by Thomas Fernandes

In Part I, we explored how bees navigate without depth perception, using optic flows to fly straight through tunnels, land smoothly, and estimate distance traveled. The visual system we examined works beautifully in providing simple navigation tools to solve complex tasks, leaving brain power for other activities such as pattern identification, nectar extraction, remembering profitable routes, and returning home

But what happens when that same motion-based perceptual interface must track and intercept a moving, evasive target? What are the rules of the hunt in insects? If any species can help us with this question, it is likely the dragonfly, with a hunting success rate close to 95%.

In a chase, a mammalian predator would run an interception course using depth perception to estimate closing distance, not follow in the exact footsteps of its prey. But insects cannot perceive depth and face a major optical challenge in motion parallax. When an observer moves, it becomes difficult to distinguish the target’s actual movement from the apparent motion caused by the observer’s own displacement.

Most flying insects, say flies pursuing other flies, use what’s called parallel navigation. The strategy is simple, you align with your target and match any changes in the target’s direction. If the target veers left, you veer left. This is a reactive pursuit, a continuous adjustment in response to prey movement.

It solves the motion parallax problem efficiently; the hunter only needs to keep the image motion of its prey at zero at all time which ultimately lets it zero in on the target. Notably, these chasing reflexes are driven by specialized “chasing neurons” that respond selectively to small, rapidly moving targets and are found only in chasing insects.

Dragonflies do something fundamentally different, as revealed by tracking studies. Read more »

by TJ Price

I.  Hook

And I’m a true doomscroller
I can’t seem to shut it down
Until the worst is over
And it’s never over

Metric’s album Formentera, released about three years ago, begins with “Doomscroller,” a deranged, multilayered, pulsing epic that lasts for approximately nine minutes. As an opening statement, this is audacious—in music, as in fiction, I often find common emphasis on the presence of a “hook,” engineered solely to cater to the fickle, capricious whims of the terminally impatient. In other words, if you can’t seduce someone effectively and immediately, then you don’t deserve their attention. Personally, I find this mode of artistic creation vulgar and repellent. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a hook, but programming it into a piece of art to ensure maximal audience engagement feels evil, somehow, to me. (Even worse, declaring it as a necessity!)

I think most would agree that an eleven-minute long track with lyrics such as ruling classes trickle piss from champagne glasses, that’s just how the evening passes, history on repeat relapses, and involving the turgid swelling of discordant electronics—like the buzzing of agitated bees!—might not be alluring bait for most. In fact, I think most might agree it would scare off any intended prey. However, I’m a weird fish. It’s like catnip to me—not to make a zoological hybrid of my metaphors. I was caught from the first moments of “Doomscroller,” from the frantic, febrile pulsing, a cybernetic heart gone tachycardic and slightly asystolic. (In fact, it seems to warp slightly, like something pausing just for a moment to catch its breath before being swept back up into the destructive sonic whirl.) Then Emily Haines breathily intoned, against that ripping, saw-like background: Was it an act of God or an accident? Read more »

Lichen growing on a rock near the river in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. ChatGPT told me: “Typical foliose lichens expand roughly 0.5–2 mm in radius per year. If this patch is, say, 10 cm across, it could easily be 25–100 years old.” It was about 10 cm in diameter. So could be older than I am. The rock also had many smaller diameter lichens but this one seemed most impressive.

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by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

For more than forty-three hours, from the afternoon of 26 November 2025 into the morning of 28 November, fire held fast to the towers of Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po, Hong Kong. Authorities later confirmed 168 deaths and 79 injuries, making it the deadliest fire in Hong Kong since 1948.

Wang Fuk Court is an eight-block high-rise estate built in 1983 to house thousands, each residential tower rising to thirty-one storeys. In late 2025 it was also a worksite undergoing major external repairs. Residents described façades wrapped in bamboo scaffolding and green debris-netting, protective boards fixed over windows and openings. When the blaze broke out, it spread to seven of the eight blocks, leaving one largely unscathed but surrounded by heat, smoke, and falling fragments.

Authorities have not issued a final cause. What they have said publicly is narrower and more important than any single dramatic culprit. Preliminary investigations found that some of the construction netting covering the eight buildings did not meet fire safety standards, and flammable expanded polystyrene foam boards covering the windows acted as potential accelerants. These details place attention on choices and oversight, and on whether regulators and contractors allowed combustible protection to become an accelerant. Officials said the rapid spread appeared linked to refurbishment materials, and that criminal and anti-corruption inquiries were under way. For residents, it sounded like an admission that risk had been accepted. The Labour Department had conducted 16 inspections of the site since July 2024, with the final inspection occurring just one week before the fire, yet the work continued. Read more »

by Herbert Lui

Just a few months before he turned 29, T. S. Eliot started his first day as a clerk in the Colonial & Foreign Department at Lloyds Bank. While he’d gained some recognition for his poetry a couple of years prior, it didn’t earn him enough income to soothe his financial anxieties, which caused him multiple nervous breakdowns. After Eliot started his day job, his wife at the time, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot, noticed his improved health. The steady income settled his nerves. She writes in a letter to his mother, “Not one of his friends has failed to see, and to remark upon, the great [change] in Tom’s health, appearance, spirits, and literary productiveness since he went in for Banking. So far, it has obviously suited him.”

Eliot’s story stands out in contrast to the current dominant narrative, that people who are dedicated to their craft must do it full-time if they hope to succeed. When Matthew McConaughey told his father he wanted to drop out of law school to become an actor, his father told him, “Don’t half-ass it.” Sylvester Stallone, even more famously, was down to his last $106 before he came up with the idea for Rocky. How many people, seeing the success of McConaghey, Stallone, and others like them, interpret this advice to mean fully committing to their work—and avoid taking a day job—betting they’ll make a hit before running out of time and money? How many people believe that having a full-time job means half-assing their craft? Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by David J. Lobina

There are some very long journal articles and books in analytical philosophy, and whilst I’m sometimes unsure as to the need for very big books in certain cases, I am a fan of long philosophical papers. Some of the best articles in analytical philosophy are long, very well argued, thorough, and pretty exhaustive – indeed, I’ve rarely thought ‘this topic deserves a full-length book’ after reading some of these pieces, and this always seemed like a good thing to me. I was reminded of this recently when a philosopher stated in their social media account that many books in politics, history or culture would be better as long pieces in the style and rigour of analytical philosophy papers, and even though the remark may have been a bit tongue-in-cheek, the point is a valid one.

I think this is true for the book under review here, Al-Rustom’s Enduring Erasures: Afterlives of the Armenian Genocide, in fact; not that long a book (the actual text is 224 pages, with an additional 40 pages of substantial endnotes), but one that is surprisingly repetitive and where the main argument would have benefited from a more constrained but focused format.

Enduring Erasures is a work in anthropology and ethnography, though it employs much of the style and theoretical framework of cultural/social studies, as I shall show later. It is nominally focused on the fate of the Armenians in Turkey since the Armenian Genocide, which is to say that it is mostly concerned with Western Armenians (those who lived in Anatolia before the foundation of Turkey) and not much with Eastern Armenians (those from the Armenian Highlands, this area eventually becoming the current Republic of Armenia). But the book does touch upon various other topics and more space is devoted to the Armenian diaspora in France than to the Armenians who stayed behind in Turkey. Complicating matters somewhat, there is a great number of so-called Hidden Armenians, or crypto-Armenians, in Turkey, and these are Armenians who conceal their origins (the estimates vary widely, ranging from tens of thousands of people to single-digit millions). Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

The American and Israeli invasion of Iran has become the next major crisis to emerge out of the ongoing polycrisis we are all living through. The thing causing the most consternation about the war seems to be the lack of clarity on reasons and the end game. The President and the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claim this will be easy, a one-and-done conflict that won’t bog America down. They throw out the usual rhetoric about Iran as an especially pernicious force in the world, as a state-sponsor of terrorism. They claim that their actions will allow the suffering people of Iran to rise up and “take back their country,” an argument for regime change.

It has been a chaotic roll-out to a war that threatens to further destabilize an already unstable world. But perhaps all this chaos is the point. Maybe the old idea that American postwar empire encouraged stability for its markets has been replaced by a new logic of rule by chaos. Amie Ceasar’s notion of imperial boomerang during the era of Forever Wars points to an intensification rather than a rupture. Rather than stability built for markets, American empire has increasingly come to demand is the exact opposite of that: chaos, deployed to make market extraction easier. The haphazard nature of the attack on Iran is just one example of the chaos of the neo-liberal economy.

A couple of overlapping phenomenon can help us to understand the world in which we find ourselves. Read more »

SUGHRA RAZA. Shadows On The Riverbed. Celestun, Mexico, March 2025.

Digital photograph.

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by Samuel Dunlap

In 2007, the neuroscientist Sabrina Tom slid volunteers into an fMRI scanner at UCLA and offered them coin-flip gambles. Win twenty dollars or lose twenty. Win thirty or lose ten. Will you take the bet? Most people refused any gamble where the potential loss exceeded about half the potential gain. The scans showed why: as potential losses grew, the brain’s reward regions responded more sharply to what could be lost than to what could be gained. Loss aversion — losing something hurts roughly twice as much as gaining it feels good — was visible in the tissue.

That same year, evolutionary psychologists were calling loss aversion a design feature — a calibrated response to environments where losing a day’s food could mean death but gaining extra food meant only marginally better odds. Meanwhile, behavioral economists were calling it a violation of rational choice theory. A rational agent’s choices shouldn’t depend on how identical information is described — but under loss aversion, they do. Frame a surgery as having a 90% survival rate and patients choose it; frame it as having a 10% mortality rate and they hesitate.

Three traditions, three accounts, all well-evidenced — and not three ways of saying the same thing. The neuroscientist suggests modulating the neural response. The behavioral economist suggests reframing the choice. The evolutionary psychologist suggests understanding the adaptive function before overriding it. Nobody has a principled way of deciding among them, because the field has never settled a prior question: what is a cognitive bias? Read more »

by Derek Neal

Allopathy and homeopathy are two contrasting theories of medicine. Allo, meaning other, and homo, meaning same, indicate how suffering (pathos) is cured in these two approaches. Modern medicine, speaking generally, is based on the principle of allopathy, meaning that sickness is counteracted by healing and therapeutic treatments; homeopathy, often considered alternative medicine or pseudoscience, is based on the idea that “like cures like,” so rather than introducing an antidote to an illness, the medicine used is meant to produce a response similar to the illness itself, stimulating the body’s natural healing mechanisms and curing the underlying ailment.

Some illnesses, however, are incurable. This is what a psychiatrist, Dr. Host, tells 16-year-old Nick in Michael Clune’s recent novel Pan. Nick visits Dr. Host midway through the story to help with panic attacks he has been experiencing for over a year. Early in the novel, Nick is able to calm himself by breathing into a paper bag, which is recommended after a visit to the emergency room, and he has found other temporary reprieves, such as reading (he delays a panic attack by staying up all night reading the 19^th century classic Ivanhoe), not thinking about the panic when it’s happening (he refers to “a gate in [his] mind,” which he can keep mentally closed, preventing a full blown attack), and, most intriguingly, through a sort of pagan ritual that he and his friends conduct on a day they call “Belt Day.” Unlike the first two remedies, which work by acting in opposition to the panic, the Belt Day ritual functions by inducing panic.

The events of Belt Day take place in an abandoned barn that functions as the hang out spot for Nick and his group of friends, which includes Ty (best friend), Sarah (girlfriend), Ian (group leader), Tod (coolest/most mysterious kid in high school), Steph (stoner friend), and Larry (comedic relief). A good portion of the novel takes place in the barn, which revolves around drug consumption (usually marijuana and later, acid) and the adolescent philosophical speculation that follows. The other settings are Nick’s Catholic high school, his father’s anonymous townhouse, and other suburban locations, such as Ace Hardware and 7-Eleven. Part of the pleasure of the novel lies in seeing these soulless and sterile American places imbued with a sense of, not necessarily beauty, but the worthiness of being artistically rendered (“There are mystical places and times of the year in the American suburbs,” thinks Nick). Read more »

Fugitive

Big brown bison walks the white line
of a two-lane, black eyes scanning for a sign.

Regarding asphalt he wonders
what happened to the grass.

How did this black ribbon come to bisect
my meadow between talus and hundred-foot pines,
and where are the columbine?

He asks no one in particular because
not even the alpha male in a herd would know.

A car crawls slowly up behind
capturing the remains of a wilderness,
smart-phones gripped in hands of small
Homo Sapiens snap at the ends of arms
thrust through windows trying to catch
an outlaw bison who broke from a farm,
whose humped shade steps like a rope-walker
down the white line’s length wondering
where the stillness went.

Where are the laurel and clover?

What are these beasts that glide like
murmuring ghosts along this scar
in my pasture clicking like crickets
trailing clouds exuding burnt
Cenozoic scents?

by Jim Culleny
Oct 31, 2010

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by Thomas R. Wells

The world’s richest 1% have more purchasing power, and hence more command over what the economy produces than ordinary people. They can afford a more extravagant lifestyle – at the extreme including multiple yachts, mansions, and private jets. One may reasonably quibble with the way activists like Oxfam produce their numbers, but it is obviously true that the average 1 percenter has a far greater climate impact than the median person in a rich country, let alone the world. What a waste! What a crime against the planet! How can it be allowed to continue?

Oxfam, Guardian readers, an unfortunate number of my academic colleagues, and many others are confusing questions of fairness (whether huge economic inequality can be justified) with questions of harm (whether inequality speeds up climate change). Specifically, it can be true that

Per person, rich people do enormously more harm to the climate than ordinary people, and

Redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor would make the world fairer

Without it being true that

Redistributing rich people’s wealth would result in less harm to the climate

I. A Robin Hood tax on the rich would increase climate change

The reason is quite straightforward. Per dollar, rich people’s spending is far less carbon-intensive than that of ‘ordinary’ (middle-class) people, let alone the world’s poor. If the purchasing power of the rich were transferred to ordinary people, it would be spent on the things we want, which tend to be more carbon-intensive. The result would be an increase in total GHG emissions and an acceleration of global climate change.

Perhaps this needs more explanation.

Rich people — pretty much by definition — already have most of the material things they want. So most of their money is spent on more immaterial things, requiring far less energy and matter in their production and consumption, and far more labour. Because they are so much richer than ordinary people they can afford to directly employ people to serve their needs – cooks, nannies, gardeners and so on. Many of the material objects they do buy are produced in unnecessarily labour intensive — basically artisanal — ways, such as million dollar cars and Louis Vuitton handbags.

Some of this consumption may be because the rich like nice things, just like anyone else, and they can afford to have them. Some of it may be due to a spiritually empty desire to show off their status via conspicuous consumption. The important thing is that although the rich spend a lot of money the way they spend it is not particularly carbon intensive. At least, it is less carbon intensive than the way we middle class people spend our money, and much less than how the world’s poor do. Read more »

by Bonnie McCune

Political discussions and debates leave me cold. That’s because I abhor conflict, and politics always seem to be accompanied by disagreements, fights, raised voices, and anger. When I think about the hot topics in the 60s and 70s, many of them centered on matters of race, I associate those times with images of red-faced individuals confronting one another, not infrequently accompanied by fists, even guns. Sometimes soldiers or militias or mobs.

Fortunate for my peace of mind at the time, I was a mother of young children, and my days were devoted to issues like potty training and memorizing the times table or arranging play dates and stretching my miniscule food budget. But the older I get, the more terrified I become over the idea of violence.

This set me thinking about regulations historically called EEO/AA (Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action) and DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). School busing was a primary one that set tempers aflame in parts of the country in days gone by. In my area out West, there wasn’t nearly the violence as, say, in the South, but still public opinion hovered at mild dislike. I thought the idea at least deserved a try. I’d learned by this time that the highfalutin ideals of American democracy often fell far short of what their originators hoped for. Here was an experiment I and my children could be part of.

We didn’t have an option in any case. Our public schools were part of the effort in our area. Having majored in psychology and sociology in college, I thought this the perfect opportunity to see models put into practice. Can theories do any good for society at large?

Life interfered. I became busier and busier, went back to work, became involved with parent groups, politics, writing, travel. Meanwhile my family experienced their lives in what was now an integrated society. Not perfect, but integrated.

Did the sky fall? Were we ostracized by friends and neighbors? Did our property lose value? The short answer? No. The long answer is much different, primarily because it is long. Complicated topics frequently take a great deal of time to develop and work on. Read more »

by Philip Graham

In the first part of our conversation at 3 Quarks Daily, the writer Kipling Knox and I spoke of the parallels of our recent books: dappled with ghosts, in similar Midwestern landscapes, they’re also fictions that are expanding into world-building versions of themselves.

From there our conversation has turned, in Part 2, to how taking the road of independent publishing allows writers to attempt tactics–in the writing, production, presentation and marketing of their work–that would likely not otherwise be available to them. Perform a radio play version (with actors from Second City) of one of your collection’s stories, accompanied by live music? Done. Drive through the country and deposit free copies of your novel in Little Free Libraries? Ditto. Illustrate your books with original photos, or line drawing? Yes. Have readers fan out across the world (the Coliseum in Rome, the Ubud Monkey Sanctuary in Bali, etc) to drop off mysterious cards that link to your novel? You bet.

Philip Graham: So, to continue. We have both, as authors, recently explored our own pathways that veer from traditional publishing models—you, at the beginning of your career, and I near the tail end of mine. Under the Moon in Illinois: Stories from a Haunted Land, your first book, arrived from an independent publishing house you founded, Prairie State Press. The book is beautifully illustrated with your own evocative photos, and there are even eerie videos of two of the stories, both of which feature music by your son. You’ve even created events that seem to rise above the usual book signing appearances. I’d love to hear more of how you gave yourself agency in this project.

Kipling Knox: I think once you decide that you’re not going to try to chase benefactors in traditional publishing, a lot of creative avenues open up. When you become an indie publisher for your work, you own all your intellectual property and you can expand or riff on it however you like. For my first book I just kept adding things to enhance the overall experience of the stories. As you say, there are photos in the book, and audio versions of some of the stories, backed by my son’s music. I made a few videos. And then we put on a really fun show, where I adapted one of the stories into a radio play. We had actors from Chicago’s Second City come down and read with me, and my son’s band played an original score. But I didn’t set out to do all these things at the beginning. It was more that at each turn, we thought about what would make the material more interesting for people.

PG: Actors from Second City! I love this. Please, tell me more.

KK: One of my best friends from high school, Brian Boland, was a regular on the main stage at Second City, which helped define improvisational comedy and produced so many famous comic actors. He’s also an accomplished voice actor and has been in some ads our readers have probably seen (like for Geico). He brought two of his colleagues and they each took on characters in the story, “The Ad Man After Dark.” It was amazing to witness how they brought the characters to life and entertained the audience. Read more »

by Barbara Fischkin

Round about St. Patrick’s Day, in the Spring of 1984, my Jewish mother, Ida Fischkin, learned that within months I would marry Jim Mulvaney.

She offered enthusiastic congratulations, as did my father. They loved Jim. We had been living together for a few years.

“Please tell me the honeymoon is in Aruba,” my mother said, sounding hopeless. She had already guessed where we were headed: Ireland, setting up shop in Dublin then establishing an outpost in Belfast to cover the raging civil war.

Jim and I exchanged vows on June 17, underneath a proper Jewish chuppah on the outdoor deck of an Irish style pub-cum-restaurant on the shores of New York’s Jamaica Bay. In less than two weeks we would move across the Atlantic. Jim and I were both newspaper reporters and this ancient Celtic-versus-Anglo story had raged again in recent years, although it bored most American editors. Jim pitched our bosses at Newsday with a suggestion of a Ireland bureau to appeal to the large number of potential readers who claim Irish ancestry – 6 percent of residents of New York City, double that on Long Island.

During the weeks leading up to our wedding, I realized how fortunate I was to have a mother who, like me, appreciated the value of risk and adventure, particularly if these included happy endings. As a six-year-old, in the midst of an Eastern European pogrom, my mother had saved her own life, astonishing my grandparents, who thought she was dead. A different sort of mother could have made those days of frantic preparations hellish instead of compelling.

There was, though, one small problem. Read more »

by Eric Schenck

It was just a dog.

Another day in Sayulita, Mexico, with my morning coffee on the balcony. Life was good. 

The sun was about to rise. A small surf town was stirring. The big fat iguanas were starting to wake up, too.

I sit on this balcony each morning. 

• Wake up at 6:15
• Make a pot of coffee
• Sit outside and observe

This is how the start of each day goes. There is a house across the street from mine. Usually, what I see is an older woman climbing down her outdoor spiral staircase.

Her routine is just as consistent as mine. There’s a coffee place around the corner. Most mornings, she’ll wake up, head to the cafe, and be walking up the stairs with her to-go cup ten minutes later. By then, I’m sipping too. It’s like a tropical version of Hitchcock’s Rear Window.

But that’s not what happened this time.

There was walking. And it was on the staircase as usual. But this time, the woman was absent. Instead, I was looking at a small white and brown circle of fur. 

My neighbor across the street had been turned into a mini basset hound.

Let’s call him Stanley.

Stanley was probably about 20 pounds, and less than a foot off the ground. 

What was interesting wasn’t that I was looking at a dog. It’s what Stanley was doing:

Taking the steps one-by-one, just like his owner.  Read more »

by David Hoyt 

Do birds have a sense of beauty? Do they, or does any animal, have an aesthetic sense? Do they respond to beauty in ways we might find familiar – with a feeling of awe, suffused with attraction, mixed with joy? Do they seek it out, and perhaps even work to fashion it from their surroundings? Darwin thought so, and made the idea the subject of his second major work, The Descent of Man (1871). In it, he outlined a mechanism by which the sense of beauty might, by shaping mating preferences, work to shape the form of insects, fish, and birds in a manner parallel to the better known process of natural selection. The resulting beauty of form, sound, or movement, Darwin argued, is neither the result of intelligent design, nor a necessary indication of superior fitness. Beauty, as Richard Prum has put it, simply happens – but in an organized, understandable way that leads to the dazzling primary feathers of a Peacock, or the bewitching song of a Wood Thrush.

The idea was, as ornithologist Matt Ridley calls it in the subtitle of his recent book, Darwin’s “strangest idea.” It is probably safe to say that the idea, known as sexual selection, was also his most original, and perhaps even most controversial, even more so than the idea of a blind transformism capable of achieving astounding organic adaptations over time. Though it made steady headway after it was introduced, natural selection was challenging enough for many to accept in the second half of the nineteenth century. Sexual selection, on the other hand, premised as it was on idiosyncratic female preference driving the evolution of ever-more varied and harmonious displays among male suitors, was, in the late Victorian period, simply a step too far. As a number of recent authors on the subject have noted, including Ridley and Prum, by the early twentieth century the idea was ushered out the door like an embarrassing dinner guest.

How this happened is a story that has not been fully told outside the confines of ornithology or the history of biology. Read more »