by Christopher Hall

One thing the commotion over Jamir Nazir’s Commonwealth Prize-winning story “The Serpent in the Grove” – allegedly written by AI – has proven is that close reading is definitely not dead. I doubt if any recently published story, prize winning or not, has come under such scrutiny. Phrases denoting the presence of the machine are hunted out, scrutinised, parsed as certain shibboleths. There are the weird, incoherent metaphors and similes: “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.” “The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.” There’s some evidence of verbal cliches, like the pairing of a concrete noun with an abstract one in the same description: “…the air sweet with cane and forgetting.” But aren’t there some decent turns of phrase here as well? “She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.” (Wait – is it that good? You can’t wear a crown on your hips or your cheekbones. Does that qualify as a hallucination?) The story is propulsive even amid the florid language. Are the characters a little on the undercooked side? Well, nothing’s perfect. How far exactly are we supposed to delve – what are we not accepting here that would pass by unremarked in a story that was unquestionably written by a human? We could say it’s not deserving of the prize it won – I’ll make no judgement here – but the questions this controversy poses go well beyond that.

I’m reasonably sure that I never would have thought the story was not written by a person if it hadn’t been suggested to me. That’s not surprising, though, as most people who don’t use AI a lot (while I’m bound to look out for AI use as a college teacher, I’ve found thus far I’m rather bad at it, and I don’t use it in my writing) are not good at identifying its hallmarks. Is it, in the end, a good story? Read more »

by Robert Jensen

Cornelia Gipson is trying to understand the hold that whiteness has on white people.

“I grew up black in Mississippi, and from the time I was 4, I knew I was black and what that meant,” she said. “How do white people come to understand they’re white? When did you first realize what it meant to be white?”

Gipson, who now lives and works in Nashville, asked me that question on a Zoom call that she initiated after reading my 2005 book, The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege. My answer: I didn’t think seriously about being white until I was 30. Better late than never.

Gipson didn’t want to lecture me but was looking for honest conversation, which meant not just grilling me but reflecting on herself.

For example, she told me about pursuing a promotion and getting rebuffed by a white colleague. When Gipson pushed back, pointing out her qualifications, the colleague said, “You don’t know your place.”

“I think of it as the night Trump showed up at my house,” Gipson said, when she had to acknowledge how quickly subtle white supremacy can turn blatant. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

It’s not often that you get a new argument on such a well-canvassed issue, but starting in 2018 Perry Hendricks began energetically defending variations on what he calls the impairment argument against abortion. It attempts to establish the wrongness of abortion without taking a stand on whether the fetus is a person, in much the same way that Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous violinist example tried to establish the permissibility of abortion even if the fetus is a person. Hendricks’ argument has generated an extensive secondary literature in bioethics and, basically, nothing anywhere else. Here I want to present his argument and my own counterexample, which I will call the Pro-Choice Astronaut.

Hendricks’ original argument can be presented in five steps. If it is immoral to impair the fetus by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome, then, all other things being equal, it is immoral to kill the fetus. It is immoral to impair the fetus by giving it fetal alcohol syndrome; therefore, it is immoral to kill the fetus. To abort a fetus is (in most cases) to kill it. So, all other things being equal, to abort a fetus is (in most cases) immoral. The strength of the argument is that it operates by analogy from a case in which the wrongness is widely accepted even by those who think abortion is permissible.

On the other hand, imagine an astronaut, call her Sally, who is pregnant and who has agreed to a space mission of substantial duration. She knows that the radiation exposure and other stresses of extended spaceflight will severely impair the fetus she carries. She also intends, on return, to terminate the pregnancy. She is not deceived about what the mission will do to the fetus and she knows what she will do upon return. After careful reflection on the facts, her own psychological states, and, perhaps, after consulting with others, she undertakes the mission.

There is no question of irresponsibility here, apart from the question of whether or not the abortion is, in and of itself, irresponsible. Sally is not drinking, taking drugs, or behaving recklessly or thoughtlessly. She is doing her job, which happens to be a job for which she has trained,  with which she has been entrusted, and which (we will stipulate in the first variant) carries great social value. The fetal impairment is foreseen and accepted as part of the cost of doing the mission, but the fetus she would otherwise carry to term is not being prepared for a life of impairment. It is being impaired and, then, separately, will be aborted. Read more »

by Nils Peterson

1. Today mind wanted to think back to all of the houses I lived in with my parents growing up and on into my young manhood. There were five, and mind tried to walk through each of the rooms in all of the houses. It was more difficult than I would have thought. I remember so much and forget so much. Give it a try. It is interesting because sometimes you are still there and you can find yourself.

One of the things I noticed was that all of them had formal dining rooms with a good table and matching buffet. It was a room not used except for dinners. And I realized that this was true of all the houses, even the humblest, of my parents’ friends, a formal place to be used in a formal way when guests arrived, the best china taken out of the buffet along with the silver and set carefully around, along with maybe an elegant crystal center piece. I am struggling now to remember if we used it for supper after my father would come home from work in the evening, of course with ordinary plates and flatware. My mind seems unable to answer yes or no when I ask it that question. I think we might have eaten in the kitchen though I can’t quite picture the kitchen table though the word is familiar.

But I started thinking about how in the modern house, there is no such room to be formally gathered together in for a meal, no dining room and no front room (what we called the living room) either where easy chairs, sofa and the Stromberg Carlson radio would sit. Everything is freeform, a flowing from one state of being to another. No sense of a room for this and a room for that, a place for everything and everything in its place. Even the kitchen is open and part of the flow. Well, that’s the way we live now. Is this a memory of loss? an elegy? an “In Search of Lost Time or Space?” Can’t quite tell if this is an important observation about the world we live in or just a wondering. Read more »

Avian bombardment of an outdoor staircase in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Jim Hanas

There is a room at the Museum of Modern Art  where you can stand with a Henry Darger at your right shoulder and look at Robert Rauschenberg’s Rebus on the perpendicular wall. It feels like an important position, this corner, where one can see—or imagine that one is seeing—naive immediacy and cultivated immediacy at once, though this immediately leads to questions. Was Darger, perhaps, more self-conscious than we imagine, and might Rauschenberg have been more intuitive, despite his credentials? How can you tell the synthesis from the thesis, once the former has become the latter and is ready for another go ’round? Maybe you can’t, any more than the Athenians could distinguish Socrates from the sophists.

In this corner, between the two paintings, there is a doorway with a glowing, code-mandated “Exit” sign above it. The doorway leads into the next gallery, but I like to think that the door itself is Ray Johnson.

Johnson—the inscrutable collagist and mail artist—is part Rauschenberg, part Darger. Part insider, part outsider. It’s been possible in recent years to see a wide range of Johnson’s work in New York. There was an exhibition at the Morgan Library that focused on Johnson’s late use of photography—which took in a lot of his other mature work as well—and one at the Craig Starr Gallery that showcased his surviving Bauhaus-inspired paintings and traced his movement into assemblage and collage. I’m also lucky enough to have a friend who managed to get on the mailing list for Johnson’s New York Correspondence School as an art student growing up on Long Island. Examining the mailings she received, still in their original envelopes, was a thrill—one of these things you move to New York hoping to experience.

Two weeks ago, my wife and I headed to Ashville, North Carolina, to the Black Mountain College Museum, for the opening of Black Mountain COLL(A)GE, an exhibition—running through Labor Day—focused on collage work produced by artists associated with the college. Black Mountain, though a relatively short-lived institution, was among the mid-century’s most fertile hubs for the emerging American avant-garde. As European artists fled to America, Josef Albers brought Bauhaus practices to the Blue Ridge Mountains, where he taught from 1933 to 1949, hosting a who’s who of interdisciplinary artists, including John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Susan Weil, Cy Twombly, and—of course—Johnson.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Ashutosh Jogalekar

In 1966, Michael Polanyi began his book The Tacit Dimension with a sentence that every experimental scientist understands: “we can know more than we can tell.” Polanyi had been a chemist before he became a philosopher. He knew the difference between the written account of an experiment and the experience of doing it. His point was not that science is vague or mystical, it was that scientific judgment rests on inherited practice, trained perception, and habits learned from other people. The University of Chicago Press summary of The Tacit Dimension describes tacit knowledge – tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments – as a crucial part of scientific knowledge.

The point is easy to see in chemistry. A synthetic procedure may ask the chemist to warm a solution with “gentle swirling,” to add a reagent slowly enough to maintain a “gently exothermic reaction,” or to continue stirring until the mixture turns “pale yellow.” These are ordinary phrases. They are also compact pieces of apprenticeship. A young chemist wants to know how gentle is gentle, how pale is pale, and how much warmth counts as a controlled exotherm. The experienced chemist has seen enough flasks to supply the answer. Even Organic Syntheses, perhaps the most careful journal of synthetic procedures, acknowledges the difficulty. Its instructions say that its procedures are written in greater detail than usual journal procedures, checked for reproducibility in an editor’s laboratory, and still may cause trouble when checkers try to reproduce the submitters’ results.

There are foundational examples in the old seminal papers. Alexander Fleming’s 1929 paper on penicillin begins with an accident that would have annoyed most bacteriologists. He had set aside plates of staphylococci on a laboratory bench. During repeated examinations they were exposed to air and became contaminated. Around one contaminating mold colony, he noticed that the staphylococcal colonies “became transparent and were obviously undergoing lysis.” A spoiled plate became a discovery because Fleming knew what he was seeing. The later paper contains numbers, dilutions, temperatures, and culture conditions. The first act was visual judgment. It was the recognition that a nuisance had become a phenomenon to be investigated.

A second example comes from a very different part of science. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Surreal Sunsets, Vermont, May 2026.

Digital photograph.

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Architecture and Light

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by Mike Bendzela

How did a marsupial end up in one of our hen house nesting boxes? That is the question, and as it sounds like the set-up to a joke, I’ll just say, “Because the hens egged her on!”

It is the tradition in (probably) all American dialects to drop the initial “o” and say “a ‘possum” instead of “an opossum” which is a bit of a mouthful. From now on I’ll drop the apostrophe used to indicate the omitted letter.

Speaking of mouthfuls: Possums have 50 teeth, more than any other mammal in this country, including a whopping ten upper incisors. Mess with a possum and she’ll let her jaw hang open so you can get a load of all those sharp teeth. She will not attack you, though, bless her heart.

I discovered the possum one evening when I went out to shut in the hens for the night and noticed the birds all hanging out in their fenced-in run; usually by dusk they’re all inside the house on their perches; but this time they were just standing there looking at me as I entered the gate. If birds could be said to exhibit body language — upright, stationary, alert — then they might have been saying to me, “We’re not setting claw in there!”

So I looked inside the house to see what was the matter: There was the possum, holding her ground inside a nesting box that had been cleared of eggs. Read more »

by Anton Cebalo

In the past few months, I have been reading about the personalities present in Young Bosnia for a forthcoming essay. The group was not formalized by any means, made up of decentralized cells of 3-5 people, and a scattered array of political influences. But in Gavrilo Princip—its most famous member and who would ultimately kill Archduke Franz Ferdinand—you see a distillation of the temperament that made them.

The Austro-Hungarian press after the assassination was eager to assign outside influences to the group. Princip and his co-conspirators were said to be molded by dark forces not of their making. Instead, a profile by psychoanalyst Martin Pappenheim reads the opposite. In the last year of Princip’s life, while kept in solitary confinement in Bohemia, Pappenheim conducted multiple interviews.

What we find is an absolutist mindset bred from the poor, difficult, and rural soil that these young men were raised. Six of Princip’s siblings died in infancy. The assassination was a violent act from the periphery, as if its spirits were tortured for centuries, and the real shock was that it actually reached modern Europe at all. The fact that it did was happenstance. Princip initially thought the moment was forever lost until he saw Archduke Franz Ferdinand while loitering in front of a delicatessen. Read more »

by Carol A Westbrook

My orchids bloom after the winter solstice, in December, the shortest day of the year.  The days begin to get longer after this, and soon it’s early spring.  Orchids, like all plants, are highly dependent on light.  They eat light, water, and carbon dioxide, to make sugar. In fact, every single molecule of sugar on this earth was made by a plant.

As the days get longer and the sunlight increases, plant life gets richer, allowing the plants to get on with living—growth, reproduction; nectar and pollen production; fighting off predators and attackers.  In other words, the plants goes on to do everything that we non-plants do, with the exception that plants don’t move, they are rooted in place.

Because of this, plants have evolved a very complex lifestyle that is different from ours; they have to reach for as much sunlight as they can get, and they have an amazing ability to synthesize complex molecules that are needed for these  processes, including communication with other plants of their species, attracting pollinators, and warding off predators.

Orchids are epiphytes, they grow on other plants in the wild, though we can also grow them in pots in greenhouses. Orchids are selective for their epiphytes host– they don’t prefer all plants. Furthermore, they don’t bloom every year, and it’s not easy to tell when they are going to bloom, but if they do bloom that year, it’s usually in the winter, and with other plants of the same species. Read more »

Dear Readers and Writers,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more »” below…

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by Jeroen Bouterse

We are fortunate to live in an equitable society, with high levels of trust and excellent administrative transparency. Many old diseases have been eradicated, and most people live healthily to old age. However, our utopia has been suffering for a long time from a peculiar and cruel illness, about which after a century of research the following is now known with moral certainty.

Everyone has a one in five chance of falling victim to this disease. No genetic or lifestyle factors predict it in any way, and it is undetectable until you are exactly thirty years of age. At that point, there are two days during which it is symptomless but detectable with advanced medical equipment, after which it is irreversibly fatal and kills rapidly. There is no cure except one: during these crucial two days, tissue from the vital organs of one healthy peer can save with certainty the lives of five diseased people. However, the required procedure inevitably kills the donor.

A few decades ago, a voluntary association was formed. If you sign up, you commit to reporting to a hospital when you turn thirty, together with thousands of peers who have turned thirty on the same day. You get tested. If you are healthy, there is now a 5% chance that you will be randomly selected as a donor, which means you will die. If you have the disease, you will be saved. For both groups, the procedure is painless. You can decide whether you want to be informed of your predicament at any point, but you cannot opt out after entering the hospital.

This ‘5-to-1’-scheme reduces every participant’s chance of dying at thirty from 20% to 4%. This being an enlightened age, by now almost everyone has realized this is the sensible thing to do. The healthy participants who die as donors are not remembered as murder victims, nor praised as heroes, but mourned as casualties of the disease itself – their deaths regarded as equally indiscriminate and senseless, but fortunately fewer in number than they were in the past. Read more »

by TJ Price

In last month’s column, I began telling a story that has its beginnings in a therapeutic modality called “narrative reprocessing.” Essentially, this is the act of re-authoring one’s trauma(s) in order to defragment painful memories, which in turn allows for a type of spiritually retroactive agency over events that caused distress in the past. I would advise reading the prior segment first before reading this one, and the one which is to follow, in four weeks’ time. (I apologize for the falsehood in the first post that this would be the conclusion; the story rather took on a life of its own and went to some surprising places.) To those of you who have followed along thus far, thank you. For those of you who have read the thing in various states of its composition—and, in some cases, urged me to press through to the end—thank you isn’t enough.

Please be advised that—in this second instalment, as in the first—there will be a number of sensitive topics involved, including mentions of sexual assault, suicidal ideation, threats of physical violence, and general injustice.

3.
I hadn’t made up my mind about the play yet, or what I was going to do there, or how I was going to talk to Iris about what happened with Ricky. That night completely blotted out any other thought in my life for weeks on end. I was distracted, quick to anger, unhappy. I posted increasingly dire lyrics from bands I loved on my LiveJournal. My online musings had lapsed from using self-harm as a metaphor to pondering its actuality. (This was a lie: I’d already experimented with inflicting physical pain on myself to dull the pain of emotions, and it hadn’t worked.)

Despite this, a friend of mine—and another RA in the building—noticed I had been acting strangely. I’d even skipped some classes, and some meetings of the student actors’ guild, and she’d become a little concerned. Amanda ran into me after I’d left the cafeteria one day, and walked alongside me as we returned to the dorm. She invited me up to her room, to talk about what was on my mind, which I accepted, but without actual plans to divulge what had happened to me. I was a guy, I thought. What had happened was my fault, because I hadn’t been clear enough in my intentions. Whether I knew it or not, I had internalized all of my guilt and shame (and anger) about the encounter, and turned it all on myself. The depression I felt wasn’t related to that, though, I said. It was related more to how I felt about another guy in my immediate social circle, Colin, who was a year older than me and permanently affixed to his high school girlfriend, who was also a member of our social circle. 

I wanted to be Colin’s brother, I think. I had attached to him in an unhealthy fashion, and I think he’d started to notice. Worse, his girlfriend had too. Worse still, I had convinced myself I was in love with his girlfriend, because of the feelings I had for Colin, and that confused things even further. This is what came out, when I started talking to Amanda. She was a patient listener, and knew just when to insert the right questions. She was also an actress, and a damn good one, though she had no need to lie to me. When I got to the part about the play, and what a difficult time I was having trying to decide whether or not to drop out, I hesitated.

You can tell me anything, Amanda said, supportively. I won’t tell anyone. Read more »

by Dilip D’Souza

What is it about ants? No, I mean it. In all my writing over the years, ants have been a frequent and nearly beloved subject. Some, when set down in a maze and faced with a choice, tend to turn left. Some have walked on stilts while compatriots have had their legs (sadly) trimmed. The late great myrmecologist, EO Wilson, described a charming experiment in which a live ant, smeared with pheromones only exuded at death, was promptly ferried – frantically waggling limbs notwithstanding – by his mates from the nest and dumped outside.

All in the service of science, and all just fascinating – fANTscinating, I can’t resist – to me.

And over the last few days I’ve been reading about … well, it’s like this. Out in the Arizonan desert, some large harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) left their nests and stood still. I don’t mean this happened all of a sudden, nor am I suggesting this is unusual behaviour for these ants. But a researcher from the Smithsonian Institute, observing these ants one morning, found them doing just this. (“The First Cleaner Ant? A Novel Partnership in the Arizona Desert“, Mark W Moffett, Ecology and Evolution, 12 April 2026.)

Why would these members of an otherwise frenetically active family of animals cease movement? No, they hadn’t dropped dead … but hold that thought.

This particular stillness, because several members of a much smaller “undescribed” species in the genus Dorymyrmex, known as cone ants, climb onto these unmoving ant Goliaths and … groom them. For which favour, the harvesters stand there with their jaws helpfully wide open. I should say, ant Amazons, because the harvesters that leave their nests and roam about are workers, and worker ants are always female. Read more »

by Steve Szilagyi

Early motion-picture film and x-ray film were often made from cellulose nitrate, also called nitrocellulose — a highly flammable plastic created by chemically treating cellulose with nitric acid. Heat, pressure or friction can set it off. Under the wrong conditions, two sheets of nitrocellulose lying atop one another long enough can decompose and ignite. Poof.

Among its virtues, nitrocellulose produces exquisite images. On the other hand, it has been responsible for some of history’s most horrifying mass-casualty events.

The most famous was the Bazar de la Charité fire, which took place in Paris in 1897.

The Bazar was one of the city’s largest annual charity fêtes, organized by society ladies and held at a novel location each year. In 1897, it was held in a large wooden warehouse whose interior had been decorated to resemble a medieval street. Among the attractions was a demonstration of projected motion pictures. A hot projector lamp ignited the nitrate film. The fire spread rapidly across the flammable decorations and through the wooden structure. Exits were poorly marked. A rough total of 126 people died.

Accounts of the disaster rarely fail to mention that many of the victims were upper-class women trapped in the voluminous fashions of the day. It was one of the first disasters in which dental records were used to identify the dead.

This movie-disaster has inspired at least four disaster movies, most recently the well-reviewed 2019 Netflix series Le Bazar de la Charité (Fire of Destiny). Today, a magnificent expiatory chapel, Notre-Dame-de-Consolation, stands on the site of the tragedy.

Less well known are the events that took place at the Cleveland Clinic, in Cleveland, Ohio, on the morning of May 15, 1929. There was fire and panic. But no dental records were required to identify the dead. Many of the corpses were unmarked; some were found seated in chairs with magazines open on their laps, seemingly dozing. Read more »