Once the pollinators go, we'll all go with them

A film without a villain, unless the villain is eighty years of farming policy. Why the loss of birds and insects outside our own windows matters more than cute penguins, and what happens if struggling farmers go under.

Derek vs Derek

Nonmeritocratic beliefs rise among Chinese college students; greater increases correlate with steeper rises in depressive symptoms.

Young people are told that effort and education decide success. Following Chinese youth from early adolescence into their twenties, the study finds college students still value effort but increasingly see family wealth, connections and luck at work, and those who notice it most grow more depressed.

Disillusionment With Meritocracy During the Transition to Adulthood: Longitudinal Change in Belief Systems and Depression in China

The French theorist Roland Barthes has this dictum that ugliness can be described, but beauty cannot, because beauty just repeats itself.

A seminar paper on the strange creation scene in Frankenstein drew a simple objection: its author was a teenager. Years later, a reader excited above all by novels that fail to work began to ask why. The answer pointed to bad writing as a concept criticism lacks.

Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel

Plants are intelligent beings that sense, remember, and communicate.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Understory

The most sophisticated robots are often the ones that do more with less.

The idea began not with an equation but at a sailing centre, watching windsurfers. Years of work on maple-seed robots met a sail seen every day since childhood, and a sensor that could drop in by air and then sail off took shape.

ALBATROSS: A Bioinspired, Aerially Deployable, Autonomous Sailing Sensor Platform

If bad things had good outcomes, you wouldn't call them bad things.

We like to believe that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and research on post-traumatic growth seems to agree. This thread argues that much of that research rests on weak methods and on a story we already want to believe. Tracked over time, most people show resilience rather than growth.

Is There Always Value to Adversity? Looking Beyond "What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger"

All my films have a relationship to photography, this fascination and love of photography.

Living on the other side of the garden wall from the Casa Azul, the filmmaker watched a quiet neighborhood turn into a tourist trail. That daily view, and a long love of photography, became the seed of the film.

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

In rationalizing a state of anxiety, conspiracy theories operate very differently from a political manifesto.

Conspiracy theories are usually treated as bad thinking that more facts can cure. This thread argues they express something real: a feeling of lost agency and a future that seems foreclosed. Their spread says as much about the poverty of our political culture as about the people who believe them.

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession