Headlines

Unpaid labor

It’s possible you use social media to grow your business. Or to enhance your career. Or maybe it’s to find delight and joy. When you add up all the tikking, tokking, tweeting and clicking, what’s the return on that investment? Is your vacation more fun when you spend it taking

The Unexpected Math Behind Van Gogh’s “Starry Night”

If you’ve taken a good art history course on the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, you’ve inevitably encountered Vincent van Gogh’s 1889 masterpiece “Starry Night,” which now hangs in the MoMA in New York City. The painting, the museum writes on its website, “is a

Make Way for Beavers

A Tube station in West London used to have a flooding problem. Instead of opting for an expensive reworking of the landscape via reservoir & levee, local officials reintroduced a family of beavers into the area . The beavers are part of an unlikely effort to bring back a

Existentialist Embroidery

The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary precision and

American Wealth, Sliced Up

Using the Federal Reserve’s Distribution of Household Wealth in the U.S. since 1989 data, Ryan Thorpe imagines a pizza party with 100 guests and 100 slices of pizza as a stand-in for the United States: We’re having a pizza party with 100 guests! Let’s divvy up the slices the

As part of the Ocean Census project, “scientists...

As part of the Ocean Census project, “scientists have discovered 1,121 marine species in a single year” . Discoveries include “a new species of deep-sea ghost shark, a symbiotic bristle worm…as well as corals, crabs, shrimps, sea urchins, and anemones”.

Caught In Joy: Music for Flow, Rest, and Reset

The moment I clicked through to the Caught In Joy YouTube channel , I knew I was going to love it. The description: Over 80 albums designed to focus, flow and reset. Instrumental electronic music for you brain to wander. And from the website : Caught In Joy (Karol

To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant . “If a...

To Land a Job in AI, Try Reading Kant . “If a for-profit AI company signs your paycheck, might that compromise your research? By playing Aristotle to AI Alexander, do you risk your work becoming an instrument for hype-building and myth-making?”

Going Focaccia Crazy

I have a pizza oven and baked very underwhelming bread twice during the pandemic, but I’ve found it difficult to fall into a proper rabbit hole when it comes to dough-making. Focaccia might do it for me. My daughter and I had been wanting to experiment with focaccia (and