It’s a question so rarely asked it almost feels silly to ask it. Some situations and some jobs work to eliminate our freedom of choice. Prison, medical school, 8th grade–there are settings where time, tools, and options are severely limited. But even in these settings, we have
Among my works, the one I like best is the Home that I have had built in Milan for accommodating old singers not favored by fortune, or who, when they were young did not possess the virtue of saving. Poor and dear companions of my life! —Giuseppe Verdi Is there a remedy for
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a creature with hopes and longings constantly
“ LLM-generated passwords…appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure , because LLMs are designed to predict tokens – the opposite of securely and uniformly sampling random characters.”
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s first catalog in 25 years, Molly Crabapple chronicles the Jewish Bund, a photographer captures a Black Southern waterway, and more
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube
A new bipartisan bill could help enshrine intellectual property rights and expand healthcare access for cultural workers.
One of the 35 girls among the 2,000 students at Mexico’s National Preparatory School, Frida Kahlo (July 6, 1907–July 13, 1954) was fifteen when she met Alejandro Gómez Arias. Both were passionate and erudite, both were members of the anarchist student group known as Los
Rather than deconstruct Western modernism or reinsert Islamic visual idioms, the artist loosens the grip of the grid.
From Heatmap News & MIT, the Electricity Price Hub is “a new public data platform that provides monthly, utility-level estimates of residential electricity rates and bills across the United States going back to 2021…”
In addition to our own fresh and feral stock of jokes, we wanted to show some love to a few other examples of shenanigans across the arts and humanities.
This week, we honor an absurdist cartoonist, a trailblazing feminist artist, and a sculptor who probed the history of violence in the US.
Scientists have genetically engineered tobacco plants to produce five psychedelic compounds , including psilocybin, DMT, and psychedelic compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.
I was thankful to read Marcin Wichary’s review of Stewart Brand’s Maintenance: Of Everything . I first heard about the book months and months ago; it sounded potentially interesting but I was afraid it was going to suffer from a now-familiar myopia of the “tech” old guard.
Dean Majd captured images of his inner circle for a decade, deconstructing performances of masculinity in the process.
Not sure what level of prank/gag/stunt this is (note today’s date), but this is supposedly a fully functional compass that only points to the Olive Garden in Times Square .
The Pioneering Coffee House Serving Since 1645 . “In Oxford, ‘runners’ would go from coffee house to coffee house, picking up all the best news and delivering it back to customers, said Garner. You’re talking human wi-fi.”
"For months, lone vibe coder Rafael Concepcion has obsessively built tools to counter the federal immigration crackdown—pivoting as he’s been outmatched. He’s also lost his job and become a target."
After two years off, Tom Scott is back with a new YouTube series : “I took a road trip through every county in England, and filmed something interesting in each of them.”
"You don’t need to shout it for the entire world, but you need to give hope to the people who need it, who you can speak to."
Joseph Ford's ongoing series 'Impossible Street Art' invites street artists to imagine their work in inaccessible sites. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The
The dark arts of “Hollywood accounting” make it difficult to determine film budgets with precision. But according to reasonable reckonings, James Cameron may have directed not just one but several of the most expensive movies of all time. The underwater sci-fi spectacle that
Tech investor and billionaire Marc Andreessen has many bad opinions (as evidenced by his investment portfolio). On a recent podcast, he shared a real boner : that he isn’t introspective, that people 400 years ago weren’t at all introspective, and that introspection was a
"...a stillness in which the germ of what is not yet palpable pauses and gathers to begin one more time."
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a paragon of
"Collectors have been tracking an 1854 outlaw tale from gold rush San Francisco to the alleys of Mexico City—and beyond. We join the hunt."
Stitch a blanket or a pillow cover that reminds you of Copenhagen, Paris, or New York. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Stitch Your Favorite