LAST SUMMER, five months into lockdown and two hours past midnight, I found myself glaring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror with five drops of Bertolli extra virgin olive oil drizzling down my nose. After an evening spent picking at my pores, I had found a buried Reddit thread suggesting I massage my skin with oil to rid it of the tiny grey spots that dotted its surface. These little nuisances—or “sebaceous filaments”—are not acne but passages that carry oil from the pores to the skin’s outer layer. Everyone has them, and they are not visible to the human eye except from an intimate distance. But, under lockdown, with the distance between my visage and the mirror shrinking with each passing day, I’d become obsessed with purging my face of these invaders.
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Earlier this year, two men launched a podcast made up of meandering conversations about their friendship and the state of the world. Nothing unusual there. Of the two million or so podcast series in existence (that’s 48m episodes and counting), a large proportion is made up of groups of men talking about themselves and laughing at their own jokes.
Throughout the eighties and nineties, even as he helped with the HeartMate and AbioCor, Frazier argued that engineers should shift from pulsatile pump designs to ones based on the more mechanically straightforward principle of “continuous flow”—the strategy that Bivacor later adopted. Some researchers argued that the circulatory system might benefit from the pulse; there’s evidence that blood-vessel walls expand in response to a quickening beat ...
Tolstoy was a moralist. He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death, and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss. In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed.
At the very beginning of her new book Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett writes that each chapter will present “a few compelling scientific nuggets about your brain and considers what they might reveal about human nature.”
His relationship with social media is a striking manifestation of the worries expressed by the French philosopher Guy Debord, in his classic work The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Social life is shifting from ‘having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances,’ he claims. ‘At the same time all individual reality has become social.’
First, let’s survey the situation. It’s as though the haze of our inner lives were being filtered through a screen of therapy work sheets. If we are especially online, or roaming the worlds of friendship, wellness, activism, or romance, we must consider when we are centering ourselves or setting boundaries, sitting with our discomfort or being present.
AFTER JUST TWO months on Clubhouse, I finally understand how Theranos happened. While articles, books, and films have covered the saga in excellent detail, some of my curiosity lingered: How could we be bamboozled by bullshit of that size and scope? I am curious no longer. After surfing hundreds of rooms on the popular new social media app, I’ve been exposed to dozens of clones of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, some of them running companies that have (allegedly) raised tens or millions of dollars.
In computer science, the main outlets for peer-reviewed research are not journals but conferences, where accepted papers are presented in the form of talks or posters. In June, 2019, at a large artificial-intelligence conference in Long Beach, California, called Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, I stopped to look at a poster for a project called Speech2Face.
Shygirl’s “Alias” is less than twenty minutes long, yet it’s weighty with the jolting hyperpop and club music that the London electronic artist has been making for the past few years. Each song is meant to show off a different side of her personality, a tactic that frees her up to play with a frenzied palette of sounds: “SLIME,” co-produced by the like-minded Scottish experimentalist ...
Aqua blue, acid lime and grape purple. Electric orange interspersed with neon pink. Gray suede and cheetah print mixed with white and gold. These are not descriptions of a minimalist’s worst nightmare, but rather new color combinations from Adidas, Reebok and New Balance. And they are jarring by design.
The Elle magazine article was a shocker. It went live a few days before Christmas and told a story of a journalist who lost her husband and her job because she fell in love with her source, who happened to be one of the most hated men on the planet, “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli. Why had Bloomberg News reporter Christie Smythe tossed away her “perfect little Brooklyn life” to pursue a seemingly doomed love affair with a sneering criminal known for jacking up medicine prices by 5,000 percent?
The day after the Great Blizzard of 2020 dropped a foot of snow on her farm in Bedford, New York, in December, Martha Stewart arose around 4 a.m., like she always does, jumped into her snowplow and got to work. The 79-year-old, who became America’s first self-made female billionaire when her company went public in 1999 ...
The world belongs to those who shape it. And however uncertain that world may feel at a given moment, the reassuring reality seems to be that each new generation produces more of what these kids—five Kid of the Year finalists selected from a field of more than 5,000 Americans, ages 8 to 16—have already achieved: positive impact, in all sizes.
With performances racked up beside Grimes, The xx and Battles, GIUNGLA’s (aka Ema Drei) propulsive modus operandi sports an all-encompassing gloss. It’s bolstered on her recent singles by the production acumen of Luke Smith, known for his work with Foals and Depeche Mode, amongst others.