Back in 2016, Adam J. Calhoun wrote a fascinating Medium post in which he showed off something quite cool: What novels look like if you strip away the words, and show just the punctuation.
He’d written some Python code to do this, then processed several famous books. …
By now, you may have heard the alarming news out of South Africa: Scientists there have tracked a new variant of COVID-19, and it has way more mutations than Delta.
Countries are halting flights from South Africa; the variant has also been found in Botswana, Belgium, Hong Kong and Israel…
We’re heading into mid-week, so you need a break.
I was busy Monday working on a new music project (woo!), so here’s a Tuesday “Linkfest” — the finest reading I could scavenge from the wild beaches of the Internet …
Modern American living rooms are usually organized around the TV…
Two weeks ago I posted a little web toy I’d made —a machine for doodling using a line that only turns in right angles. …
Back in 1978, the astrophysicist Donald Kessler made an alarming prediction: Space junk could wreck our ability to keep satellites aloft.
In a fascinating paper, Kessler noted that “low earth orbit” — a region between 99 miles and 1,200 miles up — was getting pretty crowded. In 1978 there were…
The week has begun. You survived Monday.
So reward yourself with this collection of absorbing reading material — the best I could find for you …
IMDB catalogues the genres of all TV shows since 1945, and Nathan Yau crawled it to produce this fascinating dataviz: The rise and fall…
What’s the best “tool for thought”?
I write a lot about cognition and technology, so I think about this a ton. …
Another week has begun!
Let’s start it off right — by kicking back, taking a break, feeding your brain.
You’ll have plenty of time to work later! After you’ve perused this reading material I curated, just for you ….
For 40 years, the Canadian artist Wanda Koop has created “large-scale…
I’m a long-form journalist, so I’ll spend many weeks — typically months — working on a big magazine feature. One of the trickiest things is figuring out: When am I done with research?
When do I know a subject well enough to write about it?
In my early years of…
When I was in grade school, I used to have a very particular style of doodling.
I’d draw a pattern that was governed by five rules, rather like the ones governing an Etch-A-Sketch. They were:
