by Lei Wang

I have often scoffed at coping mechanisms. I wanted to be better than them. Freud said the end goal of therapy was to take you from neurotic misery to the ordinary unhappiness, but even in the midst of neurotic misery, I wanted more than the ordinary unhappiness. Ordinariness is not very inspiring. Only the unwell (one extreme of the extraordinary), I thought, aspire to be unremarkable.

Anything that freewheeled with emotions I took to be coping mechanisms: journaling, therapy, personal essays, even heart-centered meditations. And yet I did them all. I liked them, they helped me in some way, but it felt like dating someone embarrassing, like when a friend was seeing someone she was actually quite into but whose uncool earnestness she could not stomach in public, so we secretly nicknamed him Zumba. Zumba is inefficient and not how you REALLY exercise. Zumba is cringe. (I know, I know, the snob part of me is really lovable.)

What I thought I wanted was transcendence, the stuff beyond messy incorrigible human emotions, to live in that place where all is always well, at least subjectively. It’s a very attractive state: who wants to be Eeyore when you can be Pooh? I still believe it’s possible to live this way—it is possible to be enlightened—but I no longer think it’s the best or even better way.

Lately, I’ve been finding that my favorite teachings and teachers are post-enlightenment backtrackers, no longer proselytizing the gospel of nonduality/oneness as the ultimate truth but instead how to live in the world of appearances, including the duality of relationships with other people. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

Since I last posted, I fell, broke my hip, and am now in a post-op facility trying to put my life back together. I mention this because the poem I discuss today is exactly what I need as part of my medicine for this and life beyond. Tomas Transtromer prescribes a simple but hard medicine. My piece also contains a quotation from his “Schubertiana” a wonderful poem on music and politics. If you love either or both, you should read it. My piece is also a meditation on home. I hadn’t thought about the Odyssey until this moment, but maybe something of it is here too.

Task: to be where I am.
Even when I’m in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself. —Tomas Transtromer

I have before me a copy of Truth Barriers, a collection of poems by Tomas Transtromer translated by Robert Bly. I was surprised the other day to open it and find it signed by both men. Robert, in his neat, small hand said “another Swede! – ‘Even the grass whispers Amnesty,’” and from Tomas, “Dear Nils, try to feel at home!” Both obscure, and both lovely, and both somehow true. (I just realized that all my life I’ve been trying to feel at home.) I been trying to feel at home with my Swedishness even to the point of fantasizing what my life would have been like if after a couple of years being jobless at the start of the great depression, my parents had decided to go back to Sweden as some of their friends did. What would it have been like to live there during WWII? Where would my father have found a job? He was a machinist. I imagine him working for Saab, or Skania Vobis, or Volvo. So likely we would have lived in a city rather than the farm country one of my mother’s family.

Also, I’ve been listening to a lot of music performed by Swedes having become a fan of The Real Group, that marvelous gathering of 4 or 5 singers (depending on the time frame) with impeccable harmony. They sing both in Swedish and English as do the marvelous Swedish quartet The Ringmasters And yes, I’ve bought into the learn a language app, Babbel, and am trying, painfully to learn Swedish. (I’ve pretty much given this up.) So, yes, Tomas, I am trying to feel at home. Read more »

by Carlota Figueroa

I know that a “boom” sound is usually associated with something negative, like putting tinfoil in the microwave and the inevitable trip to the hardware store for a new one. However, just sometimes, having things explode or implode can actually be very beneficial to us: especially when it comes to harvesting energy. Nuclear power as a whole is a controversial topic, but as a physicist, seeing how much our energy demand is growing year to year, I wouldn’t be able to sleep soundly at night if I didn’t talk about fusion energy and convince you (or at least try to) that it is nowhere near as scary as it sounds.

A 2022 study showed that its participants overestimated the risks of nuclear accidents compared to natural disasters. It also argued that there may be a trigger in our behavioral immune system that makes us much more naturally averse to nuclear energy, as if it were a contagious disease. In my opinion, the main problem is that in many cases fusion is not distinguished from fission: they are both grouped under the general “nuclear energy” umbrella, which evokes that feeling of uncertainty that makes so many uncomfortable. Is there really any difference between the two?

The way fission reactors work is that they take a very large (and radioactive) nucleus and split it, releasing energy in the process. Have you ever tried to buy your geeky, Big Bang Theory-loving friend an original gift with a physics motif? I am sure one of the first things that comes up is a mug with one of the most important equations in physics printed on it: E = mc^2. Well, this little equation is the main reason why we can harvest energy from dividing a heavy nucleus: the two daughter nuclei you get from the split weigh less, together, than the parent nucleus you started with, and that missing mass is released as energy. I won’t go into more detail, but hopefully you get the idea.

Now, let’s turn our attention to fusion, as the story is slightly different. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

Reading Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy is, as I’m sure it was meant to be, a concerning and surreal experience; the anti-democratic fantasias of Silicon Valley’s elite would be laughable if they weren’t having such a deep influence on the modus operandi of America’s kleptocracy. Duran traces the story from Peter Thiel’s encounter with Davidson and Rees-Mogg’s 1997 book The Sovereign Individual which predicts the total collapse of the welfare state, with crypto and other such decentralised mechanisms sustaining whatever emerges after the disaster. Participatory democracy will be replaced by system in which power is granted those cunning enough to win it, now that they have been freed of the fetters of government regulation and the damnable obligation to look after the lesser. The information age, say Davidson and Rees-Mogg, makes this inevitable, and it is thus not very surprising that the advocates of unlimited and unrestrained technological growth find this vision attractive; it naturally places them, as the “cognitive elite,” at the head of the table.

Duran then winds out the story to show how this vision has been articulated among both resplendent would-be John Galts, like Thiel, Elon Musk and Balaji Srinivasan (current CEO of Coinbase), and basement-dwellers who like to think of themselves as Underground Men, like Curtis Yarvin. This is the sort of power fantasy that reassures its votaries that the collapse will happen naturally and their victory is assured; nevertheless, it wouldn’t hurt to move the process along. The Nerd Reich shows how Thiel’s evangelism (literally, now that Thiel has added a version of apocalyptic Christian dominionism into the ideological mix) has snaked its way though a collection of political action groups and venture-capital firms, all culminating in the election of a Thiel acolyte in J.D. Vance, and the vigorous adoption of cryptocurrency by Trump as both ideological signal and as a means of personal enrichment, which is his primary, indeed only, agenda in his second term. Read more »

by Robert Jensen

After finishing required coursework, Ph.D. students in most disciplines take preliminary (sometimes called qualifying) exams to demonstrate that they’re ready to begin independent dissertation research. Faculty members on a student’s exam committee sometimes discuss potential questions ahead of time with students.

As a joke, I would tell graduate students in the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin that my question would be simple: “Social science is neither social nor science. Discuss.”

I never asked a student to respond to that prompt, which could have made for a tense exam because not all faculty would find it funny. It was just my way of poking at academics, who seemed to me to be disproportionately socially awkward. More importantly, I wanted students to question whether disciplines such as economics, political science, sociology, and communication studies were sciences in any meaningful sense.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that I may have been too cynical about the social part of the joke. The larger my sample size—as the number of people I have met in my life grows—the more it seems to me that awkwardness in people is more or less equally distributed among vocations. But I hold firm on the refusal to treat the study of economic, political, and social systems as sciences—not because those fields are less important than physics and chemistry but because they take on vastly more complex subjects that constrain the application of the scientific method. Studying atoms and molecules is hard, but understanding people and societies is more challenging, and often beyond the reach of the methods of contemporary science. Read more »

Cloud behind a mountain in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Marianne Janack

In an essay he wrote for Gourmet magazine about a lobster festival, David Foster Wallace considers the ethics of eating “flesh based viands”, and particularly the practice of boiling lobsters alive. Do they feel pain? Comparing human neuroanatomy and lobster neuroanatomy doesn’t really answer the question, he concludes—it could lead us to think that they don’t feel pain, but the same facts might mean that they suffer even more than humans do. The upshot? The answer to the question of whether lobsters feel pain can’t be answered by recourse to physical structure: the evidence is ambiguous.

I. Uncomfortable thoughts about preferences

Wallace points out that lobsters’ behavior seems to suggest that they’d prefer not to be boiled, and seeing such behavior would, in ordinary circumstances, lead us to think that the creature behaving that way is in pain. In fact, he says, anyone who has seen a tank full of live lobsters at the grocery store will see that they prefer the dark. And studies of lobsters suggest that they also prefer cooler waters. So it’s hard to come to the conclusion that lobsters don’t feel pain when they are boiled alive without doing a lot of intellectual gymnastics.

But, of course, the tradition of distinguishing animal pain from human pain is long, going back at least to Descartes. Read more »

by Richard Farr

Ladies and Gentlemen, let us raise a toast to one of the greatest and most loved books ever written, for this October 28th is the tercentenary of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver’s magnificent account of his misfortunes and discoveries, never out of print, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. You may know it by its nickname, Gulliver’s Travels.

I find his four narratives of exotic, accidental tourism so rich and vibrant — so full of old passages remembered and details never before noticed — that I think it will live forever. And, unlike the hapless Luggnaggian immortals he encountered, the struldbrugs, who are condemned to an eternity of vile decline, at 300 it remains as vigorous and youthful (and funny, and cutting, and perceptive, and joyously obscene) as the day it fell from the presses. Somehow indeed its snivelling courtiers and pointless wars seem more relevant than ever. 

Granted, we are never quite sure how much of Mr. Gulliver’s tales to believe. Consider how he introduces himself in the first adventure — both exhausted and pickled. During a terrifying storm in the heat of the tropics, his ship is torn asunder on a rock. He and a few others escape in a lifeboat, which is itself then wrecked, and he nearly shares the watery fate of his companions. In a detail more than strange he admits that, having washed up on an unknown shore, he falls into a profound slumber partly because of “about half a pint of brandy that I drank as I left the ship.” Really? He also gives the last position of the doomed Antelope as “to the north-west of Van Diemen’s Land [Tasmania]… in the latitude of 30 degrees 2 minutes south.” Perhaps some evidence of the brandy here, for this would put the site of the disaster not in some chartless southern reach of the Indian Ocean ocean but in the deserts of southern Australia. To make matters worse, his own map places him far closer to Tasmania than he could have been but also, impossibly, near Sumatra. Caveat lector.

Still, he’s a fascinating and complicated figure, well worth getting to know. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

Out of perhaps narcissistic curiosity, I recently did a search on myself, which also took me to the search engine’s AI mode summary. Its AI mode said that I had been a National Guardsman who shot and killed a student at Kent State in 1970. In case you’re wondering, it’s not true. I have never been a National Guardsman. I have never been to Kent State. I have never shot anyone. And I have never killed anyone.

Horrified, I read the AI  summary several times in disbelief. I then quickly re-ran the search to find  this time the AI mode summary about me was sketchy but generally accurate, with no reference to Kent State or the National Guard.

Wondering how this  frontier large language model AI system– which is supposed to generate text based on such things as hidden Markov chains and  Bayesian nets– could come up with this, I did a search on which National Guardsmen were involved in the infamous shooting at Kent State. My search revealed a series of names bearing no resemblance to mine. The closest connection I could find  between my name and the Kent State shooting was that my name is “Ken.”

What was an indulgence has mutated into an  exercise of routine paranoid  checkup searches. So far so good. No references to Kent State, shootings, or killings, or for that matter to being an underground anarchist or a notorious outlaw.

This did set me off wondering— what if a search did so?  What could I do about it?  And what if just by writing this column that might be added to a large language model’s database made it more probable that I would be tied to Kent State or shootings or outlaws? I guess I better keep on doing those checkup searches.

Still, what would I do if one of those searches turns out bad?  Do I write a cease and desist letter? To whom? Do I sue? Who? And how could I ever prove any damages?  Whenever I do a search the AI mode response is never quite the same in content or layout. Almost certainly, I was the only one who saw the Kent State result but if others did, how could I ever find out?

This is, of course, not really  about me. It’s about you. It’s about all of us. And to quote a line from Linus in Peanuts, the implications are staggering. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Tim Sommers

This is true. Or as true as I could manage. It is a continuation, as you might guess, of Day One. It follows the aftermath of a near-fatal car accident that led me back to philosophy. Hannibal Buress supplies this epigraph:

“When people go through something rough in life, they say, ‘I’m taking it one day at a time.’ Yes, so is everybody. Because that’s how time works.” – Hannibal Buress

__________________________________________________________

So, there’s this glass thing, I don’t know what to call it, “vessel,” I guess, next to my bed and a tube coming out of it that snakes over to me, into my nose, down my throat, and into my stomach where it pumps the blood out of me that is still leaking from various places inside. You can see the blood swirling around there. It seems too dark. There’s got to be a pump too, but I don’t see one.

I am dying to sleep.

Literally, dying. Every time I go to sleep, I stop breathing, and a clamor of people in white come to wake me up. I let myself sleep anyway until they wake me up again.

I am not dying to eat. I am just really, really hungry. But I am not allowed to eat. It’s the internal bleeding.

My Mom comes in, and she’s got a bag of circus peanuts in one hand and something more reasonable to eat in the other. Circus peanuts are these old-timey candies that are neon orange and shaped vaguely like large peanuts, but soft and squishy, the consistency of a stale marshmallow. They are made of gelatin, sugar, and disappointment. I like them.

A nurse is trying to get between my Mom and the candy and me, but while she’s distracted, I reach over and grab the circus peanuts out of Mom’s hand, then manage to hold my butt just far enough off the bed to shove the package under my mattress. Then I play the waiting game. Read more »

by Jim Hanas

Like a lot of people, I’ve spent the last week thinking about a filmmaker who, having refined the technical and philosophical aspects of his mature style, took a big swing with a controversial, genre-bending documentary that raised questions about the nature of knowledge and truth.

I am speaking, of course, of Errol Morris, whose The Thin Blue Line (1988) turned documentary filmmaking on its head when it was released almost forty years ago. The movie slowly unravels the murder case against Randall Dale Adams for the 1976 killing of police officer Robert W. Wood, most controversially through a series of reenactments. Every theory of the crime receives one, except—quite effectively—the one that the film leads you to conclude is the case. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed. Adams was released the following year.

The movie was to documentary films what New Journalism was to journalism, the inevitable moment when a form—having previously taken its medium to be transparent—begins to thematize itself and its limitations. This made The Thin Blue Line exciting for postmodernists, who read it as a deconstruction of an official narrative through close reading and a blurring of the line between fiction and non-fiction. 

Despite his incessant flirtation with such questions, Morris is having none of that.

I only became aware that Morris was a fellow grad-school dropout with the release of his 2018 book The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality), in which he relates his experiences amid the postmodernism debates on the analytic side of the aisle, where he could have hardly had a better seat. He studied with Thomas Kuhn, author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—which Morris characterizes as “a kind of postmodernist bible”—with whom he had a dramatic falling out. The titular ashtray was lofted at Morris’s head by Kuhn himself. Read more »

Sughra Raza. It’s Not Art, They Say. Boston, Oct 22, 2026.

Digital photograph, from “On The Way To Work” series.

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Hello Readers (and Writers),

We’re pleased to announce that you can now follow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Facebook, and Bluesky, where we’ll be sharing our original essays, curated articles, and other interesting material from across the sciences, humanities, and arts.

This initiative began with a suggestion from one of our writers, Carlota Figueroa, who encouraged us to take social media more seriously as a way of reaching new readers. So, we’ve now established an automated system for sharing 3QD content across all five platforms, complete with article descriptions, images, author credits, and links back to the original posts. Carlota will also be taking an active role on our Instagram account, interacting with readers and conducting interviews with 3QD writers about their work, interests, and ideas. These conversations are meant to give our readers an opportunity to get to know some of the people behind the articles they read.

NEW POSTS BELOW THIS ONE

Read more »

by Jonathan Kujawa

In May, there was a breakthrough result for the Erdos Unit Distance Conjecture. In July, an explicit counterexample to the Jacobian Conjecture was announced. In September, one version of the Millennium Prize question about the Navier-Stokes equation was resolved. All of these were settled thanks to substantial contributions by AI systems [1]. Each one of these could be waved away. I heard many mathematicians dismiss them because Erdos problems weren’t “serious” mathematics, that constructing (counter) examples isn’t the same as proving a theorem, or that throwing millions of dollars at a single problem was a one-off.

For other mathematicians, those responses felt like whistling in the graveyard. Even publicly available AI systems had clearly gotten good enough to meaningfully work at the level of a decent graduate student in mathematics. And progress seemed unlikely to stop anytime soon. Still, one could hope judgment day for mathematics would be years away.

On October 6th, everything changed. That was the day an AI company dropped a neutron bomb on mathematics. They disgorged 700+ research papers. Those papers claimed to establish significant results across mathematics [2]. For me, at least five of the announced results hit close to home. A couple were questions I had even thought about occasionally, with a vague hope that some new idea might let me make real progress. And I knew of other mathematicians who had spent years of their lives seriously working on some of these problems.

In the days after the announcement, I had all the emotions. It was immediately clear that every aspect of the mathematics profession will be disrupted. And disruption impacts real people, sometimes significantly. That shouldn’t be downplayed. The next few years are going to be a time of change, and it won’t be great for everyone [3].

In the longer run, math will be alright. Read more »

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by John Allen Paulos

Election Day is just a week or so away and we can be sure that there will be many bogus claims that elections in this or that state or district were rigged. Of course, these claims generally depend on outright lies, not on the counterintuitive subtleties of probability theory, one of which is described here. Stated in terms of a long sequence of coin flips, the surprising bit of mathematics is called the Arcsine law. It focuses on the changing difference between the number of Heads up to a point in the sequence and the number of Tails up to that point.

What might we say about this changing difference? Assuming the coin is fair, we would naturally assume that the difference, the number of Heads minus the number of Tails, would change as the coin flips continue and would sometimes be positive and sometimes be negative. Furthermore we might expect that the difference between the number of Heads and the number of Tails would be positive about half the time and negative about half the time.

We might also conceive of flipping coins as counting the ballots between two evenly matched candidates, Harry and Terri. Since the candidates are, by assumption in a dead heat, we might expect in the ballot counting process that Harry at times will be ahead of Terri and Terri at times will be ahead of Harry. Furthermore, during the counting process we might expect each of the candidates to be ahead about half the time.

Whether expressed in terms of coin flips or votes, this intuition “about half the time” is not correct. What happens is that it’s considerably more likely that either Harry/Heads will be ahead during almost the entire counting/flipping process or that Terri/Tails will be ahead during almost the entire counting/flipping process than it is that Harry/Heads will be ahead about half the time and Terri/Tails about half the time. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

In a recent video, youtuber Belle of the Ranch discussed a question sent in by a viewer. The viewer wondered whether medicare for all (a policy that Belle supports) would be possible as it might give the US government a chance to ban trans healthcare. Belle pointed out that the government was already trying to do so in our current landscape. She noted that this comment was an argument against fighting for what all of us need at the expense of a marginalized group – a more robust healthcare system we can all access.

I appreciate her calling out this kind of bigotry and divisive rhetoric inherent in the question. To counter, she argues in favor of affirmatively defending all our neighbors and for the fight for a larger structural change for the benefit of all. But I’m interested in a slightly deeper problem she’s pointing out: how so many Americans have decided that big changes made by collective action are, in fact, not possible. A certain cynicism lay at the heart of the question, the either-or of divisive politics and the difficultly of making change becoming an impediment. This seems often universal in our political discourses these days. We have gone from AmeriCAN to AmeriCANT. So many – left, right, center – bemoan the state of affairs and often just settle on returning to some sort of status quo rather than moving our country forward, as if the post-9/11 status quo was actually working for most of us. In some cases, such as with climate change, they refuse to believe any solution is possible. But the status quo, as figures such as Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have been arguing, will not get us to a better world. Instead they advocate for bold action driven by people power. Read more »

by Sean Murphy

i.

Here’s the thing about clean-up hitters: they strike out a lot.

Then again, consider some of baseball’s most prodigious home run champions: Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron, and Babe Ruth, the top three, had career batting averages of .298, .305, and .342, respectively. In baseball terms, excellent, but that also means they didn’t hit safely about sixty-to-seventy percent of the time they stepped to the plate. And these are the best of the best. Making a career at writing is not dissimilar to becoming a big league ball player: a hit every third attempt might enable you to remain employed, to call yourself a professional.

Thom Jones, in this umpire’s opinion, struck out a lot. He was a fastball hitter, and when he saw a meatball down the middle, he could get hold of it. Epilepsy, punch-drunk boxers, and wounded men battling addiction (to drugs, to drink, to bloodshed) comprised his sweet spot, and he returned to it often, albeit with increasingly diminished returns. When he stepped outside his comfort zone, the results could range from embarrassing to unreadable, and those moments occur with distressing frequency in his second (Cold Snap) and especially third (Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine) collections.

With very few exceptions, no honest (or sane) writer would quibble with a publishing history that confirms every third or fourth story is generally regarded as a home run, or a minor classic. Indeed, many of us would giddily settle on completing just one worth remembering. More, a great many writers would be perfectly content with every third or fourth story being an extra base hit. And then there are the thousands (millions?) of undiscovered writers who would trade years of their lives for a solitary single.

No sane or honest writer would ever want to be measured by their batting average of every published piece, over the course of a career. Read more »