All the threads

Taking the fat takes the pain away – in LiDo, the so-called lipedema.

Lipedema is painful fat rather than edema, and removing the tissue completely ends the pain.

The disease known as lipedema is neither edema nor ordinary fat: it is fat that hurts. A randomized trial of 410 women now shows that removing it completely takes the pain away, where diet, exercise and drainage do not.

Liposuction versus conservative therapy for patients with lipoedema in Germany: a multicentre, randomised controlled clinical trial

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This example encapsulates a key facet of Old in the Game, that hip-hop’s familiarity and appeal is cross-generational.

Hip-hop is not a youth movement and has not been one for decades.

At an AARP conference in Boston in 2007, a room of people with canes and walkers and greying hair nodding along to hip-hop beats, waiting for a thirty-nine-year-old rapper to bound onstage and lead their morning workout. It matters within the culture when you entered the game, at what age, and how you carry it since. "Inside, none of us feels sixty," one pioneer says. Another: "It took a lifetime to get here."

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

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Memory doesn't retrieve the past: memory makes the present.

Memory is a force that remakes the present, not a store from which the past is retrieved.

An hourlong work for speaking voice and string quartet, built around Beckett's last prose, uses memory as its raw material. Musical events return, arrive early and open inside one another, so the past changes the size and meaning of the present.

Stirrings Still

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Roman-period mourners used cattail fluff bedding to make graves resemble places of rest

Roman-period mourners furnished graves with soft cattail bedding, preparing the dead a place of rest.

A lump in museum storage labelled a moss pillow turned out, under the microscope, to be something else entirely. The find widens into a question about what archaeology can and cannot see.

Pillows, mattresses or log coffin linings: Use of cattail (Typha sp.) in Roman period funerary rituals at Czarnówko in Pomerania

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What to feed them as they grow from paralarvae to juveniles and finally to adults remains a mystery.

The ethical case against farming octopus is weaker than its cultural momentum suggests, and the real obstacle is feeding paralarvae.

Two obstacles, one biological and one political. Nobody has worked out what to feed a newly hatched octopus, despite decades of research, and until they do there is no industry. And if they do, the objectors are already waiting: American states have banned octopus farming outright, though not one octopus has ever been farmed in North America. In the nineteenth century it was the devil-fish; now it’s a beloved cultural icon.

Life on the Octopus Farm: The Ethics and Future of Growing the World's Most Intelligent Invertebrate

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A very powerful woman's story

European money sent to stop migrants in Libya feeds a militia trade in kidnapping and ransom.

A phone hidden in a baby's diaper became a young mother's way of telling her story from detention in Libya. The rescue in the title is hers.

Rescue

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The TLE that hit the ER-2 produced very strong UV signals but comparatively weak IR.

Upward lightning from storm tops can strike high-flying aircraft, and spaceborne sensors need ultraviolet channels to see it.

The pilot remembered the storm shooting lasers at him. Ultraviolet signals and a purple hue told researchers what the lasers were, and why the next generation of lightning sensors needs to see in the UV.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

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In a flash, one of them climbs onto the bike and rides off.

The simplicity of Bicycle Thieves is a sleight of hand, and the film deliberately occludes the war.

Day one of a new job, up a ladder, pasting Rita Hayworth to a wall half by half. Some men circle between the parked cars; in a flash the bike is gone, an accomplice fakes concern, another points the wrong way down the road. The street sounds give way to a swelling score, the camera cranes back, and within seconds a bicycle has stopped being a bicycle.

Bicycle Thieves

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A giant Jurassic dipluran shows that hidden mouthparts evolved more than once.

Hidden mouthparts evolved separately in three hexapod groups rather than once in a shared ancestor.

Robust, toothed mandibles and smooth pincers suggest an ambush hunter at the top of a Jurassic soil food web. The next question is whether three groups pulled their mouthparts inside for the same reasons.

A Jurassic giant with its mouthparts showing

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A giant Jurassic dipluran shows that hidden mouthparts evolved more than once.

Hidden mouthparts evolved separately in three hexapod groups rather than once in a shared ancestor.

Collected twenty years ago, the specimen sat in a collection until a systematic screening turned it up again. The hardest decision was where it belongs on the tree, and whether its exposed jaws are a quirk or the ancestral state.

A Jurassic giant with its mouthparts showing

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A giant Jurassic dipluran shows that hidden mouthparts evolved more than once.

Hidden mouthparts evolved separately in three hexapod groups rather than once in a shared ancestor.

A 165-million-year-old fossil from Inner Mongolia looks like a textbook dipluran, except its jaws sit outside its head. That single detail suggests hidden mouthparts evolved separately in three groups, overturning the idea that they share one ancestral origin.

A Jurassic giant with its mouthparts showing

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Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

A record assembled from studio fragments is a different art from a captured live take, not a lesser one.

A poet left alone in a vocal booth, session after session, produced a catalog of old poems, songs and stories. When six busy musicians could not gather in one room, that catalog and a rule against heavy gear shaped the record.

Sing the Color Blue

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During pregnancy, a woman's brain changes enormously.

Pregnancy remodels a woman's brain faster than adolescence did.

Pregnancy and the postpartum remodel the brain more, or at least faster, than adolescence does, making them among the most plastic periods of adult life. The evidence takes apart three old stories about motherhood: idealization, minimization, and the famous "mommy brain."

A Mother’s Brain: The New Science of the Neuro-Maternal Revolution

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

The villain of nature's collapse is the farming system governments built, not the farmers who run it.

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

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

College students who come to see luck and connections behind success grow more depressed than peers who do not.

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

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

Critics prize broken rules in modernist novels and refuse to admit that some are simply mistakes.

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

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

Plants are intelligent beings that sense, remember and communicate, not passive sources of food and fibre.

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

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

A robot grows more capable when each part does several jobs and physics does the rest.

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

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

Research on post-traumatic growth is weak and survives because it flatters a story we already believe.

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"

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

Frida Kahlo's commercial afterlife has turned her from an artist into a global symbol of cultural resistance.

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

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Conspiracy theories express a lost sense of agency and future, not a failure to accept facts.

Frustration with an academic conversation that treated believers as people who simply think badly led to this work. A psychiatrist or an anthropologist does not begin by calling a patient or a cult wrong, but by reconstructing a structure of experience. Defending facts alone, the thread argues, can sound like asking people to accept an unbearable world.

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession

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

Conspiracy theories express a lost sense of agency and future, not a failure to accept facts.

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

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Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia happened at different times, for different reasons, and explains nothing by itself.

At Malalmuerzo, the bones of at least 36 people preserve a sequence of cuts, fractures and tooth marks. Set beside cinnabar-stained remains and carefully made skull cups from nearby caves, they show why one word cannot carry so many human stories.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

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People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

People are more persuaded by AI because they think it cannot be persuaded, so they argue back less.

Fewer buts, fewer howevers, fewer reasons given in defense. Inside the transcripts, the moment people stop counterarguing, and what that means for how AI systems should be designed.

From People to Prompts

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People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

People are more persuaded by AI because they think it cannot be persuaded, so they argue back less.

Persuasion research has long studied the message. A conversation is two-sided, so the question became how people behave when the other side is a chatbot, and why they see so little point in arguing with it.

From People to Prompts

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I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

The unhoused on our streets are ourselves dressed in rags, and refusing them empathy costs us dearly.

An old, sick man tries to rob a bank to get medical care, and the police send him home. Seven songs ask what it would cost to treat everyone as a neighbor.

Rooming House

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The early Supreme Court was a political institution both by design and in practice.

For its first hundred years the Supreme Court was a political institution.

Judges are not politicians, a future chief justice told the Senate in 2005. For the nation's first hundred years that idea would have baffled Americans: justices rode circuit, drafted legislation, advised presidents, backed candidates, and roughly a third of them ran for president from the bench.

The Political Supreme Court: A Forgotten History

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In the 1960s, while the young Vladimir Putin was dreaming of joining the KGB, others of his age cohort were busy memorizing the lyrics of Beatles songs, growing their hair long, and adopting the freewheeling lifestyles and attitudes of hippies.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

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Soviet perestroika and "new thinking" did not appear from nowhere, nor were they merely a forced retreat under material decline; the ideas behind them had incubated inside Soviet expert communities for two decades before Gorbachev embraced them and became their political bearer.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

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The controls and the oppression were very real, but only some Communist states at particular times came close enough to total control from above to meet criteria that make it reasonable to call them totalitarian rather than authoritarian.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

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The diversity within the communist world and within particular countries is often forgotten.

Everyday life under communism is usually pictured as total control and silent conformity. Three historians were asked what that picture leaves out. Their answers find life going on beneath it in different places: churches full in Poland and banned in Albania, reformers quietly at work inside Soviet institutes, and Soviet teenagers memorizing Beatles lyrics.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part II

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Mysticism without religion, and the fungus that made it possible.

Psilocybin mushrooms have turned from Mazatec ritual into a mysticism without religion and a pharmaceutical commodity.

A small brown mushroom travels from ritual use in the mountains of central Mexico to university labs and pharmaceutical boardrooms. Along the way it gathers many of the modern age's hopes, from mystical experience outside religion to the next profitable drug.

Still Seeking the Magic Mushroom: Fungi, Pharmaceuticals, and Mysticism Without Religion

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A very powerful woman's story

European money sent to stop migrants in Libya feeds a militia trade in kidnapping and ransom.

A storm on the first night, the fear of being out of reach, and twenty years of anthropology among women migrants. Why film can carry a story further than an academic article, and the daily ethics of telling it.

Rescue

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Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Antarctica will lose ice this century even at 1.5 °C, but emissions still decide how much.

Beneath a floating ice shelf, warm water thins the brake that holds back the glaciers behind it. Under very high emissions the dominoes fall, and Antarctica alone could add as much as 25 centimeters to sea level by 2100. Taking that seriously would change coastal planning and where research looks next.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

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Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Intertidal oyster reefs protect shorelines as seas rise but never work as net carbon sinks.

Overfishing left a fraction of the reefs that once lined estuaries. Restoration promises cleaner water and gentler storms, but only where oysters can live, and many estuaries are becoming hostile to them.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change

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Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Intertidal oyster reefs protect shorelines as seas rise but never work as net carbon sinks.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change

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Literary modernism is an artistic movement that praises formal deviance more than any movement before it.

Critics prize broken rules in modernist novels and refuse to admit that some are simply mistakes.

Literary critics rarely call a sentence bad, and they have learned to prize the moments where grammar, plot or realism break down. This thread traces that habit back to modernism, when breaking rules became a program. Not every broken rule, it argues, is a deliberate one.

Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel

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Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

A record assembled from studio fragments is a different art from a captured live take, not a lesser one.

Most jazz records are photographs of a good live take. This one was built instead, layered, cut apart and reversed in the studio, and that is a different art rather than a better or worse version of the same one.

Sing the Color Blue

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Roman-period mourners used cattail fluff bedding to make graves resemble places of rest

Roman-period mourners furnished graves with soft cattail bedding, preparing the dead a place of rest.

Archaeologists notice what survives: brooches, cups, beads. Four graves in northern Poland kept something softer, and it changes the picture of a richly furnished burial.

Pillows, mattresses or log coffin linings: Use of cattail (Typha sp.) in Roman period funerary rituals at Czarnówko in Pomerania

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Experience has a history, and life-changing experience has not always been possible.

It began with one sound, a faint hum beneath all perception, and two books about sound that left a larger question standing. What followed is an old-fashioned philosophical work that aspires to a worldview, with memoir included because readers are entitled to know where a writer's thoughts come from.

Experience: A History

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One of the book’s discoveries is the simple realization that experience has a history at all.

Experience is not an inherent feature of human life but has a history.

What is experience, exactly? The question has rarely been asked, and one answer is that experience has a history: it has not always been possible, and it has changed over time. Literature, art, music and philosophy trace that history, which ends in memoir.

Experience: A History

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

A robot grows more capable when each part does several jobs and physics does the rest.

Robotics usually answers each new problem with another motor or sensor. This makes the case for the opposite: a small craft whose wings first slow its fall from the sky and then become its sails on the water.

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

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One method to right the wrongs was to guide children in camera use to inspire them to shoot back.

For a century, children with cameras have ignored what teachers, clubs and Kodak told them to photograph.

In 1970s south London, a children's rights workshop handed kids cameras built from wellies, prams and chocolate tins. The aim was to let them shoot back at the images that defined them, and to show that independence learned in a makeshift darkroom could carry into social and political life.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

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Priya’s experience reveals one of the costs the diversity contract imposes on residents of color.

Fort Bend County's celebrated racial harmony rests on a bargain to praise the diversity and never name the inequality.

A woman started seeing therapists — not over a crisis, but because she needed somewhere she was permitted to talk about race at all. She came to each interview with a list on her phone of incidents she had never been able to name out loud. Her case is unusually intense, which is exactly what makes an entire community's unspoken rules visible.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

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Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia happened at different times, for different reasons, and explains nothing by itself.

The team expected a single regional episode of cannibalism. Then the radiocarbon dates arrived, and the question shifted from what one cause could explain it to why it happened again and again, and in such different forms.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

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AI safety requires constitutional democracy, so repairing democratic institutions is AI safety work.

A Silicon Valley call for tech to partner with government in defense of democracy leaves out half the problem: keeping democracies democratic once they hold powerful AI tools.

AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond

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AI safety requires constitutional democracy, so repairing democratic institutions is AI safety work.

When Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon share a stage on AI, something new is under way. Public anxiety about jobs and power is real, and so is the old pull from populism toward authoritarian rule.

AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond

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The bottom line is this: AI safety absolutely requires constitutional democracy.

AI safety requires constitutional democracy.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond

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I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

The unhoused on our streets are ourselves dressed in rags, and refusing them empathy costs us dearly.

Depression-era slogans that haunted a meatpacking neighborhood, and years of outreach work on cold northern streets, taught one lesson above all: empathy. Today it is treated as weakness.

Rooming House

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The evidence was overwhelming; an upward lightning discharge from the top of the storm had hit the ER-2.

Upward lightning from storm tops can strike high-flying aircraft, and spaceborne sensors need ultraviolet channels to see it.

Months after a campaign hunting gamma-ray flashes, a researcher spotted pulses too fast to come from inside a cloud. A camera that usually showed only black at night turned out to hold the first record of such a strike.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

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Upward lightning from storm tops can strike high-flying aircraft, and spaceborne sensors need ultraviolet channels to see it.

Lightning can leave a thundercloud from the top, and in 2023 an upward discharge struck NASA's high-altitude ER-2. Nobody on board or on the ground noticed, and the reason is what kind of lightning it was.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

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Human amoebas good and bad are part and parcel of life and death.

There is no more to being a cell in a human than to being the cell of an amoeba.

A mycologist's late-career detour, begun out of curiosity about whether single cells can be said to learn. It leads to vampire amoebas that turn red draining algae, amoebas that hunt worms in packs, and the rare brain-eating species that may be spreading as the climate warms. It also leads inward, to the hundreds of billions of amoeboid white blood cells crawling through all of us — and to the cancer cells that move the same way.

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell

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People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

People are more persuaded by AI because they think it cannot be persuaded, so they argue back less.

When people believe they are talking to an AI rather than a person, they push back less and change their minds more. The persuasive edge comes from the listener, not the machine.

From People to Prompts

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In disability fiction, distance lends us not only drama, but intimacy.

Fiction can bring readers close to cognitive disability without entering a character's mind.

Today's screens are full of minds that think and perceive differently, which makes this the right moment to look back at how twentieth-century American writers drew readers toward cognitive disability. Their tools were narration, vision and time, and a kind of intimacy that does not depend on getting inside a character's head. One of the most-read novellas in American schools shows how repetition itself becomes the foundation of the story.

Engaging Minds: Cognitive Disability and American Storytelling, 1899–1953

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A very powerful woman's story

European money sent to stop migrants in Libya feeds a militia trade in kidnapping and ransom.

Filming a year aboard a Doctors Without Borders ship, an anthropologist witnessed a militia seize women and children at sea. The film follows one family through what came next, and traces the European money behind the kidnapping.

Rescue

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In a flash, one of them climbs onto the bike and rides off.

The simplicity of Bicycle Thieves is a sleight of hand, and the film deliberately occludes the war.

The war's aftermath has become a subject in its own right — a foundational moment of collapsed empires, new binaries and a world turned upside down. A 1948 film belongs squarely to that turn, and part of its strangeness is how deliberately it leaves the war out. Why is our hero unemployed? Why is there a gap of eight years between his two children? The film declines to answer, and the silence is the argument.

Bicycle Thieves

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Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Antarctica will lose ice this century even at 1.5 °C, but emissions still decide how much.

One chart of projections that could not agree on whether Antarctica would raise or lower the seas set this work in motion. A chain of models, each adding blur, explains the disagreement. A fast emulator checked against two decades of gravity measurements from space cuts through it.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

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I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

The unhoused on our streets are ourselves dressed in rags.

A folk opera imagines a kitchen table where neighboring is a verb, empathy is not a bad word, and money does not decide who gets care. Everyone gets a seat.

Rooming House

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Hip-hop’s familiarity and appeal is cross-generational.

Hip-hop is not a youth movement and has not been one for decades.

Hearing "Rapper's Delight" on the radio in 1979 outside New York and filing it as a novelty; hearing "The Message" three years later and realizing it wasn't. Then the mid-eighties reggae clubs where rap kept slipping into the breaks, and the late-eighties realization that the artists were his own age. Nobody building this in 1979 expected to be tagged a pioneer for life.

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

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The phenomenon of people dressing up as Frida, the lookalikes, is absolutely extraordinary.

Frida Kahlo's commercial afterlife has turned her from an artist into a global symbol of cultural resistance.

A documentary that leaves out every painting and looks instead at the fascination itself: the merchandise, the lawsuits, the lookalikes. Who gets to own an icon, and what happens to an artist once she becomes a brand?

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

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What to feed them as they grow from paralarvae to juveniles and finally to adults remains a mystery.

The ethical case against farming octopus is weaker than its cultural momentum suggests.

Fifty years of trying and nobody has farmed octopus commercially yet — but within a decade it will probably be in your supermarket. Reporting from Mexico, Spain and Japan, and from a stint working on a farm in the Yucatán, on a four-billion-dollar market and the question underneath it: is it defensible to farm the most intelligent invertebrate on earth? There are honest arguments on both sides, including for the animals.

Life on the Octopus Farm: The Ethics and Future of Growing the World's Most Intelligent Invertebrate

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In the last seconds of a chase, lions rely on steering more than speed.

In the last seconds of a chase, lions rely on steering more than speed.

Early mornings at a Florida safari park, a drone held high above a lioness racing after a lure. Consumer drones, pose-tracking software and an unexpected partnership with a theoretical physicist made it possible, for the first time, to measure a large mammal's chase stride by stride.

Quantifying the control laws governing terminal attack in lions

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Reinvestment in Black urban neighborhoods failed because it routed public money through outside lenders and never let residents shape it.

A block of twenty-seven houses with nine of them abandoned or foreclosed, and a former insurance agent who found she could not sit in her home and watch the community fall apart. A neighborhood that went from no empty houses to more than five hundred in a decade, financed by predatory federal loans. No dues, no officers, no way to join or quit — if you showed up often enough, you were a leader. The FBI listened in; they treated it as a status symbol.

Cash on the Block

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Reinvestment in Black urban neighborhoods failed because it routed public money through outside lenders and never let residents shape it.

Sending money to the rich in order to help the poor has never once worked, and yet the approach keeps coming back — partly because its architects believe poor Black Americans to be corrupt and incompetent, and wealthy people to be reliably honest. Set against that, three points King, Carmichael and Hamilton all agreed on in 1967, and a five-decade history of neighborhood organizations that got it right.

Cash on the Block

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Sending money to the rich to help poor Black neighborhoods has never worked.

What happens when you try to fix a problem without understanding its cause. Segregation, redlining, speculators, employers lured out to the suburbs by tax breaks, highways built for those suburbs while urban transit was cut — the damage was specific and quantifiable. What followed was not a remedy for any of it, but a machine for routing public money to outside lenders and businesses, most spectacularly through federal loan insurance that paid out in full when residents defaulted.

Cash on the Block

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For a century, children with cameras have ignored what teachers, clubs and Kodak told them to photograph.

Children's drawings were celebrated as authentic expression while their photographs were treated as a catalogue of mistakes. Guidebooks, competitions and school archives across more than a hundred years show the camera working as a moral device, and show how changing ideas of childhood shaped what children were allowed to see.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

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Black churches file over 60 percent of church bankruptcies, and nothing on the church's side explains it.

Five banks turned the congregation away, including the one it had banked with for thirty-five years. Then a faith-based lender arrived talking not about finances but about vision — and sold a loan the church soon couldn't meet. One Bridgeport congregation's decade-long fight to keep its sanctuary opens a much larger story about predatory lending.

Forgive Us Our Debts: How Black Churches Use Bankruptcy to Survive

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Soleil Ô was begun in 1965, shot mostly in 1969, screened in 1970, and made in France, not Mauritania.

Young men crossing into Ceuta were told there would be work in Spain and arrived to find a climate of prejudice instead — a story from recent headlines that is also the narrative fabric of a film from 1970. Its protagonist, newly arrived in Paris, opens the want ads and the first job he sees routes him straight back to Africa, to a French-owned factory where a company "is not a souk." So much for colorblind France.

Soleil Ô

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Soleil Ô was begun in 1965, shot mostly in 1969, screened in 1970, and made in France, not Mauritania.

An autodidact who probably saw as many films as Truffaut, parodying the instructional films colonial authorities made about Africa and replacing them with a pedagogy of his own. He was an anti-capitalist whose restored masterpiece we now watch thanks to a grant from one of the world's wealthiest men. And when Pasolini went to Tanzania to read African independence through ancient Greek democracy, this was the film that answered him.

Soleil Ô

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Even at 1.5 °C, Antarctica loses ice this century. How much is our choice.

Antarctica will lose ice this century even at 1.5 °C, but emissions still decide how much.

Antarctica is already committed to losing ice this century, even if warming is held to 1.5 °C. An AI trained on an archive of simulations tested hundreds of thousands of futures against satellite records, and the survivors point one way. How much ice is lost is still ours to decide.

Committed Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss by the end of the twenty-first century

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The problem with deployed AI agents is accountability, not capability, and the fix is standing to contest.

Eighty-three rejections in eighteen months, some arriving minutes after submission, some in the middle of the night. No human read any of those applications. When the case reached court, the defense was that the software merely implements a client's criteria — and a federal judge, working from employment law written decades earlier, found the precise words for why that no longer holds.

Agent Nation

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The problem with deployed AI agents is accountability, not capability, and the fix is standing to contest.

Two decades of studying how systems decide what to show people, and then somewhere around 2022 the systems stopped presenting options and started closing loops. Nobody announced it; it happened one procurement decision at a time, because a backlog was cheaper to solve with software than with three more staff. In the polite circle where engineers point at policy, policy points at vendors and vendors point at clients, there is always a person who was denied something and cannot find out why.

Agent Nation

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Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

Prehistoric cannibalism cannot be understood through a single explanation.

Human bodies were dismembered, defleshed and eaten in three caves near Granada. The radiocarbon dates and the marks on the bones point to different moments and different behaviours, from a violent episode to the ritual treatment of the dead.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

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Fort Bend County's celebrated racial harmony rests on a bargain to praise the diversity and never name the inequality.

Most Black, Latinx, Asian, white, immigrant and poor Americans now live in suburbs, yet we still picture racial inequality as an urban problem. Growing up in one of the most diverse communities in America taught one sociologist almost nothing about racism — a disconnect that took a decade, a return home, and a national analysis to explain. Integration may be worth having, but proximity alone has never dismantled anything.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

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In the last seconds of a chase, lions rely on steering more than speed.

The end of a chase is a control problem, not a speed problem.

A prey animal rarely needs to outrun a predator; it needs to out-turn it. Drone footage of 67 chases shows lions steering with the same rule a hunting hawk uses, a rule engineers also build into homing missiles, and it fits in a short equation with a few parameters.

Quantifying the control laws governing terminal attack in lions

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Competition on the business side of live entertainment determines the art on stage, and Live Nation/Ticketmaster should be broken up.

Two companies controlling nearly all big-time vaudeville, crushing any attempt to unionize. Six men blackballing the leading actress of the age from every first-class theater in the country, so she performed in tents, abandoned churches and once on a hilltop. And a 1990s alt-rock band that couldn't mount a cheap national tour. The abuse is usually illegal; the law just takes decades to catch up.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage

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Competition on the business side of live entertainment determines the art on stage, and Live Nation/Ticketmaster should be broken up.

Everyone knows Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Morgan. Almost nobody knows the barons of vaudeville or the men who controlled Broadway and the touring circuits, who took what the market allowed, drove out anyone competing on merit, and got away with it for half a century. The antitrust laws written in the 1890s to stop exactly this didn't manage it until after the war.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage

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The business side of live entertainment determines the art on stage, not the other way round.

How much competition exists on the business side of live entertainment has always determined the quality and price of what reaches the stage, and how the artists and crew get treated. Vaudeville, a century of commercial theater, and today's arena tours — why vaudeville died, why a theatrical syndicate should have been prosecuted as the cartel it was, and why a monopoly had to be broken up in the 1950s.

Power and Greed: Monopolies, Mergers, and Cartels on the American Stage

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For a century, children with cameras have photographed what they wanted, not what adults told them.

Camera makers told parents for a century that children longed to take pictures, yet almost nobody had asked what children actually did with their cameras. The story starts with unruly schoolboy photographic societies, where assignments went undone, teachers were snapped unawares and one darkroom burned down.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

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Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is a more insightful account of Dylan's life than A Complete Unknown.

A biopic so strange it cast six different actors — including a young Black boy and Cate Blanchett — as the same man, then flopped at the box office before cinephiles caught up to it. A case for why this shattered, kaleidoscopic life story may be the most insightful telling of all, told from behind its subject's own eyes.

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Misunderstanding the role of nuclear weapons during the Cold War has led to two consequences: 1) an unrealistic faith in their power to deter war—even as we see the military forces of nuclear-armed India and Pakistan engaging in periodic wars and nuclear-armed Israel attacked by missiles from Iran and even non-state militia forces; and 2) a reluctance by the nuclear-weapons states to accept the view of the majority of the world’s states, as represented in their endorsement of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, that they are safer without than with them.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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This matters today. Russia's war on Ukraine has revived essentialist explanations of Russia as the dominant Western framing, and with them, the fallacy of inevitability. If Russian behaviour stems from some essence, the only acceptable Russia is a defeated and contained Russia, because no other Russia is possible. If it reflects identifiable institutional, ideological, cultural and external configurations, those configurations can change, as they did between 1985 and 1991. Recognising this restores the broader analytical space that essentialism's over-simplification forecloses.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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Although achieving and maintaining military parity with the United States required a significantly larger share of the Soviet budget than US military spending occupied in the larger American economy, this was seen by successive Soviet leaders as a price worth paying.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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Reagan's hard line did not force the Soviet Union to end the Cold War.

The Cold War is the one everybody thinks is settled. Three historians were asked what the public still gets most wrong about it. Their answers name different things. Between them they take out a claim about how it ended, a claim about what Russia is, and a claim about what kept the peace, and none of the three is a fringe belief.

The Cold War: A Rorotoko Weave - Part I

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Our environmental and social crisis has spiritual roots, and Tara embodies the synthesis that leads out of it.

Cataract surgery that should have been routine, a detached retina, five more operations, and three weeks of being ordered to keep his head face down all night and eight hours a day. Sitting cross-legged with his forehead on the desk, awash in fear, he went through his catalogue of meditation practices and landed on a figure he barely knew — and then something happened that he still cannot explain.

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

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Our environmental and social crisis has spiritual roots, and Tara embodies the synthesis that leads out of it.

Three mythic figures carry the story. The Goddess of our earliest ancestors, rooted in the body and an enchanted world where rocks and streams were sentient. Then the Great Hero, hyper-masculine, subjecting instinct and nature to the rational ego — and never quite winning. And then a third possibility: the same transcendence, but leaning forward, ready to leap to anyone who is suffering.

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

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Our environmental and social crisis has spiritual roots.

Poisoned air, land and water, tens of thousands of species gone a year, unprecedented wealth and mounting anger — and a shelf of political and economic theories that only add to the confusion because they ignore the spiritual roots. A synthesis drawing on history, archaeology, sociology, Jungian psychology, mythology and religious thought, plus practices simple enough to actually try.

Searching for Tara: The Goddess Who Became a Buddha

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The Drake Equation is a teaching tool, not a calculation with an answer.

The seven-variable equation that supposedly tells us how many civilizations we could be talking to right now — and a case for why we can’t answer it, only learn from trying. Written by someone who left traditional academia because it was hard to concentrate on other planets while this one burns, and who refuses to pretend that neutrality is a virtue. Fragile as a flower and more resilient than mountain ranges, all at once.

Cloudy with a Chance of Starships: How the Drake Equation Reveals the Odds of Life in the Cosmos

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Hip-hop is not a youth movement and has not been one for decades.

We know how to picture an aging blues or jazz musician — stalwart, gravitas, late style. We have no such image for a seventy-year-old B-boy, even though the culture is past fifty and its pioneers were teenagers when they built it. Drawing on interviews with Grandmaster Caz, Sha-Rock, Chuck D, Ice-T, LL Cool J, Pepa and Yo-Yo, an argument that hip-hop's ageism runs inward, generation against generation, and always has.

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

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Inefficiency, bulk and persnicketiness are the source of analog's appeal, not costs paid despite it.

It opens with a board game being unboxed — a genre of video weirdly beloved by collectors — and the surprisingly rewarding act of narrating that ritual 700 words deep. From one small, deliberate activity comes the book's real invitation: find something you love doing, then figure out what, exactly, you love about it.

The Love of Analog: Meditations on Value

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The simplicity of Bicycle Thieves is a sleight of hand.

A stone-cold classic that has quietly slipped out of the critical conversation, respectfully cited and no longer really studied. Look again and it is still teeming — a film everyone believes they know backwards, whose famous simplicity turns out to be a sleight of hand covering something far more complicated about postwar Europe, deprivation and care.

Bicycle Thieves

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A century of radical clinics, from Weimar Berlin to AIDS-era New York, grew from anarchism joined with organicism.

The opening scene of a 1996 documentary: a woman pacing a forested estate, palms turned to the sky, humming of sorrow, while a man seems to relearn how to walk. Behind them stands the château of an experimental psychiatric clinic, where patients are staging an absurdist play about aristocrats terrified of being exposed as common.

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

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A century of radical clinics, from Weimar Berlin to AIDS-era New York, grew from anarchism joined with organicism.

A nod to Foucault's birth of the clinic, answered with its death. The aim is a history of social and community-led medicine that is patient-centred, queer, personal and anecdotal: every human quality modern medicine tried to exclude in the name of objective empiricism.

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

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A century of radical clinics practiced a medicine without hierarchy, centered on relationships.

A book of literary nonfiction, written as a letter to a late mother, that travels through a century of radical clinics: Weimar Berlin, interwar London, postwar France, 1970s Geneva, and New York at the height of the AIDS crisis. What joined them was a horizontal, anti-hierarchical way of caring, drawn from anarchism and organicism alike.

The Death of the Clinic: Radical Experiments in the Art of Medicine

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Who has the words?

Memory constantly reconstructs the past, and the promise of meaning never erases what happened to a person.

What would it be like to watch somebody you knew had died walk out of a tomb? The answer might not be joy. It might be horror.

Testament

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The Stepford Wives was made by women who have themselves been erased from its history.

She picks up a kitchen knife and stabs her best friend in the abdomen, and the wound does not bleed. Where the blade goes in, what the novelist wrote to the director to make sure no blood appeared, and whose arm you are actually watching on screen — one brief, gruesome scene holds the whole argument about the film, plus one more hidden replacement of a woman.

The Stepford Wives

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The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present.

Memory constantly reconstructs the past, and the promise of meaning never erases what happened to a person.

Opera has a different problem. The moment you put something on a stage, it becomes present. Rather than trying to reproduce the book’s interiority, we could make memory physically happen around Mary.

Testament

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Todd Haynes's I'm Not There is a more insightful account of Dylan's life than A Complete Unknown.

Sometimes a director doesn't need dialogue to make a point — just the right famous face walking into the room. This is about star personas as narrative shorthand, from a shadowy folk-club cameo that spells doom for a fictional singer to what we're really watching when a fraying legend takes the stage.

I'm Glad I'm Not Me: Bob Dylan on Film

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Folk tradition is a mode of adaptation, governed by custom and transmitted by showing rather than teaching.

Chicago, 1892: a Polish Jewish girl newly arrived from a shtetl is invited to a Christmas party at Hull-House and says she cannot go, because she might be killed. She goes anyway, without telling her mother. What she wrote about that night — the candles, the carols, children from all corners of the earth, most of them underfed, none of them afraid of each other — is one answer to what a common life might mean.

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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Folk tradition is a mode of adaptation, governed by custom and transmitted by showing rather than teaching.

Folklore lived and folklore studied — this is mostly about how the music gets learned and handed on. "I can't teach you, but I can show you," said one veteran barn-dance performer, and that is the whole pedagogy. Even the cover painting turns out to hold two real people, a schoolteacher and his daughter, whose lives trace the same arc from enclave to wider world and back.

Our Common Life: Folksong from the Front Porch to the Concert Hall

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