Step on it!

Skateboarding the eclipse

This skateboard trick may never be eclipsed.

Danny León, a Spanish Olympic skateboarder, set up this shot and landed it during today's eclipse in Spain.

Perfect planning! pic.twitter.com/D6A6JQAFWj

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) August 13, 2026

Gort, Robert Wright, and A.I. @3QD [GT-5]

My latest 3 Quarks Daily article is up:

Klaatu barada nikto: Robert Wright’s The God Test

It’s a review of Robert Wright’s current book, The God Test. It turned out to be a tough slog, more than I’d anticipated.

I started blogging about it well ahead of time. I figured I’d write a half-dozen to ten or so blog posts ahead of time and then wrap things up with the formal review. I wrote some blog posts, but by Tuesday, August 4, less than a week before my article was due, I was still blogging about coming up with an approach and hadn’t gotten around to the various things I wanted to cover in the lead-up. Then the weekend arrived and I had to start writing. So I did, here and then. But things wouldn’t converge. Still, I managed to write something and post it on Sunday afternoon. But I wasn’t happy.

Of course, while sometimes I’m satisfied with my 3QD pieces, that’s not always so. This was just one of those times. But still.

On Monday, when the piece actually appeared, I thought I had one of those situations I often had as an undergraduate. I’d write the term paper, turn it in, and then it would hit me, “this is what I should have done.” The process of writing the piece had taken me to a different intellectual place, one where I saw what had to be done. I had such moments of illumination on Mondey, Tuesday as well. But none of them held.

And so, here I am, still not knowing how I could have done a better job of reviewing that book. On the one hand, I wanted to give it a good review. Wright’s a smart guy, I’ve followed him for a long time, I think his “cosmic perspective” is important and I think his views on international cooperation on AI development are important as well. On the other hand, I don’t think much of his account of how LLMs work, but I just didn’t want to get into that. Yes, I indicated one problem in the review, Wright’s casual treatment of semantic relationships. As I indicated in the review, Bert Idem has discussed other problems. But I see still other problems. And I just didn’t want to get into that morass. Going into that would have swamped the review. (Let me say, moreover, that I think Wright is unnecessarily credulous of the Silicon Valley view of the technology. He should have listened more carefully to Gary Marcus.)

It is what it is.

But I will say this. I am working on my own book in which I present my own “cosmic” view: Play: How to Stay Human in the AI Revolution. On this I agree with Wright. That is the perspective we need to take. But I approach it in somewhat different terms, terms which I’ve sketched out in a piece I published four years ago, Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. Note that in the book length version I do not intend to even try to explain how LLMs function internally. The technology that will take us there – whatever and wherever it is – will necessarily involve different architectures. The last chapter of Play will sketch out the kind of research program I think we need to take us there. Here’s a sketch: Brave New World: Notes on the next 30 years in AI [Work in Progress].

As for explaining how LLMs work, that’s a different project. I don’t intend to work on that. But I am thinking about a book that would be useful to anyone who is interested in that subject. The book I’m imagining would be preliminary to such an account: Language, Memory, and Mind: A Supplement to The Computer and the Brain.

Some wild flowers in blue, yellow, and white

Brains, AI, The Geometry of Thought

Maggie Vale, AI & The Geometry of Thought, Seeds of Science, Aug. 12, 2026.

Minds build an internal architecture of curved spaces, folded structures, and traversable shapes.

Across neuroscience and AI research, a shared picture comes into view. Concepts gather in high-dimensional manifolds, and cognition moves through those manifolds like paths across a landscape.

In brains, ideas appear as smooth, population-level patterns spread across many neurons at once. Brain imaging studies show that sentences, scenes, and abstract themes light up constellations of activity that form continuous subspaces. Nearby regions carry related meanings, and distant regions carry more distinct ones. The geometry of these patterns preserves relationships between ideas.

Large models form a similar inner space. During training, they learn embedding geometries where words, images, and concepts settle into neighborhoods. Related items land close together, and meaningful directions through the space capture transformations such as analogy, composition, and abstraction. Clusters, trajectories, and curved subspaces emerge as a natural result of learning.

Across biological and artificial minds, the same structure appears: meaning takes the form of a shape, and thinking unfolds as motion across that shape.

There's much more at the link.

Colleges are already trade schools

Jessica Grose, Even Elite Colleges Have Become Trade Schools, NYTimes, Aug. 12, 2026.

As the new school year begins, it’s worth pointing out how students and administrators treat colleges — even elite universities — as a catapult to a “good job” above all else.

Which is to say: Colleges are already trade schools.

The top two majors for students at four-year institutions as of 2022 are business and health professions. In June, the Department of Education issued its “earnings accountability” rule, which states that undergraduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a high school diploma, and graduate programs have to show that their students earn more than a person with a college diploma, or they risk losing access to federal loans.

Nathan Heller, in a 2023 New Yorker article about the death of the liberal arts major, offered a history of the competing aims of the American university. In the 1960s, our institutions of higher ed were described by Clark Kerr, president of the University of California system, as a multiversity that “incorporates the tradition of land-grant universities, established with an eye to industrial-age skill sets. And it provides something for everyone.” The pursuit of knowledge and beauty, scientific research, and pre-professional studies were all bound together, even if it was never a harmonious union.

That fractious union was breaking apart long before the second Trump administration took a wrecking ball to the federal funding of research across disciplines. But the effort to put higher education in its place started much earlier. Over the past 30 years, there has been a concerted effort by mostly conservative politicians to diminish trust in the value of college, and to provide less federal funding for it. They paint America’s colleges and universities as foolish, progressive hotbeds of ethnic studies departments where impressionable young people get expensive Marxist indoctrination rather than marketable, useful skills.

There's more at the link.

Happiness and war in the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Sinikka Parviainen, William Pyle, Measuring Rally Effects Under Authoritarianism: Evidence from Russiaʼs War in Ukraine, Munich Society for the Promotion of Economic Research - CESifo GmbH, August 2026.

Abstract: Measuring politically sensitive attitudes in authoritarian settings is difficult because ex- pressions of political support may reflect repression and social pressure as much as genuine belief. We propose a complementary approach: using responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive to provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes. Using subjective well-being (SWB), we ask whether within-person changes in life satisfaction, after accounting for changes in material and personal circumstances, can provide evidence of incorporation into a wartime national project. Drawing on more than a decade of panel data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (2013–2024), we find that life satisfaction rises significantly following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Gains are initially larger among ethnic Russians and smaller in Moscow and St. Petersburg, consistently larger in military-industrial regions, and sharply lower among those nearest the front. This theoretically patterned heterogeneity is difficult to reconcile with generalized social-desirability bias and is consistent with differentiated wartime incorporation. By 2024, rising non-response and attenuating subgroup differences suggest that the informational value of SWB may deteriorate over time.

From the Introduction:

How can politically sensitive attitudes be measured when citizens believe they cannot safely reveal them? The problem is particularly acute in authoritarian regimes, where repression, self-censorship, and social pressure complicate the interpretation of survey responses. It becomes even more difficult during war, when expressions of support for the state may reflect social expectations of patriotic solidarity and strategic conformity as much as genuine belief. Under these conditions, conventional survey measures of support for political leaders or government policy provide an uncertain guide to underlying attitudes.

Existing efforts to address this problem have focused largely on improving the measure- ment of politically sensitive attitudes themselves. Indirect questioning techniques, including list and endorsement experiments, seek to make truthful responses less risky (Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro 2011; Blair and Imai 2012). These methods have substantially advanced the study of authoritarian public opinion, but they continue to measure politically sensitive attitudes through survey items whose purpose is to recover those attitudes. We take a different approach, asking whether responses to questions that are not themselves politically sensitive can sometimes provide indirect evidence about politically sensitive attitudes.

The intuition is that politically sensitive attitudes may manifest themselves in ways that extend beyond explicit political expression. They may shape how individuals experience and evaluate their lives, producing psychological outcomes that respondents have little reason to perceive as political. If these downstream consequences are less susceptible to strategic misrepresentation than direct expressions of political support, they may provide complementary evidence about those attitudes. We test this idea using subjective well-being (SWB).

Wartime rally effects provide a particularly demanding setting in which to evaluate this argument. Existing work typically identifies such effects through increases in support for political leaders or governments, despite longstanding concerns that these measures are espe- cially vulnerable to social desirability pressures in authoritarian settings (Hale 2022; Kizilova and Norris 2024). Because questions about life satisfaction do not ask respondents to evaluate political leaders or government policy directly, they may be less vulnerable to the strategic distortions that complicate the interpretation of conventional approval measures. At the same time, life satisfaction may respond to the same feelings of collective purpose and national sol- idarity that underlie genuine rally effects. We therefore ask whether SWB, after accounting for its material and personal determinants, can serve as an indirect indicator of incorporation into a wartime national project.

H/t Tyler Cowen .

Posts on the waterfront

Where “the will to live” resides in the brain

Neuroscientists found a brain region that physically grows when you do things you don't want to do. It shrinks when you stop.

It's called the anterior midcingulate cortex. It's smaller in people who struggle to delay gratification. It gets bigger when obese people diet. It's… https://t.co/Bba5FL6RiM

— Aakash Gupta (@aakashgupta) August 11, 2026

We Need To Talk About Leopold [& Situational Oblivion]

From the YouTube page:

Last week, 24-year-old Leopold Aschenbrenner — former FTX staffer, ex-OpenAI researcher, and author of the viral 165-page essay "Situational Awareness" — managed to lose roughly two-thirds of his $45 billion hedge fund in a matter of weeks. The margin calls arrived during his wedding weekend.

In this video I break down how a trader with no professional experience raised billions from Silicon Valley, why his AI "hedge" wasn't a hedge at all, and how leverage plus a concentrated bet on artificial intelligence stocks turned a great-looking expected return into a catastrophic outcome. Along the way we look at the cultural gap between Silicon Valley and Wall Street, why Ken Griffin's Citadel ended up buying the collapsing portfolio in an overnight fire sale, and the maths of volatility drag — the reason a high expected return can still drag an investor's typical outcome straight into the ground.

It's a story about leverage, risk management, expected versus median returns, and what happens when you go "full Kelly." Featuring reporting from the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, plus Victor Haghani's lessons from The Missing Billionaires.

I’ve listened to enough of Boyle’s stuff to have decided that he’s an absolute master of dry humor. But he really outdoes himself here. This one is so dry it could have sucked up all the rain that’s fallen on the East coast in the last several days.

Spain - Chick Corea | Rhythm Shaw & Purbayan Chatterjee

What does top-level achievement in literary criticism look like?

Recently Séb Krier asked:

What would a Fields medal type challenge look like in non-STEM domains? How should normative elements be evaluated? What would make me say “ok we have superinteligence in economics.”

I have no idea what a Fields medal type challenge would look like in literary criticism. But the main scholarly organization of literary critics in the United States is the Modern Language Association. They’ve given lifetime achievement awards since 1996. A got the list and uploaded it to Claude Opus 5 along with some remarks on what I knew about them and asked it for a short characterization of each. After going through the list it concluded with this remark:

One pattern you might find useful: the award splits fairly cleanly between theorists (Miller, Girard, Jameson, Spivak, Mitchell), field-founders who made a body of texts institutionally legible (Ruoff, Adorno, Saldívar, Gubar), and one editor-scholar of the old dispensation (Mack). Heilbrun sits across two of those. The chronology moves roughly from the third category through the first toward the second.

That makes sense to me. 

Getting back to Fields medals, I know little about them beyond the fact that they are awarded to mathematicians under 40. I don’t know to what extent the award is based on a body or word or some specific achievement, such as a spectacular proof (or two). If I were to compare Fields medalists with MLA lifetime achievers, it’s the theorists who are most comparable.

Here’s Claude’s commentary on the list:

A note on sourcing before the list: the MLA doesn't publish substantive citations for this award the way some societies do — the announcements are typically just "honors the lifetime scholarly achievement of a distinguished member." So your baseline assumption is right: it's a body-of-work award in every case. What follows is a characterization of the body of work being honored, not a paraphrase of an official rationale.

2025: Ramón Saldívar — A foundational figure in Chicano/a literary studies, best known for Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference (1990) and The Borderlands of Culture: Américo Paredes and the Transnational Imaginary (2006), which won the MLA Prize for the best book in US Latina/o and Chicana/o literary and cultural studies. He began as a comparatist — his first book was on figural language from Cervantes to Joyce — and his later work introduced the widely-discussed concept of a "postrace aesthetic" in contemporary ethnic fiction. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2011. (He's the brother of José David Saldívar, also a border studies scholar, which occasionally causes confusion.)

2023: W. J. T. Mitchell — Your association is correct and is probably the largest single factor: he is the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor at Chicago and edited Critical Inquiry for roughly four decades. Beyond the editorship, he essentially founded visual culture studies within literary departments — Iconology, Picture Theory, What Do Pictures Want? — arguing for the inseparability of word and image.

2020: Susan Gubar — Feminist criticism, yes, and specifically the Gilbert-and-Gubar collaboration: The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), No Man's Land, and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. At the award ceremony colleagues praised her not only for setting the standard in feminist criticism but for modeling collaboration itself as a mode of scholarly work. Her later cancer memoirs and Judas/Holocaust-related work extended her reach well beyond the academy.

2017: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak — Both of your associations hold. The 1976 translation of Of Grammatology, with its long introduction, effectively brought Derrida into American literary studies; "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) then made her central to postcolonial theory, alongside A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. She's also known for decades of rural literacy work in West Bengal, which she treats as continuous with the scholarship.

2014: Rolena Adorno — Colonial Spanish American literature, particularly the writings of the conquest and its indigenous counter-histories. She is Sterling Professor of Spanish at Yale, and produced a critical print and digital edition of Guaman Poma de Ayala's El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, serving as scholarly consultant to the Royal Library of Denmark, which holds the original manuscript. She's also written extensively on Cabeza de Vaca. Worth noting for your purposes: she was an early advocate for digital humanities, which is unusual in this list.

2011: Fredric Jameson — Body of work, as you say: Marxism and Form, The Political Unconscious, and Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I'd push back slightly on "no critical school" — he doesn't have a named method like Girard's, but "always historicize" and the postmodernism thesis have been programmatic for a lot of people.

2008: René Girard — Your characterization is right, and he's the outlier here in having a genuine school (Colloquium on Violence and Religion, Contagion, students and followers). Mimetic desire in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), the scapegoat mechanism in Violence and the Sacred (1972) and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World — a theory that outgrew literary criticism into anthropology and theology.

2005: J. Hillis Miller — Body of work spanning two distinct careers: the Geneva School phenomenological criticism of The Disappearance of God and Poets of Reality, then the Yale deconstruction of Fiction and Repetition, The Ethics of Reading, and Ariadne's Thread. He was MLA president in 1986, and his presidential address on "the triumph of theory" is a period document in its own right.

2002: A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff — She essentially built Native American literature as an academic field. She trained in nineteenth-century British Romanticism, but went to the Newberry Library to find primary sources when she began teaching, work that culminated in American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review and Selected Bibliography (MLA, 1990) — what Kenneth Roemer called the "bible" of the field. She also co-edited the MLA's Redefining American Literary History and did years of institutional work within the MLA on behalf of the field, which the award recognized as much as the scholarship.

1999: Carolyn Heilbrun — Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (1973) is right, but the book that traveled furthest is Writing a Woman's Life (1988), on the unavailability of narrative forms for women's biography. She was the first woman tenured in Columbia's English department, MLA president in 1984, and wrote the Kate Fansler detective novels as Amanda Cross. Her 1992 resignation from Columbia over the treatment of women there was itself a public event in the profession.

1996: Maynard Mack — Your hunch about editorial work is not just correct, it's arguably the whole story. He was an editor of the Twickenham Edition of Pope's poems, the standard edition, and edited the Twentieth Century Views series (143 volumes), Twentieth Century Interpretations (97 volumes), and New Century Views (17 volumes); he also served as general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. Alongside that he wrote King Lear in Our Time, The Garden and the City, and Alexander Pope: A Life, and taught at Yale for 45 years.

Red flowers on a street corner in Hoboken

Mongolian Girl Has a Laugh with her Camel.

Mongolian Girl Has a Laugh with her Camel.
The little girl’s name is Butedmaa and she was just 5 when this picture was taken in 2003 by photographer Han Chengli, who titled it “Inner Mongolian Child”. pic.twitter.com/8SNLEQCOzo

— World's Amazing Things (@Hana_b30) August 9, 2026

Remarks by Billy Strings on the mind of a musician

David Marchese, The Interview: Billy Strings Escaped the Darkness. He’s Playing to Not Go Back. NYTimes, August 10, 2026.

Billy Strings has drawn from something old to do something entirely new. The singer and virtuoso guitarist, who is 33, has broken ground by using the elements of traditional bluegrass to become an arena-filling, chart-topping phenomenon, straddling the worlds of roots music and jam bands. Along the way he has also acquired a Deadhead-like legion of fans who follow his tours from concert to concert.

As improbable as it is that Strings can sell out cavernous venues across the country while playing bluegrass classics — in addition to his own introspective compositions, which he and his drummerless band often spin into long improvisations — it’s even more surprising when you know the path he took to get there. Strings, whose real name is William Apostol, was surrounded by poverty and drug addiction in his family growing up in small-town Michigan. Those demons have continued to haunt him: Strings’s mother died from a drug overdose last year at 64 years old. That loss inspired much of the music on his beautiful new album, “So Much for Goodbyes,” due out Aug. 28. He discussed the genesis of that album, among many other things, in our heart-wrenching conversation, which took place during a rare day off from his summer tour.

Well into the interview:

How does playing music help process the feelings that you have, whether it’s about your mom or anything else? It’s always been my coping mechanism, survival strategy and my medicine. Playing bluegrass music, it’s like a portal back to my childhood, back before I knew anything dirty about the earth. And it’s a way for me to go back to a time that was just beautiful and full of light, growing up playing music with my dad. And then songwriting is my cathartic and therapeutic way of dealing with things. I think sublimation is one of my main characteristics. Instead of letting this hard stuff drag me down, I try to make art from it, make lemonade, if you will.

A bit later:

When did you realize that you had a real gift for the guitar? That was early on. I started playing when I was about 4 years old. By the time I was 6 or 7, I could carry a tune, and I was my dad’s rhythm player. He would play all the lead and do all the fancy picking and singing, and I would hold down the rhythm. One of the biggest moments for me was I was sitting in my dad’s bedroom with him, as I would basically do every night, and he was teaching me the song “Beaumont Rag.” We would play the tune and I would mess up the second part every time. And I stopped us right in the middle of the song and said, “Why don’t you just play it and let me listen?” And so that’s what we did. Instead of trying to count, I listened to what he was playing. I listened to the melody. Then I was like, “All right, let me try it again,” and I nailed it. He was awful proud. He called my grandma, made her listen on the phone. That was a big moment for me. That’s when this listening thing started: I was able to listen to the music more intently and I could tell what chord was coming next. I used to think it was magic or something. I had no concept of music theory or anything. But my dad would play a G chord and then he would play a G seventh and my ear would just lead me. I’d be like, Well, the next chord’s probably going to be a C, and then it would be. It’s better to learn bluegrass and folk and hillbilly music that way than to try to learn from some academic point of view. It’s better to learn it on the back porch and to let it get under your skin, because then it’s not some equation, it’s a feeling. It comes from your soul.

Before shows:

I read an article about you that talked about how before shows, you used to get real anxious and have stomach pain. Is that still an issue? I definitely get nervous before a show. Sometimes moments before I’m walking onstage, I feel like I might pass out. I’ve just got to get into the first song or two, and halfway through the show I’m the complete opposite. I have all this energy. I feel great. I feel super confident, almost cocky even. There is that expectation from the crowd to do something amazing, and also that expectation from myself to always do better than I did the night before, because this is my livelihood and this is my life, and deep in the back of my mind, I’m scared that this is all going to go away, and maybe I’ll have to go back to the way life was when it was really hard. There’s this little devil on my shoulder that tells me I don’t deserve any of this, and thinks that I should be in some little trailer somewhere addicted to drugs, not a penny to my name. So it does feel like I’m playing for my survival a lot. Each time I walk onstage, I’m playing so that I don’t have to go back there.

Of course there is more at the link.