An American: You guys have something called Flying Ant Day. Is this some kind of national holiday? A British person who is tired of ants: I can see how you’d get there, given the past 14 years of British politics. Quite the opposite, though: it’s the summer day we all dread because unlike other commemorative […]
Sally
There was a brief moment in my life when I thought it was obvious what an internal world model is. Self-evident, even! It’s the homunculus version of the cosmos as represented inside the confines of our skulls. Like this Emily Dickinson poem I found in one of Maria Popva’s always illuminating articles about consciousness: The […]
Item code: Partial transcriptDate: 20330503 05:06:35Source: NeoBrane 1.8 cortical interface ExoRAM®™ cacheNote: Data retrieval partial due to implant damage got it done last year because Noah told me it did multiple orgasms for men. Before that I had the Neuron.XI. Which was fine, but it didn’t do that. Actually they specifically said it was impossible, […]
When the internet was young, David Bowie was asked by a skeptical journalist whether it would ever have any real impact on the world. Wasn’t it just a fad whose transformative potential artists were exaggerating in a bid to stay relevant with the youths? It was 1999, and while this stance is easy to mock […]
Around 2011, there was a lot of chatter about an algorithm supposedly so scary Google wouldn’t release it. It would allegedly help you find people just from snapping images of their face. As with so much of today’s reality, what was a cool and spooky ghost story in 2011 has become just another intrusive and […]
“Is it okay to still have children?” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked her social media followers in 2019. She was addressing a growing reluctance among young people to consider parenting; both because of concerns about overpopulation and because of concerns about what kind of world new children would be coming into. This openness about rethinking parenthood […]
Chris Pincher. You may think of him as the man whose singular commitment to nominative determinism provided the final straw that brought down the UK Prime Minister. I think of him as my flimsy excuse to republish my paean to nominative determinism! I’ve also taken the opportunity to top it up with some of the […]
When I was in my 20s and we liked to be out professionally drinking after a day of professionally working, a study made the news – I have no idea which study, by whom, or exactly what it said because I only heard about it through the bitter complaints of my friend. She was a […]