A time to fast. Why the laws of physics are inevitable. Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Scale-free networks well done. What’s next for social priming? Roberto Saviano. Liu Cixin. Prehistoric art. Best of 2019. And more.
Martin Scorsese on why Marvel movies aren’t cinema. Deep sleep. An interview with Nabokov. Who needs literature? The world in a song. Aesthetic judgment is autocorrelated. Insect decline. Religion and global psychological variation. AI. Generating new ideas. Moles. Dogs. Fairies. And more.
Cormac McCarthy’s tips on how to write a great scientific paper. Photos of mathematicians’ blackboards. Category Theory. Footnotes to Plato. Curation as creation. Language, AI and the brain. Natural Selection. An octopus changing colour while sleeping. The tragedy of Kashmir. And more.
Bloomberg special issue on the periodic table and the elements. Machine behaviour. A day in the life of a tree. Excerpt from The Understory. The insect apocalypse is driven by a 50x increase in toxic pesticides. If Sapiens were a blog post. J.M Coetzee on Australia’s shame. Mosquitoes. And more.
Dancing with the ancients. The number of roles in theatre plays has decreased over time. How digital advertising markets really work. Time is running out for sand. Deep learning has a terrible carbon footprint. The first humans to reach the Americas. Pentaquarks. Extremophiles. Sloths. And more.
Why science needs philosophy. What are the limits of deep learning? In defence of the black box. Cats know their names. Using physics to make sense of the brain's tangled networks. Stadium shows in the age of mechanical reproduction. The new physics needed to probe the origins of life. And more.
Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history. Walking helps us think. Weekend recovery sleep doesn't work. Why anti-conformists end up looking the same. An interview with Javier Cercas. Denisovans may have mated with modern humans as recently as 15,000 years ago. And more.
A world without clouds. Interview with the CEO of Norway's sovereign wealth fund. Why zebras have stripes. The universal decay of collective memory and attention. David Salle on Andy Warhol. Manhattan‘s new needle skyscrapers. Behemoth. Harold Brodkey: yesterday’s genius. Sleep science. And more.
Is ancient DNA research revealing new truths or falling into old traps? Robots use imagination to learn concepts. Poons vs Koons. Towards a general theory of neural networks. The concept of the corporation. A robot reveals how ancient reptile moved. Frederick Eberhardt about causality. And more.
Albert-László Barabási on the 5 universal laws of success. Ocean warming is accelerating. Steven Strogatz on the future of AI. The conceptual limits of machine learning. Tickets in London's West End are not a rip-off. Tattoos are copyrighted. How radical 1960s architecture got it so wrong. And more.
How to be an artist. The Burgess shale. Spider silk is stronger than steel. Humpback whale songs undergo a cultural revolution every few years. The insect apocalypse. René Girard. The US opioid crisis. Understanding Russia’s two hybrid wars. Global warming will happen faster than we think. And more.
Quantifying reputation and success in art. Transforming the global food system. Tales from the Warhol Factory. What if the placebo effect isn’t a trick? Interview with David Foster Wallace. The Art Institute of Chicago has uploaded 50,000 high-resolution images from their collection. And more.