Category: Blog

The natural world, as we learnt from the horrors of Grizzly Man, is not easily compared with ours. The structures we adopt for our stories — be they tragic, romantic or comedic — do not fit nature quite so tightly, and Herzog knows this. Any facts about the penguins’ motivations and thought processes remain unobtainable.…

Depending on the species, and the dimensions, each log in your fire might represent the equivalent of a full years’ growth for that tree. All of its effort to capture the energy of the sun, for the entirety of an orbit around that star, reduced to the fuel in your hand, and gone before your…

Tim Walz. Lil Jon. A big stadium. Everything is a spectacle. Even good guys know about Get Low. Everything has converged. — Read on youngna.substack.com/p/make-it-make-sense

“I OBVIOUSLY didn’t know it was going to snow,” she says, in a way that makes clear that what was obvious to each of us about it not snowing was not equivalent in any way. — Read on youngna.substack.com/p/eight-vignettes-about-power-and-misunderstanding

He is drawn to books that challenge the form itself in different ways, those that self-consciously or otherwise disrupt the more stately certainties of the great 19th-century novels. “The writers of the 20th century are ambushed by history,” Frank writes. “They exist in a world where the dynamic balance between self and society that the…

Casper Grathwohl, Oxford Languages president, said: “Brain rot speaks to one of the perceived dangers of virtual life, and how we are using our free time. It feels like a rightful next chapter in the cultural conversation about humanity and technology. It’s not surprising that so many voters embraced the term, endorsing it as our…

It used to be widely assumed that the brain was the last bastion of sterility in the human body – it has a blood-brain barrier, for one, which microbes were thought to be too big to pass through – but it turns out that microbes flourish in the brain. In many – but not all…

He was told that on winning a million yen’s worth of goods his mission would be complete; moreover he was allowed to eat and drink whatever edible or drinkable prizes he could get, including dog food. And all the time his ordeal was being broadcast to a huge Japanese TV audience without his realising it.…

ROBERTS: I wonder how much of it is the fact that it’s really convenient to have a system, gives you something to shove into the box. You’ve got this black box that you take the world’s events and you’ve decided how they should be processed. Then something new comes along, and you know how to deal…

To compete for the same passengers as cheap airlines, Nunes says, you have to give people the opportunity not to pay for certain things, which has the unfortunate effect of making the classic coach flyer aware that they’re being charged for what used to just come in their bundle. That middle-class experience can still be…