Month: June 2022
June 30, 2022
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How to turn Online Friends Into IRL Ones
“In a 2018 study on friendship , Jeffrey Hall, an associate professor in communication studies at the University of Kansas, discovered that it takes about 50…”
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This Is Your Brain Under Anesthesia
“When you are awake, your neurons talk to each other by tuning into the same electrical impulse frequencies. One set might be operating in unison at 10 hertz,…”
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“P erhaps you’ve noticed that ebooks are awful. I hate them, but I don’t know why I hate them. Maybe it’s snobbery. Perhaps, despite my long career in technology…”
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Towards the abolition of animal farming
““Yes I eat cow/ I am not proud” — Kurt Cobain I love meat. As a Texan I pride myself on my steak-grilling abilities, but I have to admit the Argentinians have…”
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Crosswords: the meow meow of the 1920s
“Some people associate crosswords with respectability: the suburbanite knocking off the Times on the 7.22 from Twyford, or the major’s wife tidying away her…”
June 29, 2022
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The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline
“Future technology that could power a city with a device the size of a shipping container may prove a better bet than harnessing the wind In a key milestone on…”
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What Makes an Artist in the Age of Algorithms?
“In 2021, technology’s role in how art is generated remains up for debate and discovery. From the rise of NFT s to the proliferation of techno-artists who use…”
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Walking as a Productivity System
“Most writers have a system in place to drive the work they do. My own system, for example, is mad and unpredictable, and it’s based on a mysterious alchemy of…”
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If the January 6 Hearings Don’t Change Minds, Nothing Will
“At the Global Fact international fact-checkers’ conference I attended in Oslo earlier this month, there were workshops on digital investigation, lectures on…”
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Opinion | The fall of Roe is the culmination of the Democratic establishment’s failures
“The overturning of Roe v. Wade , and the underwhelming reaction from senior Democratic leaders to that huge defeat, make the case even clearer that the party’s…”
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Essay: The digital death of collecting
“Hi everyone! This missive contains a recap of my columns on digital culture for The New Yorker and a B-side essay that helped me figure out my column on how…”
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“news analysis In the final, frenzied days of his administration, Donald J. Trump’s behavior turned increasingly volatile as he smashed dishware and lunged at…”
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The Petty Pleasures of Watching Crypto Profiteers Flounder
“I cannot stop watching videos of Web3 boosters failing to explain the usefulness of the technology. I realize this is petty, but the videos are deeply…”
June 28, 2022
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On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
“The fennec fox is the smallest fox on earth and cute as a button. It has mischievous dark eyes, a small black nose, and impish six-inch ears—each several times…”
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Can Nuclear Fusion Put the Brakes on Climate Change?
“Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and…”
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Adobe should make a boring app for prompt engineers
“AI image synthesis has just crossed a reliability and quality threshold that means that it can replace a broad swathe of creative work, like, tomorrow, but…”
June 27, 2022
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People Aren’t Lazy (Including You!)
“People may not be lazy, but Giggles the rabbit sure is. In order to highlight some thinkers I think could use a bigger platform and more attention, I’m going to…”
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Why Depression Can Wipe Your Memory Clean
“When Jake quit smoking weed, he assumed he would stop forgetting where he put his keys, or the toilet paper his girlfriend asked him to pick up on his way home.…”
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“The most marvelous and unexpected thing about digital technology is that it amplifies two contrasting currents at the same time. It empowers extremely huge…”
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Menace, as a Political Tool, Enters the Republican Mainstream
“Threats of violence have become commonplace among a significant part of the party, as historians and those who study democracy warn of a dark shift in American…”
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Eureka! On the clustering of geniuses
“I Why do so many discoveries happen at roughly the same time to different people? There are cool sounding names like multiple discovery and simultaneous…”
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A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world
“A minute before midnight on 21 July 2021, as passengers staggered sleepily through Manchester airport, I stood wringing my hands in the glow of a vending…”
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Far-right, controversial candidates create new headaches for Kevin McCarthy
“Far-right candidates are surging in House races across the map: Republican leaders increasingly fear that a red wave will wash in a raft of conspiracy theorists…”
June 26, 2022
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America Is Running Out of New Ideas
“Let’s start with a simple mystery: What happened to original blockbuster movies? Throughout the 20th century, Hollywood produced a healthy number of entirely…”
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Pets, Aliens, Spirits, and Slaves
“There are roughly five different models we can adopt for our relationships with AIs. In the future our lives will be packed with thousands of different species…”
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“Twenty five years ago, when I was co-editing Wired, we ran a controversial article called the Long Boom . This was a scenario forecasting 25 years of economic…”
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Genre Is Disappearing. What Comes Next?
“When the newest batch of Grammy nominations were announced, in late November, Justin Bieber expressed displeasure with the way his music had been identified by…”
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Air Travel Is a Disaster Right Now. Here’s Why.
““The very first symptom of the general collapse was an old one: nothing worked.” The sentiment is old—it comes from Doris Lessing’s 1969 novel, The Four-Gated…”
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Every Disaster Film Is About How We Can’t Wait for the World to End
“Is the world ending this weekend? Probably not, but you can always hope. Earlier this month, NASA revealed that an asteroid roughly the size of the Eiffel Tower…”
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“I had a very different newsletter planned for this weekend. But here we are, reeling from the aftermath of the legal revocation of bodily autonomy for all women…”