MIT researchers overturn old theories about how memories form and recall works.

Inequality in nature and society. "(..) chance alone will drive 1% or less of the community to dominate 50% of all resources in situations where gains and losses are  multiplicative."

Interview with mathematician Corina Tarnita who deciphers patterns in the soil created by competing life-forms.

Everything we know about black hole growth says this one is too young to be so big.

A literary tour of the U.S. with 50 State-set books. I've read quite a few.

Ideology is the original augmented reality. Slavoj Žižek on how we fill gaps in our everyday experiences.

The radical chic of Rick Owens.

Is Spotify turning all music into muzak? I would say that it comes down to a change in the way in which people listen to music, e.g. while coding, cooking or commuting. Few people actually sit down to listen to music and those who do don't do so whenever they put on music. I'd add that listening habits are historical  anyway.

Who would have thought that Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story would become reality so soon? Inside China's vast new experiment in social ranking.

Erik Brynjolfsson and Tom Mitchell on workforce implications of what machine learning can do.

Paul Levy reviews five recent books about bread including the six-volume 2,642 page Modernist Bread.

Further further reading: Longreads Best of 2017.