epidemics, as seen in zombie movies
the victim becomes the victimizer. human contact – the very thing that makes us human – kills us. it’s a total and absolute threat to the human condition....
Category: people
those who look for a world war will find it
Adam Gopnik: What all forms of fascism have in common is the glorification of the nation, and the exaggeration of its humiliations, with violence promised to it...
keeping the hamsters alive: clickbait and the information market
google just served me up the following “news” without knowing my full identity: this appears to be their default offering for an English speaker in ...
the stories that win
John Cassidy: To get people to turn out and vote in your favor, you also have to give them something positive to rally behind. The Leave campaign, for all its l...
“what’s going on”
Virginia Heffernan: Just get back to that time where you were just tripping out in college and wondering what else is out there, before you buttoned up. Because...
the science of bad movies
Nora Caplan-Bricker: The ideal bedtime story, according to Nitun Verma, a national spokesperson for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, is one that “doesn’t...
maximum efficiency, minimum effort
Josh Marshall: As Clinton and her team certainly anticipated, hitting him hard as mentally unstable and unfit for the presidency has placed Trump in a sort of C...
beside the lake, beneath the trees
How Trees Calm Us Down: Urban environments can certainly elicit involuntary attention… but they do so in a harsh, peremptory way that requires voluntary attenti...
the cruel myth of the rugged individual
Jesse Singal: In other words, it may simply be the case that many people who lived in less equal, more “traditional” times were forced into close companionship ...
Insecurity
Mollie Bloudoff-Indelicato: Workers with less education are more likely to take jobs with more workplace stress, such as those involving shift work, experiencin...
Representation
“I feel a lot of hate,” she said. “I haven’t said anything bad to anyone.” says the 18 year-old attending a political rally in sup...
Hollywood
From West of Eden: An American Place by Jean Stein, excerpted by Andrew O’Hagan: I was very young in 1955, when Warner Brothers did Rebel without a Cause ...
Where coincidences come from
Julie Beck: Beitman in his research has found that certain personality traits are linked to experiencing more coincidences—people who describe themselves as rel...
Elissa Steamer
A simple yet rich portrait of an artist-athlete during a period of cultural shift in which she both flourished and was frustrated.
Certainty is a contact sport
Nicola Twilley: The LIGO team includes a small group of people whose job is to create blind injections—bogus evidence of a gravitational wave—as a way of keepin...
South Pasadena, USA
I drove through South Pasadena, California this afternoon. It’s a beautiful neighborhood with tree lined streets and large, stately houses. If you’r...
robots and secrets
From an overview of consensus by John Cassidy: Why, then, are the markets so disturbed? One possible explanation has to do with trading algorithms, which encour...