Shere Hite sold roughly 50 million copies of her landmark 1976 sex report, more than Kinsey's name recognition or Dr. Ruth's podcast fame ever bought her. Yet decades later, a strange disrepute still trails the woman behind it, right down to the mispronunciation of her first name.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza
Singapore hasn't had a real mosquito problem since the 1960s, when breeding households dropped from 48 percent to under one percent. The fix was toxic fog that wiped out butterflies and bats along with the bugs, and the city is still paying for it.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Eric Feigenbaum
Brad DeLong once plowed through 150 books a year at five hours apiece. Now he's down to half that, and he's asking whether AI can rebuild the document that a deep read would have left behind.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Robin Varghese
Iris Murdoch said you can't just will yourself out of love. A philosophical case for why "time heals" is wrong, and moving on actually demands deliberate, active work.
— via Psyche (Aeon sister), Matthew Barnfield
ChatGPT doesn't work like a database pulling up a file, whatever it feels like. Two cognitive scientists trace the surprising lineage of today's AI back to researchers trying to understand human minds, not build better search engines.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
A daughter finds her dying mother in the margins of her own bookshelf, scrawled Italian phrases and all. Mary Cappello talks through "Frost Will Come," a memoir that treats grief as a two-way passage between who you were and who you're becoming.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Philip Graham
OpenAI says an unreleased internal model solved 377 open math problems across 722 papers, nearly all written without human editing. The computing cost per proof has reportedly dropped sharply since its costly Navier-Stokes effort, though two Millennium Prize-adjacent proofs still needed extra machine time.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
An Instagram algorithm's romance-novel hunch turned into a real walking club: women gathering on Southern California trails to listen to audiobooks together, talking only if they feel like it. For one member battling anxiety, the no-pressure setup became an actual friend group.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza
A 17th-century philosopher never wrote about border policy, but a newly published text shows him proposing a test still missing from today's migration debates: imagine being the one detained, separated or deported before deciding the policy is justified. Leibniz's principle doesn't settle the arguments, it just makes evasion harder.
— via Blog of the APA, Lloyd Strickland
A library once dedicated to H.L. Mencken now bears another Baltimore journalist's name, and the swap is no injustice. The case for letting Mencken's ghost roam unrespectably, rather than enshrining a writer whose politics never quite held together.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
AI already disproved a geometry conjecture and found a new matrix-multiplication algorithm. A philosopher-computer scientist argues the same systems are about to make philosophy a capital-intensive discipline, driven less by solitary thinkers than by compute.
— via Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg
An autism diagnosis in 2023 exposed two competing reactions that both undermine the person being diagnosed: dismissing the condition as a flaw to deny, or praising it as a hidden superpower. Drawing on philosophy's account of epistemic injustice, the author explains why both responses erode credibility rather than build it.
— via Blog of the APA, Agata Mala
No excerpt content to summarize: the article body contains only a donation prompt and a stray markup bookmark, with no reportable facts, figures or claims to draw a deck from.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
A physicist best known for explaining quantum gravity to general readers now wants to collapse the distinction between minds and stones, electrons and laws. His latest book argues nothing in the universe differs essentially from anything else, a claim stranger and bigger than his earlier bestsellers ever attempted.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
A debate challenge spirals into dream-invasion jokes and rival podcasters fighting to host, before the real fight starts: a point-by-point reply to an open letter arguing AI might not be so dangerous after all.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, S. Abbas Raza
The Met's new Krasner-Pollock show is gorgeously installed, but the real draw has nothing to do with art history. Visitors come to gawk at a marriage, and to ask how Lee Krasner outlived it and kept painting while a passenger in Pollock's fatal crash did not.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Morgan Meis
One critic's personal shelf holds the books he loves most, and Cormac McCarthy's debut novel edges out all his other masterpieces for the single spot. The proof is one sentence about a shadow crossing a roof, picked apart word by word to show why it works.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza
Algorithmic bosses don't just hide decisions behind opaque code: they're quietly dismantling the collective resistance that built the labor movement. Workers end up isolated, outgunned by surveillance, and unsure who's even making the call to fight.
— via Blog of the APA, Orlando Lazar
David Byrne, the man who gave us bike racks and tree drawings between Talking Heads albums, has written a book about failure. Specifically, about ignored ideas and forgotten artists he calls "sleeping beauties," a term borrowed from a 2004 scientometrics paper that took two decades to turn into this.
— via 3 Quarks Daily, Azra Raza
Harvard has produced 72 APA presidential terms across the association's three divisions, dwarfing every other Ph.D.-granting institution. A new data dig into a century of philosophy's top job finds Yale shut out since 2006 and only 53 schools ever represented at all.
— via Daily Nous, Justin Weinberg
