A brief history. | Continue reading
More than 40 years ago, Lyn Lofland, who died last month, published a book that changed how I think about death and dying. | Continue reading
Jeremy Bernstein recounts his half-century friendship with the renowned scientist and visionary. | Continue reading
Harvard's LCGSA was a significant educational experiment, training one of the first generations of designers in computers and new media. | Continue reading
"My body is as if someone had drawn a vertical line separating the two halves. The right half seems to be twice the size of the left half." | Continue reading
We may already have a "miracle" fix for climate change: Electrify everything. | Continue reading
Iofan’s career is a precise reflection of all the compromises that architects must make with power. | Continue reading
Historian Peter Baldwin explores the evolution of the state's role in crime and punishment over 3,000 years. | Continue reading
To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom. | Continue reading
New research on magical thinking challenges many traditional views of cognition. | Continue reading
A poetic, geographic, and botanical journey of perfume discovery. | Continue reading
An excerpt from Chomsky and Moro’s new book “The Secrets of Words.” | Continue reading
Adopting autonomous vehicles is a question of psychology as much as of technology. | Continue reading
A deep history of mass manipulation, from the 1920s through the mid-1970s. | Continue reading
Two leading voices in evolutionary consciousness science explore the subject through words and images. | Continue reading
Emily West, communication scholar and author of “Buy Now,” offers a cautionary tale of bigness in today’s digital economy. | Continue reading
For over a century, buttons have conjured fears of all-or-nothing actions that could spiral out of control. | Continue reading
The acceptance of death is deeply embedded in our culture; it's time to overthrow that idea. | Continue reading
An excerpt from "Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births." | Continue reading
Honesty is a core scientific virtue, but what does it require of us? | Continue reading
Much like Dorothy discovers at the end of “The Wizard of Oz,” the key to hacking time is a tool we’ve had all along: Choice. | Continue reading
Ancient skeletons, funerary practices, and DNA reveal layers of inequality in past societies. | Continue reading
In October 1989, as the Cold War was ending, television viewers in the Soviet Union tuned in to the first of a series of very unusual broadcasts. | Continue reading
An essay from renowned photography historian Clément Chéroux’s book “Since 1839... Eleven Essays on Photography." | Continue reading
Alain Bécoulet, author of "Star Power: ITER and the International Quest for Fusion Energy," on the history of nuclear power. | Continue reading
Geographer and urbanist Matthew Gandy explores the fascinating history of spontaneous forms of urban nature. | Continue reading
"We thought this film was defective. But we were mistaken. This is how radiation looks." | Continue reading
Anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate draws on five years of research and ethnographic fieldwork in server farms to illustrate some of the diverse environmental impacts of data storage. | Continue reading
“This is how one ought to see, how things really are.” | Continue reading
Elizabeth Claire on the culture of dancing madness in post-terror Paris. | Continue reading
Artificial servants, autonomous killing machines, surveillance systems, and sex robots have been part of the human imagination for thousands of years. | Continue reading
Sketches and texts from the conceptual artist’s earliest notebooks offer a rare look inside his art-making process. | Continue reading
New explanations from economics research. | Continue reading
“When you’re shining a light on something, almost everything else remains in the dark. And sometimes that darkness is deliberately kept dark.” | Continue reading
The prostate-specific antigen test is one of the most lauded tests for prostate cancer. It’s also controversial and fraught with uncertainty. | Continue reading
Fifty years ago, Computer Space launched the video game industry. Here's why it never took off. | Continue reading
The untold story of a world-renowned architect, an obsessive librarian, and a $5,500 house that never was. | Continue reading
We may sometimes behave like computers, but more often, we are creative, irrational, and not always too bright. | Continue reading
Attempts to scientifically “rationalize” policy, based on the belief that science is purified of politics, may be damaging democracy | Continue reading
Lem's 1964 story, published in English for the first time, tells the tale of a scientist in an insane asylum theorizing that the sun is alive. | Continue reading
A series of botanical encounters in the rainforest, excerpted from Francis Hallé’s book “Atlas of Poetic Botany.” | Continue reading
The story of teaching machines is deeply intertwined with Skinner’s psycho-technologies, which laid a foundation from which education technology has never entirely broken. | Continue reading
Traditional environmentalism has lacked a meaningful, practical democratic vision, rendering it largely marginal to the day-to-day lives of most Americans. | Continue reading
Modern authoritarian regimes don’t attempt total, absolute control. Their censorship is more selective and calibrated — and thus more resilient. | Continue reading
Easy and effective, copying is how we cope with unpredictability. | Continue reading
If geographers “carve,” “draw,” or “write” the earth, psychogeographers add a zest of soul to the mix, linking earth, mind and foot. | Continue reading
The idea that other worlds might be home to alien beings has been part of our thought for as long as we have been looking skyward. | Continue reading
The Russians may have been winning the space race in the 1950s, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the sophistication of Western dress. | Continue reading