While we think of our genes as being set from birth, DNA does accumulate changes over the years. Sometimes errors are introduced when a cell divides, a spontaneous typo emerging when the DNA is copied and pasted from one cell into another. Mutations can also occur as a result of environmental exposures. - The New York Times
Going car-free is a lot harder than it seems. Not only has it led to politicians and urban planners facing death threats and being doxxed, it has forced them to rethink the entire basis of city life. - Wired
Twenty-five of America’s 26 largest downtowns have more residents today than they did on the eve of the pandemic. Meanwhile, both violent and property crime plummeted in cities across the country in 2022 and 2023. - The Atlantic
Cast your eyes across this burgeoning literature of cultural stagnation—now so voluminous it counts as an authentic subgenre in its own right—and you won’t find much acknowledgment of the critic’s role in all this. - The New Republic
Never is it discussed that a cordoned-off, highly policed, highly regulated urban fabric of the kind that exists in every metropolitan center in the Western world is created in the image of the people who dominate that world, at the expense of those who don’t. - The Nation
Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. - The Atlantic
How can these powerful systems beat us in chess but falter on basic math? This paradox reflects more than just an idiosyncratic design quirk. It points toward something fundamental about how large language models think. - The New Yorker
That aggregation of talent, energy and audience created what felt like a moment of rupture and renewal, a chance to reinvent Black life and Black consciousness, to escape the self-imprisoning consciousness that Du Bois anatomized and the even more debilitating quiescence and accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington. - Washington Post
"These novels, films and TV shows set on grand estates strike us differently when most people can’t buy a flat. ... More than that, the Arcadian English ideal simply cannot survive when we discover slavery in the deeds.” And yet. - The Guardian (UK)
Broadband speed of 25 Millibytes per second (Mbps) for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads isn’t it anymore - now the FCC says wants to more than quadruple each speed. (Gamers and those who have experienced buffering understand this all too well.) - Wired
The self has never been more securely an object of classification than it is today, thanks to the century-long ascendence of behavioral analysis and scientific psychology, sociometry, taxonomic personology, and personality theory. - Hedgehog Review
While some skeptics think the models are going to hit a wall, more optimistic scientists believe that foundation models will even tackle the biggest biological question of them all: What separates life from nonlife? - The New York Times
Contemporary journalists have a relationship to ideas that is more or less the opposite of the old school’s. It begins before they even get to campus. Students at elite colleges are drawn overwhelmingly from the upper classes, with roughly two-thirds coming from the top 20% of the income distribution. - Persuasion
