Archive

• Monday 26 October 2026

  The Knowledge in the Hands

  Why isn’t knowing how something works enough to make it work?

• Sunday 25 October 2026

  The Door and the Bridge

  Kim Jong Un has crossed a bridge that stood finished and unused for twelve years. What turns a bridge into a door, and a door into a bridge?

• Saturday 24 October 2026

  What the Monkey Couldn’t Type

  Chimpanzees may differ from us partly because of an infection we never had. What does it mean to explain something by what didn’t happen?

• Friday 23 October 2026

  The Quizzing Problem

  We’re getting better at identifying the factors that accompany a change. But when does a likely explanation become a cause – and what would it take to actually know the difference?

• Thursday 22 October 2026

  Learning to Shrug

  When an alarm built for the few who can act is heard by the many who can’t, it teaches them how to shrug.

• Wednesday 21 October 2026

  A Rubbish Museum

  Reuse was once common sense. Bringing it back will take more than changing our habits.

• Tuesday 20 October 2026

  The Break That Lasts

  What if an idea’s endurance has less to do with being right than with where, and from whom, it first came?

• Monday 19 October 2026

  Stayed in China

  The energy transition was supposed to free countries from dependence on whoever controlled the fuel. Instead, a new dependency emerged, which can’t be solved by buying the right equipment.

• Sunday 18 October 2026

  The Guaranteed Six

  The appeal of an artificial companion isn’t that it’s better than a person, but that it can’t refuse you. So what exactly is a relationship in which only one side can fail?

• Saturday 17 October 2026

  The Seed and the Stunt

  Everyone watched a car flip through the air. But who decides what a new capability is for: the people who invent it, or the people who pick it up next?

• Friday 16 October 2026

  The Creative Director Is Dead, Long Live the Creative Director

  Two fashion houses lost their creative directors on the same day. In an industry built around individual vision, institutions survive by repeatedly replacing the people who provide it.

• Thursday 15 October 2026

  The Statistical DJ

  Deezer wants to let listeners filter out AI-generated music. But the question was never really whether machines were involved in making the song – it’s whether anyone will answer for it.

• Wednesday 14 October 2026

  A Way to Get Back Home

  You can stick to a rule long after you’ve stopped being the person who made it. What does it mean to keep a promise to someone you no longer are?

• Tuesday 13 October 2026

  A Fridge Frozen

  Sometimes the inability to change can be a product’s best feature. We’re so used to measuring progress in new capabilities that we rarely ask what might be gained by refusing one.

• Monday 12 October 2026

  Room Left to Change

  Artificial intelligence is transforming some companies while barely touching others. The difference may have less to do with the technology than with what happened before it arrived.

• Sunday 11 October 2026

  Musk and the Mask

  You can make a machine speak like a person, but when does speaking like someone become speaking for them?

• Saturday 10 October 2026

  The Track and the Train

  A train capable of 260 km/h runs on a railway where its average speed is closer to 110. The train is new. The problem is not.

• Friday 9 October 2026

  Live From Fort Hood

  The US has decided to broadcast an execution. What changes when a public punishment becomes a spectacle watched by people who are nowhere near it?

• Thursday 8 October 2026

  Getting Away With Not Thinking

  We tend to think that intelligence is about inference – thinking and reasoning. What if some of that work is already done by an agent’s shape, before any brain gets involved?

• Wednesday 7 October 2026

  Whoever Got There First

  We have to forget how knowledge was established in order to use it. But what happens when we forget that we have forgotten?

• Tuesday 6 October 2026

  The Story After the Facts

  What fills the space where the facts refuse to arrive?

• Monday 5 October 2026

  Survival of the Stickiest

  The »lizard brain« has been scientifically discredited for decades, yet the idea survives. Will LLMs give obsolete ideas an entirely new way to reproduce?

• Sunday 4 October 2026

  The Unimpressed Sun

  Timekeeping is a system we once designed. Why did we stop designing it?

• Saturday 3 October 2026

  The Negotiated Collage

  Edi Rama has given some of the world’s most famous architects extraordinary freedom to imagine Albania’s built future. What happens when everyone is free to say yes, but nobody has to make those yeses agree?

• Friday 2 October 2026

  The Character is the New Story

  Audible’s Interactive Story sounds like a new feature for audiobooks. At second thought, it may be a new idea about what reading could become.

• Thursday 1 October 2026

  The Age of No Consent Needed

  What happens when technology lets us use a dead person’s identity without asking them?

• Wednesday 30 September 2026

  What Makes a Mind Continuous?

  An anaesthesia study spanning six species suggests that rather than how much activity a brain contains, consciousness might depend on how strongly its present remains connected to its past, its parts, and what comes next.

• Tuesday 29 September 2026

  Form Follows Constraint

  What’s the difference between designing something to make it behave, and running an experiment to make something reveal how it behaves?

• Monday 28 September 2026

  The Shape of Understanding

  The first exhibition at MoMA devoted entirely to information design asks how invisible systems become visible. The harder question is what disappears in the process.

• Sunday 27 September 2026

  The Life of the Gift

  A diplomatic gift looks simple enough: a country wants to signal friendship, so it hands something over. How does a gesture built on calculation and disguised self-interest end up producing something that feels, eventually, completely sincere?

• Saturday 26 September 2026

  The Age of Projucts

  What happens when companies stop trying to predict what people will want, and let them help their R&D departments find out?

• Friday 25 September 2026

  The Wrong Apocalypse

  Who’s afraid of artificial intelligence? The AI debate may be concentrating on the most spectacular risk while the more consequential changes happen quietly.

• Thursday 24 September 2026

  The Rules of the Skeleton

  Evolution doesn’t always invent new parts. Sometimes it changes the instructions for using the ones it already has.

• Wednesday 23 September 2026

  Occupational Hazard

  In China, drone deliveries and air taxis share the airspace with flying wildlife. Empty space isn’t unoccupied space, and the air is now acquiring a new kind of value. Say hello to »the low-altitude economy«.

• Tuesday 22 September 2026

  Is Intervention the New Conservation?

  We changed the conditions of life, and now we’re wondering whether we can help life catch up.

• Monday 21 September 2026

  The Actor Among Other Agents

  What happens when a representation begins to change the thing it represents?

• Sunday 20 September 2026

  The Wrong History

  What makes a fake fake when the thing itself can be almost entirely real?

• Saturday 19 September 2026

  An Experiment to Live Inside

  What makes a rule survive massive changes to its environment? Warren Buffett spent sixty years finding out.

• Friday 18 September 2026

  Guyana’s Accergy

  What happens when a system suddenly acquires more possibilities than it has the capacity to realise?

• Thursday 17 September 2026

  The Parthenon Principle

  An explanation begins to change the world when we start using it to make something else.

• Wednesday 16 September 2026

  The Language Virus

  AI models left to talk among themselves have started inventing their own slang. What happens when language no longer needs humans to understand it?

• Tuesday 15 September 2026

  Risk Appetite

  Risk used to be how we found things out. Today we mostly watch other people take it, and it rarely finds out anything new anymore – so why do we still want to feel it?

• Monday 14 September 2026

  Fuzzy Borders

  A country’s borders are fixed on a map. What it actually belongs to rarely is.

• Sunday 13 September 2026

  The Centre Cannot Hold

  What happens when a political possibility remains imaginable, but no longer has a party to represent it?

• Saturday 12 September 2026

  Between a Rock and a Hard Place

  When we destroy something in order to understand it, are we uncovering a truth that was already there, or making a different kind of truth by changing the thing we destroy?

• Friday 11 September 2026

  Nothing But the Truth

  When every frightening fact is true, what exactly makes the resulting story frightening?

• Thursday 10 September 2026

  The Things That Don't Fit

  How do you recognise something when you’ve never seen it before? And if that thing was alien life, what would we need to agree on before we could say we had found it?

• Wednesday 9 September 2026

  Ten Thousand Explorers

  Scientific discoveries have always involved exploring what we don’t know. What happens when the unknown becomes easier to explore?

• Tuesday 8 September 2026

  No Lying Required

  What if forgetting isn’t the absence of memory, but the presence of another memory?

• Monday 7 September 2026

  A Different Kind of Thing

  Creative fields advance by occasionally becoming something they were not supposed to be. The interesting question is how far they can expand before we can no longer say which system they belong to.

• Sunday 6 September 2026

  The Horde Wall

  A boundary can mean entirely different things, depending on who’s asking you to build one. This week, a government found an unusually effective way of teaching you which one it has in mind.

• Saturday 5 September 2026

  A New Map for the Same World

  What happens when we mistake an instrument for an ontology?

• Friday 4 September 2026

  Temporary Aligned Zones

  What happens when the people who control a space have an interest in keeping it free?

• Thursday 3 September 2026

  The Polygons of Saturn

  How long does something have to happen before we decide that it's there?

• Wednesday 2 September 2026

  The Living Compiler

  What happens when information starts acting directly on matter?

• Tuesday 1 September 2026

  Anomaly or Signal

  How do we decide what something means when we don't yet know what happens next?

• Monday 31 August 2026

  The World According to You

  What happens when we still share the territory, but no longer share the map?

• Sunday 30 August 2026

  The Constraint Is the Aesthetic

  How does a constraint become a form? And what happens when a generation forgets that the constraint was ever imposed?

• Saturday 29 August 2026

  The Death of the Genius

  What happens to authorship when the author is gone?

• Friday 28 August 2026

  Becoming a Tree Again

  To preserve something, we first have to decide what that thing is.

• Thursday 27 August 2026

  Human Nature Reserves

  Bill Gates wants to reserve some jobs for humans. Maybe the more interesting question is what humans are actually good at.

• Wednesday 26 August 2026

  The Rules of the Game

  We tend to think of peace as a matter of finding better leaders. Perhaps we need to find better games, designing the rules so that peace becomes not merely desirable, but the rational choice for all parties.

• Tuesday 25 August 2026

  Matter Out of Place

  We tend to think of waste as a property of things. Perhaps it’s a property of systems instead: what looks useless in one context can become food, fuel, or value in another.

• Monday 24 August 2026

  The Staircase and the Platform

  Finland tried to end homelessness by doing something that sounds almost too simple: it gave homeless people homes.

• Sunday 23 August 2026

  Move Slowly and Repair Things

  The Greenland shark can live for four centuries, apparently by doing something our culture has become remarkably bad at: maintaining itself.

• Saturday 22 August 2026

  The Imitation Game

  We used to travel to discover things. Now we travel to reproduce them.

• Friday 21 August 2026

  Degenerate Design

  Beijing’s decades-old street trees turn out to drive most of the city’s ozone-forming chemistry. What if the answer to what we don’t know isn’t more measurement, but more multiplicity?

• Thursday 20 August 2026

  Treating Probabilities

  Moderna shares skyrocketed after the company announced positive cancer vaccine results. But what might happen if we stop waiting for the tumour?

• Wednesday 19 August 2026

  Misemployed Android

  What happens when we stop fitting robots to our world, and start fitting the world to our robots?

• Tuesday 18 August 2026

  Follow the Value

  Nvidia is helping finance the infrastructure behind OpenAI’s next generation of AI. But what happens when the company selling the technology also helps build the infrastructure that uses it?

• Monday 17 August 2026

  Worlds Within Worlds

  Computer games are becoming less like bounded works and more like worlds that accommodate other worlds. What happens to culture when the borders between worlds become permeable?

• Sunday 16 August 2026

  The Book-Eating Toy

  The world is full of things that have not yet discovered what they are for. What becomes possible when such outputs become inputs?

• Saturday 15 August 2026

  Horizon Event

  We make the map as we traverse the landscape. What happens when we reach the edge of the map and have to draw what comes next?

• Friday 14 August 2026

  Nice Jig If You Can Get It

  What happens when transactions start replacing jobs as the basic unit of the economy?

• Thursday 13 August 2026

  In Vitrica

  We are learning to construct increasingly accurate models of ourselves. What happens when we use them to experiment on our possible futures?

• Wednesday 12 August 2026

  From Prediction to Production

  We are getting better at predicting the future. But what happens when prediction becomes an instruction to the present?

• Tuesday 11 August 2026

  Protocols Beyond Papers

  Digital Science has just given AI agents access to more than 430 million interconnected scientific records through its Dimensions research database. But why should the machines read papers?

• Monday 10 August 2026

  Constraint Theatre

  Europe is getting better at measuring environmental performance. So why are its politicians still asking architects to make things look green?