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Required Reading

This week: how to make art with a full-time job, portraits of Black marronage, artists vs. algorithms, US men’s hockey team acts up (again), snow sculptures in NYC, and more.

“ Eclipses have been connected with the fate of...

“ Eclipses have been connected with the fate of rulers since at least ancient Mesopotamia, around 4,000 years ago.” But more recently: “In 1581, Queen Elizabeth I of England made it a felony to use horoscopes to predict her death or her successor.”

“ x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86...

“ x86CSS is a working CSS-only x86 CPU/emulator/computer. Yes, the Cascading Style Sheets CSS. No JavaScript required. What you’re seeing above is a C program that was compiled using GCC into native 8086 machine code being executed fully within CSS.”

Elizebeth Smith Friedman: The Codebreaker

The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together: cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships chief cryptanalyst for

The Man Who Stole Infinity

"In an 1874 paper, Georg Cantor proved that there are different sizes of infinity and changed math forever. A trove of newly unearthed letters shows that it was also an act of plagiarism."

Love immortal

In pursuit of defeating death, Alan has dedicated his life to cryonics. He hopes to be defrosted together with his wife - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon

Aeon

The presence of power

The Indian thinker Rammohun Roy believed that good governance must be close: distance made the British Empire cruel - by Shomik Dasgupta Read on Aeon

Aeon