“Our cursed age of self-monitoring and optimisation didn’t start with big tech: as so often, the Victorians are to blame.”
society
Posted inEditor's Pick
Speaking Apartment
“The good ones are seldom advertised; they are passed down to friends or family members.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Walk In These
“Shoes are deeply personal, literally moulded to our lives. But they create our social lives as much as express them.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
How Societies Morph With the Seasons
“An evolutionary anthropologist details seasonal changes among foraging communities—and distills how the fixed political structures of industrialized societies are an outlier in human history.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
W.A.S.T.E. Not
“John Scanlan looks for the future in the dustbins of history.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Dog Duty
“It’s a sympathetic image—the community uniting in gratitude behind a civic-minded poop-scooper—but, reader, this is not the full story.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
Ant Geopolitics
“Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Coronavirus Pandemic’s Ongoing Legacy: COVID Orphans
“Five months. Four caskets. Three funerals.”
Posted inEditor's Pick
The Case for Hanging Out
“There’s a growing crisis in our social lives. Could the cure be this simple?”
Posted inArts & Culture, Essays & Criticism, Highlight, Quote Posts, Quotes
What Brings True Happiness: the Booze or the Bonding?
“But there’s nothing wrong with a nudge toward examining the difference between what makes us happy and what is merely habitual.”