Ken Schafer

November 11, 2019

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Remembrance Day Poppies: The Political History of a Symbol

“The origins of the Remembrance Day poppy are pretty well known. However, how they made the jump to Canada, is rather unclear.”

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Is Prison Necessary? Ruth Wilson Gilmore Might Change Your Mind

“In three decades of advocating for prison abolition, the activist and scholar has helped transform how people think about criminal justice.”

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The Trouble With Dentistry

“We have a fraught relationship with dentists as authority figures. In casual conversation we often dismiss them as “not real doctors,” regarding them more as…”

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Can a Burger Help Solve Climate Change?

“Pat Brown, Impossible’s founder, argues that we can’t fight climate change unless we get rid of cows.”
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What came first? Wheeled luggage or a man on the moon?

“This man had to carry his luggage when he got home. Brian Weisberg: Marketing Quant Follow Sep 22, 2014 · 5 min read Take a moment and look at this picture of…”

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What Happens When Lyme Disease Becomes an Identity?

“Polly Murray, in the 1960s and ’70s, was a mother of four with an old house on several acres in Lyme, Connecticut. In the summer, her kids built forts in the…”

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Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking

“Abstract In five preregistered studies, we assess people’s tendency to believe “kids these days” are deficient relative to those of previous generations. Across…”
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Is the world really better than ever?

“By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude that everything was terrible.”
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What is Amazon?

“What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years.”
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What does it mean for a machine to “understand”?

“Thomas G. Dietterich Oct 27 · 7 min read Critics of recent advances in artificial intelligence complain that although these advances have produced remarkable…”
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The 1950s Are Greatly Overrated

“Anyone miss the cookie-cutter lifestyle? Photographer: H. Armstrong Roberts/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Photographer: H. Armstrong Roberts/Hulton Archive/Getty…”
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In 1986, Superheroes Needed Watchmen. Now Superhero Movies Need the New Adaptation.

“Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by DC Comics and Mark Hill/HBO. For the past three weeks, fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been raging against…”
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‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations

“Now it’s war: Gen Z has finally snapped over climate change and financial inequality.”

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How Lana Del Rey’s career explains a huge shift in the way we think about pop stars

“Lana Del Rey poses for a portrait during a visit to 107.7 The End on October 2, 2019, in Seattle, Washington. Mat Hayward/Getty Images At the end of August,…”

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The Line of Beauty

“Why millennial women have fallen in love with Matisse.”

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Machine learning deployment

“In 2012 or so, if you’d asked most people in tech about ’neural networks’, if they had any answer at all they might well have said that it was an obscure idea”

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Machines Beat Humans on a Reading Test. But Do They Understand? | Quanta Magazine

“In the fall of 2017, Sam Bowman , a computational linguist at New York University, figured that computers still weren’t very good at understanding the written…”
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The 2010s Have Broken Our Sense Of Time

“The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time The rhythms of American life changed in the 2010s. How everything from TV to Trump to Instagram messed with your head just…”

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The Leafy Love Affair Between Millennials and Houseplants

“Summer Rayne Oakes understands why so many millennials have developed houseplant fever. Until very recently, I went about my days with a moderate case of “plant…”

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Why do some people develop the lost camera films of total strangers?

“‘Pictures are our only defence against time’: a rediscovered family portrait from Evansville, Indiana, probably 1940s T he woman in the photographs had an…”

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Overlooked No More: Robert Johnson, Bluesman Whose Life Was a Riddle

“Johnson gained little notice in his life, but his songs — quoted by the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin — helped ignite rock ‘n’ roll. A photo…”

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How climate change gave added urgency to a $1.25B project to prevent flooding in Toronto | CBC News

“In May 2017, record-breaking levels in Lake Ontario left much of the Toronto islands underwater throughout the summer. The following year, a powerful storm hit…”
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Will there ever be a cure for chronic pain?

“P eter McNaughton, a professor of pharmacology at King’s College London, is a devoted optimist. He acknowledges that his positivity can sometimes seem…”

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America, the Gerontocracy

“Illustration by Laurène Boglio Our leaders, our electorate and our hallowed system of government itself are aging. And it shows. Timothy Noah is the employment…”
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Why Do Straight Men Have Such ‘Serious’ Instagram Photos?

“There’s a new way to lightly mock straight men, and it involves an Instagram aesthetic common to them. “If you ever want to see what the world is like with no…”

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Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change

“Let’s imagine for a moment that we’ve reached the middle of the century. It’s 2050, and we have a moment to reflect—the climate fight remains the consuming…”
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Sorry, But Male Geniuses Are Replaceable

“The archetype of the lone male genius has always existed. For centuries, the image of a scientist has been a stagnant one: an eccentric and intelligent man,…”
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A Woman’s AncestryDNA Test Revealed a Medical Secret

“Holly Becker took an AncestryDNA test, and the results exactly matched those of a young man in New York. This was strange, but the test was not wrong.”