“The problem isn’t your memory, it’s that we have the wrong expectations for what memory is for in the first place. Severe memory loss is undoubtedly debilitating, but our most typical complaints and worries around everyday forgetting are largely driven by deeply rooted misconceptions.” - Undark
Works of literature and art, for example, can teach us to challenge dominant visions of sleep, allowing us to see sleep as a place where values are formed and cultural debates are shaped. - The Conversation
Should crosswords lead solvers to new words and ideas, or should they be for those who’ve been doing crosswords for a while and “don’t want to be disrupted”? Crossword creator Anna Shechtman says it’s a challenge. “The notion of a sort of apolitical, abstract common knowledge is a fantasy." - Slate
"Morse code outlived the telegraph age by becoming the lingua franca of the sea. But by the late 20th century, satellite radio was turning it into a dying language." The last official transmission went out in 1999 - but it’s not dead yet. - The Atlantic
Like Zola for those with long Twitter memories (your current editor watched that one unveil in real time), last weekend’s epic TikTok drama shows that middle-aged users are taking over the app that originally appealed to the Youth. - The New York Times
Now, in a demonstration of the risks of connected, autonomous AI ecosystems, a group of researchers have created one of what they claim are the first generative AI worms—which can spread from one system to another, potentially stealing data or deploying malware in the process. - Wired
What if instead of digging in the archives and criticising arguments, you could write history directly from the physical remains of the past, reconstructing events with the forensic detail of a crime scene investigator? This would be a history written not from words, but from things. - The Guardian
Beyond the operating table, knowledge of how the body maps onto the motor cortex has been instrumental in the development of brain-machine interfaces that control prostheses to restore function to paralysed patients and amputees. - Aeon
When we look at history’s major censorious regimes, all of them—I want to stress that; all of them—invested enormous resources in programs designed to encourage self-censorship, more resources than they invested in using state action to actively destroy or censor information. - Reactor
Since our actions result from nothing more than one event following another, no one really deserves praise or blame for anything they do. Our actions are determined by physical events in the physical brain, tightly linked in a causal chain that none of us is able to control any more than anyone else. - 3 Quarks Daily
I still believe in philosophy’s capacity to seek truth, but I’m conscious that I’ve tethered myself to an academic heritage plagued by formidable demons. - Aeon
By the end of the long weekend, the eclectic crowd had created a radical system for describing and discovering online content that still directly powers web search today, and which paved the way for how all content is labelled and discovered on the open web. - Aeon
Sports fandom raises a number of interesting and important philosophical issues such as the connection between sports fandom and identity, and whether it is better to be a committed fan of a particular team or to appreciate the sport from a more neutral perspective. - Aeon
