2245 Micro-Interviews

700+ Scholars, Artists, Creators
600+ Threads

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City on the Edge - In a nutshell

The internet, if you think about what a website is — the engineering is underneath it, but it's really about the design, and the creative expression, and the writing. So it's a different thing. And relatedly, the people who were interested in the culture of Burning Man were also the people who were interested in the design end of technology. That became central, much more than the kind of hard engineering part of it.

Jonathan Weber
Profit vs. Progress - In a nutshell

The reality is that sustainable (also called "socially responsible") investing mostly supports the status quo. Corporations are happy to receive sustainable investments, but they don’t let it change their course. They have one objective: produce value for shareholders.

Brad Swanson
King PONG - The wide angle

The argument I always make as an educator and a historian is that I hope game developers today are looking at older games to see, one, what's been done — don't do it again, think differently. I don't know how much history is active in game design programs.

Raiford Guins
How We Think - In a nutshell

We humans are so proud of our big brains because it "feels" like brain size must be an advantage, but is it? As some of the essays in this book suggest, a lot of bad behavior and negative thoughts come out of those big brains as well. We feel superior to other animals who are doing just fine in their particular habitat, and we often feel it is our "right" to rule everything on the planet. Our big brains might, in the end, be our downfall

Meredith F. Small
The Virtual Universe - The wide angle

Virtual worlds and the Metaverse are no longer at the center of media attention, as one has to admit, unlike a few years ago when Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook as Meta to signal the growing importance of virtual reality for business and society. It was during that period that I decided to return to researching virtual worlds, despite having once sworn that I never would.

Andreas Kaplan
A Little More Social - A close-up

Once you see that your own beliefs are a little bit misplaced, it’s that sense of empowerment that I hope people get out of the book. I hope the book encourages you to look for those places, and to test your beliefs. You don't have to believe me about the results here. They provide an opportunity or encouragement to go out and test them yourself...

Nick Epley
Moonment - A close-up

My aluminum sheets are alive to me. They bend and shift with their surroundings—delicate yet strong, protective yet vulnerable. Aluminum is originally used for roofing, a material designed to adapt to environmental forces such as heat, wind, and rain. In my work it becomes something more sensitive, almost like skin. I also see a kind of femininity in this material—resilient and powerful yet refusing inappropriate control.

Sizhu Li
Cold-Blooded Murder - In a nutshell

Reptiles and amphibians are in trouble for a variety of reasons. Most are connected to habitat loss and degradation because of human activities. Many animals, including some reptiles, are eaten. They are items in the diet, especially in Asia.

Craig Stanford
Work Looks Back

A work is built through a set of formal relationships—proportion, alignment, adjacency, interval—but those relationships don’t settle into a single reading. Edges register, then slip. Intervals hold, then open. The composition remains slightly in play.

Lee Albert Hill
Mathematics and Creativity - A close-up

Math is still being made. This thread pushes back against the idea that mathematics is a closed body of old knowledge, showing instead how new work is constantly emerging—and how badly our classrooms fail to convey the subject’s vitality, reach, and inventiveness.

Paulina Rowińska
Ultrafinitism

The belief that both the physical and the mathematical universes are finite. Of course, they are enourmously large, but still finite. The so-called infinity is completely unnecessary, and is due to a superstitious belief in something transcendental, analogous to the belief in God.

Doron Zeilberger
Alan Dunn: The Cartoonist as Architectural Critic - In a nutshell

What did ordinary people think when confronted with a house shaped like a cube? How did city dwellers feel, a century ago, surrounded by forests of skyscrapers? What relationship existed between the human body — especially the female body, so often confined to domestic space during the twentieth century — and architecture itself?

Gabriele Neri
Why Start-Ups Fail - The wide angle

There is a temptation to think that what startups need most is a sense of wonder — the ability to wander in the mind, to think about things other people thought were impossible. But I think it's actually the opposite problem that brings most of them down. Startups fail more often because of lack of focus. Too much wandering. Generally, you need to focus.

Bernie Bulkin
A Little More Social - The wide angle

It supports this idea that our sense of worth comes from our beliefs about others. When self-esteem is low, when we're not feeling good about ourselves, that's our body's and mind's way of signaling to us that things aren't going great in our relationships. It's an alarm...

Nick Epley
The Ultraview Effect - A close-up

He began to realize -- based on vision, not just imagination -- just how many stars there were, a number too large for his brain to adequately process. In that moment, he realized that the universe was far bigger than he had ever understood and became certain that there was other intelligent life elsewhere in the universe.

Deana L. Weibel
Moonment - The wide angle

Instead of forcing material into a fixed form, I began asking a different question: what if sculpture could move and respond to the world around it? That question gradually evolved into Moonment. Over time, the project expanded into a series of site-specific installations in different cities, each responding to its environment while remaining connected to the larger idea of shared time and perception.

Sizhu Li
Declaration - A close-up

The genius is to realize that America was born out of this idea of free will and self-actualization—the notion that you can be whatever you want...

Robert P. Watson
Marked by Time - The wide angle

History, in other words, is baked into criminal records. In this case, it generates a systematic gap between actual and predicted arrest patterns across birth cohorts. This bias appears in all major racial groups and among youth who were arrested as juveniles, so it is not the usual form of bias we worry about. It also shows up for both absolute and relative risk. A prediction tool can correctly rank who is riskier ...

Robert J. Sampson
The Friend Machine - In a nutshell

I found that synthetic intimacy is not emerging in a vacuum; it is meeting a real, unmet need, or perhaps more cynically speaking, entering and widening a wound that was already there, exacerbated by elements like the loneliness epidemic. That is why it is so powerful, and also why it is so complicated.

Victoria Hetherington
Seeing Is Not Immediate

I’m interested in how those frameworks can be made visible through form. Each decision of proportion, alignment, interval and edge is intentional. The aim isn’t to complicate the image, but to make its internal structure legible over time – revealed. What I’d want a reader to notice first is that sense of intention. The work doesn’t resolve all at once; it unfolds as relationships begin to register.

Lee Albert Hill
The Cries of Evil Times

The first encounter with this painting may not be beautiful in an aesthetic sense, but it is true to my feeling. I have always believed that humanity is capable of peace, and peace is the opposite of everything that is depicted here...

Agron Bytyçi
A Little More Social - In a nutshell

Another big reason is that people underestimate how positively the other person will respond when we reach out to connect with them. People are reluctant to engage a stranger in conversation. If they think the other person doesn't want to talk to them, they often underestimate how interested the other person is in talking to them. We're reluctant to engage in deep conversation ...

Nick Epley
King PONG - In a nutshell

Raiford Guins on King PONG, his history of Atari's launch product as a masterclass in market creation. Three engineers with no business background reinvented coin-op amusement, then pivoted into consumer electronics via Sears — becoming the engine behind ubiquitous gaming today.

Raiford Guins
Freedom Round the Globe - In a nutshell

When street protests prompt controversy and violence, a complex and colorful history of global resistance to tyranny has much to teach us. We see how ordinary people—from enslaved pregnant women to suffering soldiers to Indigenous grandmothers—navigated extraordinary, conflict-ridden times. We learn about quiet acts of resistance,

Sarah M.S. Pearsall
Bicentennial - In a nutshell

First, it offers new historical perspectives on the 1970s, treating the bicentennial as one of the decade’s most significant events and arguing that the decade has been misrepresented as a mere interlude between the liberal 1960s and the conservative 1980s. Instead we see the bicentennial as a critical moment in a ...

Marc Stein
Why Q Needs U - A close-up

This single letter so nicely demonstrates the development of the alphabet, through both its enduring similarities and later differences with its bovine prototype. The letter A has lost much of the complexity...

Danny Bate
Mathematics vs Arithmetic - A close-up

Arithmetic may be the foundation, but it is not the heart of mathematics. This thread examines the difference—and why proof and reasoning matter so much.

Edward Scheirneman
Film Diplomacy - In a nutshell

This history comes into focus when we take both the films and their audiences seriously. Educational films were not marginal relics, and viewers were not passive recipients. Sponsors, translators, censors, researchers, projectionists, and audiences all shaped meaning. Viewers did not simply take what institutions gave them.

Ayşehan Jülide Etem
The Ultraview Effect - In a nutshell

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics.

Deana L. Weibel
Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See - A close-up

There’s something so powerful about artists who are simply willing to be artists, to create to create, without [a demand for social presence]. To put their world out there and let us sink into it...

Anthony Gomez III

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