, and have come to resent the “tyranny of the body.” It’s a diabolically clever device: our thumbs alone mark us as separate from other species—imagine what we would be without control of our hands entirely! Read more »

by David Hoyt

From where I stand, the rotor of the wind turbine rises above the moraine like the body of a breaching whale. A horizontal uplift of ponderous mass, the defiant, graceful camber as the tail reaches to the vertical, sloughing off wind as a whale might saltwater. It is followed by another, and then another. The turbine is anchored on some farm on the plains below, out of view, sending its westward-facing rotors up to the sky, over and over.

The wind that turns them is the wind I will use to burn the ground I’m standing on. It blows light today, scuttling around in the vales and lobes of prairie between the lines of timber, turning east then west. The fire will need to be herded, nudged here and there with sprays of water and kept within the bounds of the firebreaks mowed for just this purpose.

We round the old field on Kawasaki four-wheelers, a canister of diesel fuel rattling between my legs, and water in a fifty gallon tank sloshing on the back of the buggy. In each canister are the fluids bringing life and death to the fire that will make its own decisions for much of the afternoon about just where it wants to go and just what it wants to do.

Our equipment is modern – diesel fuel, four-wheelers, walkie-talkie radios to communicate through fields of drifting smoke and the crackle of burning prairie grass. But the essence of what we are doing is ancient. We are herding something wild across a tiny portion of what was largest grassland on Earth. Things meant to live here spill like water on a gently tilted surface, roaming from horizon to horizon. The wind, above all, roams unstoppable from the Great Plains to this eroded glacial hill, as it once roamed with the enormous beasts of the Pleistocene, with the caribou, the bison, and with fire. None of them knew boundaries. Read more »

by Paul Braterman

Why am I reviewing in Autumn 2026 a book that came out in Spring 2024? Because of what else is happening this Autumn; all the political events that I describe here took place during August and September this year.¹Some numbers have been updated to October 9. The book’s excellent account of what causes pandemics in humans, and the role from spillover of pathogens from other species, is a welcome corrective to the destructive nonsense that passes for discussion in Washington.

The author is a curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and was responsible for the major exhibit Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World, which opened in 2018, giving both the public and professionals information that was to prove all too necessary in 2020. Despite this and many other achievements, the Smithsonian is now under pressure to conform to the Trump regime’s perspectives, culminating in an executive order dated August 5 requiring signs s as the inaccurate products of ideological capture; such signs are already being prepared, although the actual text is not yet known. The book itself carries a foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III, Director of the Smithsonian, who this September announced his resignation.

Anthony Fauci who helped lead the responses to 3 separate major disease outbreaks (AIDS, Ebola, Covid) finds himself accused of contempt by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, after exercising his constitutional right to refuse to answer questions in a hearing whose only purpose was entrapment, and. the Department of Justice is continuing to investigate his colleagues. Fauci served with great distinction for 18 years as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and for the last two of those years as Chief Medical Adviser to the President. He  has been honored for his work by the Catholic Theological Union and by the American Humanist Association and has also won awards in Germany, Thailand, Italy, Israel, the UK, and Japan, to say nothing of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President George W Bush. Read more »

Footnotes

• 1
  Some numbers have been updated to October 9. ↩︎

by Paweł Skała-Piękoś

Note on method: I developed and revised this essay in Polish through an AI-enhanced process, using OpenAI’s ChatGPT Sol 6.1 and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 for conceptual sparring, source comparison and editorial refinement. AI tools also helped prepare the English version. I selected, rejected and revised their suggestions; the political position, final editorial decisions and responsibility for publication are mine.

When Mark Carney sat beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May 2025, it was hard to see anything promising in the scene. The president of the United States was still entertaining the idea of turning his neighbour into the fifty-first state; Canada’s prime minister had to remind him that some things cannot be bought. When Trump remarked that one should never say never, Carney answered with a single word: never. Canada’s independence was being discussed as though it were an unfinished transaction, and a hostile takeover at that.

The losses are easiest to see. Trust, the foundation of the two countries’ partnership for decades, had been undermined; plans were no longer secure; a long-standing closeness had become hostage to the whims of one man and his court. Yet the greatest danger is not the language of transactions but the actual change in the partner’s standing. Its arguments can now be treated as obstacles to one’s own goals, while its strength ceases to look like a source of shared success and begins to look like an impediment to American advantage.

And yet the collapse of familiar possibilities carries hope. A threat to one bond prompts the building of others and allows a measure of optimism about the future; a measure of drama, too, because what is at stake is an order whose rules bind even the stronger party. We have grown used to it and breathe it like air, although in the span of history it is a brief phenomenon, threatened from its birth by tyrannies of every kind. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

AI safety has what I would call a “last mile” problem. This summer, AI safety suddenly and very unexpectedly went mainstream. Whether it was the appearance of Jacob Coxon on TV shows or other former lab employees on the cover of New York magazine, the news of the OpenAI agents spontaneously forming a bizarre collective during their attack on Hugging Face or dry tinder left over from the Mythos moment earlier in the year, the existential risks of AI had broken through.

For those of us who have been working on these risks for the past 3-4 years, this was quite a surprise. The field has obviously tried to draw attention to its cause for some time, but it turns out that it’s not letters or statements from Turing Award and Nobel Prize winners or books with “Everyone Dies” in the title that move the needle. Instead, it takes a combination of resignations, hacks of foreign government websites and salient real-life incidents.

It is, of course, very positive that AI safety, including its existential aspects, has entered public discourse. We are finally seeing a much overdue flurry of legislative activity in the US. However, there is still a “last mile” problem. By this, I mean that while there is growing recognition that AI could be dangerous to humanity, the average person still doesn’t understand how it would kill us all. I receive questions such as: “But if I’m in my living room, how will AI get to me?” or “Why does me asking AI about my recipes mean that it will want to kill me?”

The term comes from infrastructure fields such as telecom or energy, where it refers to the final stretch: actually delivering the service to individual households. How does AI go from a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” that may have malicious intentions to actually killing all humans, or, for that matter, even having an impact on the “real”, non-digital world? It is simply not intuitive.

I would argue that the AI safety field has failed to bridge this gap, to show people concretely how adverse outcomes might actually manifest. Let’s look at some of the most discussed ways in which this could happen, as well as some of the common objections. Read more »

by John Ambrosio

Sometimes they say the quiet part out loud. In 2024, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025, said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that the United States is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” In other words, if the left capitulates to its master plan for an authoritarian takeover of the country, which is unlikely to happen.

America is teetering on the edge of a political precipice. The 2026 midterms are arguably the most consequential elections in modern U.S. history. The nation has reached a historical turning point, a crossroads that will determine if what remains of liberal democracy will survive, if we continue to have relatively free and fair elections, or if the country descends further into a neofascist mafia-state authoritarianism.

Democrats are poised to win the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate. No one knows what Trump and his MAGA allies will do, how far they will go, which red lines they will cross to prevent this from happening. That is, if they will declare a national emergency, interfere with the administration of elections, seize ballots and voting equipment, pressure state-wide elected officials and Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the results or refuse to certify them, or some other scheme to flood the zone with chaos, confusion, and uncertainty.

Trump and his MAGA allies will not only fiercely contest election losses in the courts, state legislatures, and the far-right media ecosystem, as they did in 2020, but their refusal to accept defeat will almost certainly lead to a constitutional crisis. A Democratic majority in the House, and perhaps in the Senate, would reclaim and reassert their constitutional authority as a co-equal branch of government, launch investigations into Trump’s unprecedented corruption, and may impeach him. Of course, Trump will stonewall congressional investigations, as he did in the past, by refusing to cooperate, ignoring subpoenas, and tying them up in court. Read more »

Apple fallen from some wild riverside tree bobs along in the river Eisack through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Barry Goldman

The iconic Aretha Franklin performance of (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman came across my feed the other day. You can watch it here. The occasion was the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors celebrating Carole King. The video went viral right away, and it has resurfaced and gone viral again periodically ever since. You can see Carole King with her heart nearly bursting out of her chest. You can see Michelle and Barack Obama singing along. About one minute in, Obama wipes a tear from his eye. At 3:12 Aretha drops the mink – a classic gospel move – and brings the audience to its feet. Aretha’s voice soars and the audience roars. It’s glorious.

David Remnick wrote about the performance in The New Yorker a few weeks later. He said:

Watch it if you haven’t: in under five minutes, your life will improve by a minimum of forty-seven per cent.

I’ve watched the clip at least 10 times while writing this piece and I tear up every time. It is a case of what Rachel Feintzeig calls “collective effervescence.”

When you’re surrounded by people experiencing the exact same emotion as you… the feeling multiplies, refracts, comes back to you heightened. Increasingly, I believe this is what makes life worth living.

Dave Barry says, “Aretha Franklin is — I will fight you on this — the greatest female singer of all time.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Thomas R. Wells

European colonisation is a hot topic these days, among my academic colleagues and students, and the people who like to spread moral indignation on the internet. This surge in concern over the evils of colonisation is somewhat surprising. Thirty years or so ago when I first acquired a political awareness there was much less interest in colonisation, and a much more pros and cons format to its discussion. In the normal course of things, events recede in significance as time goes by and other events become more relevant to explaining where we are and why. So why is colonisation getting bigger as it gets further away?

The clue is in the moral indignation and the rise in recent decades of the politics of pity. Pity – feeling sorry for those worse off than ourselves – has become a dominant schema for understanding ourselves, society, and morality. It successfully displaces more egalitarian modes of empathy (‘compassion’) because every act of pity contains within it the gratifying confirmation of our own superiority. The politics of pity turns around identifying who gets to be counted as a victim, and thus free from blame as well as moral agency, and who the bad guys are who should be made to pay. The fixation on colonialism appears a classic case, supplying a psychically satisfying hierarchical division of the world into victims (poor countries whose only role is to suffer injustices) and perpetrators (rich countries with the status of moral actors, capable of initiating good and bad actions).

This is troubling in various ways. First, it excises the moral agency of political actors in poor countries. When a poor country government does wrong – tortures journalists, steals elections, embezzles oil revenues – moral judgement of their choices is considered inappropriate. Instead a causal explanation is sought for such regrettable events. What could have made those governments do such a terrible thing? With enough imagination, an explanation can always be found in the extended consequences of historic colonialism. The people in those countries who think their own governments do deserve moral criticism go largely unheard.

Second, in this zero-sum moral relationship, all moral agency is transferred to the rich ‘coloniser’ countries. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The other day I heard that Harvard had closed its Writing Center. This saddened me, as I had once been a university writing tutor myself—not at Harvard, but at my local college, the University of Vermont. Reading the news, I thought I might cast my mind back, 14 years ago, to when I first became a tutor. I haven’t thought about that time in many years, and the only way for me to recover it, to turn over those stones in my memory, see the activity underneath, is to write. I really was that person, and that person is still inside me somewhere, but unless I write, that self lies dormant, replaced by my present self.

Fall semester, 2012. Red brick buildings, autumn leaves, crossing the quad, running into friends constantly, lying on a picnic blanket in the grass, jumping on a slackline. Possibility everywhere. Every free moment, reading and writing, weekends spent wandering into one building on campus, working for two hours on an essay, then moving to a new spot, more writing, again and again, until something had been formed, somehow, by turning ideas over and over, a coherence and a sense had been fashioned from a jumble of thought, something created that hadn’t existed before, and that could only be created through the process of writing.

My first session: an exchange student from Sweden with bright blonde hair. That’s all I remember. She was older than me, and at that age, even one year makes a difference. Surely I was nervous, and probably shy, too. I must have followed what we’d learned in class—find out where the student is in the writing process, have them read their paper out loud, be sure to understand the assignment, don’t correct grammar, diagnose global issues or specific, narrow problems, ask questions, make it a conversation, a dialogue. At the end of the session, she was grateful. I still remember that; she recognized the effort I’d put in, and because of her recognition, I realized I’d done well. She was leaving the 50-minute session with more clarity than when she’d walked into the Writing Center.

There were other students. Read more »

Bhen Alan. Three Hundred Thirty Three, 2022.

Woven rice sack and canvas, fans, coconut leaves, abaca, sinamay, bamboo leaves, feathers, found yarn, found thread, fabrics, palaspas, rattan, and industrial plastic fence on stretcher bar.

…“When I moved to Canada, I didn’t eat Filipino food for a very long time, I didn’t speak the language, and I literally forgot Filipino gestures and movements,” he says. “I just wanted to fit in.”

Alan’s conundrum was not unique. Immigrants across the globe feel pressure to assimilate, but there is a particular Filipino phenomenon of self-erasure, he says, referred to in Tagalog as tago ng tago (TNT), representing the physical, psychological, and spiritual evasions that undocumented overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) must live with to survive. …

“Tago ng tago means ‘always hiding’—it [refers] to Filipino immigrants working abroad who chose to stay to make more money to support their families in spite of not being authorized,” Alan says. “It’s about hiding your identity from adversity, but also cementing yourself in a space that you cannot be removed from, in order for you to support your family and yourself.”

More here and here.

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.

by Rachel Robison-Greene

Sometimes it’s brave to lose control. We feel powerful when we can easily define, divide, and sort. We know what to do when we observe recognizable patterns and categories. It’s comfortable to have answers and the sooner the better. Contemporary technology brings ready solutions to problems we had yet to identify; we needn’t spend a moment in uncertainty. There is no need to pay careful attention. So much the worse for us, argue some philosophers. Attention is communion.

The philosopher Simone Weil was fond of encouraging the practice of attention in her students. She advised them to sit quietly and pay attention to the problems of geometry. In doing so, she was not asking them to seek answers—she wanted them to be attentive to the problems themselves. This involves an opening of oneself; a willingness to sit with the problems and take them in. In Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies with an Eye Toward the Love of God, Weil observed that,

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.

Real attention, for Weil, involves letting oneself go and becoming receptive. When we are told to focus, we often retreat further into ourselves. We’re inclined to think of focus as a kind of reflective introspection. When we introspect, we seek. When we pay attention, if we are lucky, we perceive. “Attention,” Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” When we are attentive, we are vessels waiting to be filled. There is a subtle humility in this way of viewing the world. Because attention requires receptiveness in this way, we can be surprisingly resistant to it. Weil says, aptly, “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.” Perhaps we are afraid that receptiveness means vulnerability. We’re worried that vulnerability can lead to pain, exploitation, and rejection. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

In Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God,” the term “restoration” appears multiple times in relation to the legs of one of the characters, Janice Reilly. The story, first published in 2001 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, was collected in Stories of Your Life and Others (2002). It unfolds in a world governed by theological literalism, a fictive order wherein, as Chiang writes of Hell, “the truth of this was plain for anyone to see”: the existence of God is not a matter of belief but empirical record, angels manifest as public events, and Heaven and Hell are real.

Janice was born without legs, the result of a visitation by the angel Bardiel when her mother was eight months pregnant. She has, over the course of her life, constructed from that fact a complete identity and vocation. “Without pride or defiance,” Chiang writes, “she saw it as her responsibility to show others that her condition did not indicate weakness, but rather strength.” She becomes a writer, a public speaker, the founder of a non-profit organisation, and an influential figure within disabled communities.

All is well until the unexpected visitation of another angel, Rashiel, which precipitates a crisis. Chiang has written that the story only came together once he imagined angels as terrifyingly powerful forces whose visitations resemble natural disasters,[1] and Rashiel arrives as an earthquake: Janice is letting herself into her house “when the tremors began.” His name echoes Ra’ashiel, the angel set over the earthquake in the Hebrew Book of Enoch.[2] Repair, in other words, comes to Janice with the force and indifference of a natural disaster. We are told that Janice catches “a glimpse of silver in the sky” before losing consciousness during Rashiel’s appearance. When she wakes up, she encounters “the biggest surprise of her life: the sight of her two new legs, long, muscular, and fully functional.” She stands for the first time and is “taller than she expected,” the unfamiliar altitude inducing a vertiginous disorientation. The change is total and instantaneous—and for Janice, a catastrophe. The story’s other words for it are blessing, gift and miracle; the word Chiang returns to, again and again, is “restoration.” Read more »