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...
Category: people
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...
looking at the dark side
George Soros: Recognizing a problem is an invitation to do something about it. That is the main lesson I learned from the formative experience of my life, in 19...
competition
An intrepid researcher has mapped some of the microwave towers being used to conduct high-frequency-trading around the world. HFT requires competitors to use cu...
The eyes of the other
John Lahr profiles actor Al Pacino: To Pacino, there is no such thing as a fourth wall. “The audience is another character in the play,” he said. “They become p...
The campaigns
I was reading about the person who inspired the poem Ozymandias when I came upon the headline: “First Syrian Campaign.” Huh, I thought, so he also w...
Who let the bots out
Today I had occasion to contact roughly two dozen friends via the message or chat tool on Facebook. When first contacted, two of them replied by asking if I was...
a rage for rigor
TO THE HYPHENATED POETS Richer than mother’s milk is half-and-half Friends of two minds, redouble your craft. Our shelves our hives, our selves a royal je...
actor and spectator
in the actor-spectator relationship, both participants experience self-knowledge by “trading places” with another person. for the actor, self-knowle...
why do marketers anthropomorphize cookies and candies?
perhaps, eating is inherently social – that is, we are hardwired to eat with others. how then to justify “indulging” oneself with food? perhaps, by ...
Bingo in Baghdad
From Daniel Voll’s The Hunter Becomes the Hunted in Esquire: Clemente arrived to interrogate the suspect, a handcuffed middle-aged man named Zaid, and und...
Sons and daughters
The poignant, universal story of inter generational drift (class, immigration) obliquely rendered by Benjamin Dewey:
The religious impulse
Elif Batuman in the New Yorker: The findings at Göbleki Tepe suggest that we have the story backward—that it was actually the need to build a scared site that f...
The eyebrows of Björk circa 1988
The most beautiful eyebrows I have seen in some time – perhaps, because I do not live in Iceland.