Fresh picks from 135 curated publications • Auto-updated daily
Typists, editors, arbiters of art. Literary amanuenses like Theodora Bosanquet, Véra Nabokov, and Valerie Eliot shaped modern literature
Oscar Wilde, William Morris, and John Ruskin were exemplars of socialist aesthetics, advancing the view that more leisure would result in better art
How did Western psychiatric taxonomies handle such non-Western disorders as “pibloktoq” (a wintertime psychosis) and “kufungisisa” (thinking too much)?
Paul Bloom at Small Potatoes: We are born with a yearning for the spiritual and transcendent, and the difficult truths about life that we learn about as we grow older—such as the inevitability of deat
And how to stop them
Why don’t filmmakers just film on location instead of using visual effects? Lots of reasons, including not disrupting communities, control of weather & sun position, or can’t get permission.
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Part the First: Predatory or Not? Over the past six years the biomedical literature has accumulated 494,547 scientific “publications” with “COVID” (case insensitive) somewhere in the paper. A search
New research into burn-response genes shows evidence of accelerated evolution The post Was the Human Genome Forged by Fire? appeared first on Nautilus.
Bezos didn’t abandon the Washington Post. He just decided which part of it he wanted.
Higher Ed is at war, after all
Jonathan O’Callaghan in New Scientist: We are only a month into 2026, yet it’s already clear what one of the major space stories of the year is going to be: mega-constellations, and the ongoing attemp
This essay is adapted from Traversal. “Death may snatch me from you, before you can weigh my advice,” Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the philosophical novel she wouldn’t live to finish, addressing a dau
Dan Davies has his finger on something important here. It is not, at root, about "AI". It is about work. The spreadsheet first escaped from the finance department and colonised the world. “Serious”...
Dan Sinker writes about the transformative experience of seeing a work by Jenny Holzer when he was 14. “Truisms was a revelation. Art could be just words. Art could be just at home slapped on a POST N
Christin Bohnke at JSTOR Daily: In August 1968, a visiting foreign minister from Pakistan, Mian Arshad Hussain, gave Mao a box of mangoes as a gift during a state visit. Presenting mangoes has a long
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
Silver Bulletin favorability ratings for the world's richest man.
When the cryptocurrency ecosystem sheds $2 trillion, we should pause to notice where it went.
The post Extreme Inequality Presages The Revolt Against It appeared first on NOEMA.
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What mundane pleasures will I be robbed of by domestic robots? Sometimes I feel like my job at home is putting things into machines and taking things out of machines. I don’t mean to sound unappreciat
“How did medieval French handwriting become ‘the Nazi font?’ And why did Hitler make it illegal?” TIL that Hitler gave a speech to the Reichstag about how much he disliked blackletter fonts.
Hermione Hoby at The New Yorker: David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” a book whose notorious bigness comprises both physical size and reputational heft, turns thirty in February. The occasion is a
What people throughout the world and across time have made of lunar eclipses The post The Many Myths of the Blood Moon appeared first on Nautilus.
Sometimes we learn things
Thomas E. Miles at The Hedgehog Review: Why bother? What’s the point? These are questions that inevitably arise in conversations about college programs in prisons. But these questions make certain ass
Do you remember Oddpost? It was an early email web app that used dynamic HTML to mimic the design and functionality of a desktop mail app, 2 years before Gmail launched.
Something metamorphic lurks beneath this dark bridge. Elizabeth Maher’s inventive story placed third in our Building and Burning Bridges protocol fiction contest.
AI and the end user effect
Fridays are all about podcast links here at Abnormal Returns. You can also check out last week’s links including a look at...
More pro-planning, less fussed about privatisation, more pro-monopolies
Tinder Hasn’t Worked, So I’m Putting Myself on Zillow. “I realize that my late-’80s construction might not land me in the “trending” section right away…” 💬 Join the disc
Body size pushes these river monsters to become apex predators The post The Monstrous Appetite of Japanese Giant Salamanders appeared first on Nautilus.
Mathematicians finally understand the behavior of an important class of differential equations that describe everything from water pressure to oxygen levels in human tissues. The post Long
Science journalist Adam Becker dissects offensively crazy tech billionaires' schemes that greenwash their planetary looting.
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: How do you translate a Roman inscription found on a tombstone? How many pairs of tendons are supported by one bone in hummingbirds? Here is a chemical reaction that requ
Dream Father I seem to have a dream about my father roughly once a year. Most of the time he acts pretty much like when he was alive, Stands off to one side and maintains a running commentary, Sucking
Opus 4.6, GPT-5.3-Codex, As Rocks May Think, Mouse Brain Computers, Waymo, Contrary Tech Trends + 4 Extra Doses
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