Elsewhere in the maze, there were long stretches without any junctions. Oskar van Deventer, a Dutch telecom engineer and a renowned designer of mechanical puzzles, told me, “This is something you will recognize in all Adrian Fisher mazes: that it has some long corridors with no decision to be made.” This provides the choice-fatigued aspirant with a brief, blissful break, but, of course, as I discovered when I hit one and thought I must finally be on the right track, it also serves Fisher’s wily purposes. “A long journey with no choices reinforces the feeling that either you’re going to solve it—or you’re getting very lost,” Fisher explained.

ON SATURDAY a wild winter storm resulted in a rare red weather warning for parts of the UK. There were extremely hight winds, some places had a beautiful snowfall, while here it was just really windy and rainy and by 10:00pm Saturday night, we were sitting by firelight and candlelight and no wi-fi due to a sudden power outage …

It’s early on a Tuesday night in October, and Frances Haugen and I are at a bright restaurant in a dark corner of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico—a few blocks from the Castillo de San Cristóbal. No one here recognizes her, even though she’s been on every TV and across the internet for weeks. She’s telling me how, as a product manager at Facebook, she secretly gathered more than 20,000 scanned pages of internal corporate documents over the course of a few months in 2021. “I was shocked I never got caught,” the 37-year-old says. “But no one was looking.”

CHANCES ARE, you’re already familiar with the work of Canadian interior designer Ashely Montgomery, for her designs have been all over Instagram lately. And it’s no wonder—the effortless mix of deep wood tones and marble, ceiling beams and brass is both elegant and liveable at once …

WE HAVE BEEN collecting things we like for the past little while and realised that they all looking lovely together and have a sort of running theme: neutral tones and cosiness, soft light and a kind of wintery feel. There are chunky knits with long cashmere scarves, comfy chairs and coffee table books; slipcovered sofas and quilted handbags, warm wood and winter whites …

In 2012, Joan Serrà and a team of scientists at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish National Research Council confirmed something that many had come to suspect: that music was becoming increasingly the same. Timbral variety in pop music had been decreasing since the 1960s, the team found, after using computer analytics to break down nearly half a million recorded songs by loudness, pitch, and timbre, among other variables. This convergence suggested that there was an underlying quality of consumability that pop music was gravitating toward: a formula for musical virality.

THOSE WHO KNOW me know that I can’t watch films that are violent or scary, or gory or too intense or sad. I just get far too upset and emotionally invested, and often replay the entire film in my dreams later that night. I’d thought that I was unusual, but as it turns out, we make up 20% of the population, those of us who are highly sensitive. According to Genevieve von Lob, a clinical psychologist, when highly sensitive people receive information, they process it much more deeply and more elaborately …

When historians look back on this period, one of the things that they will find remarkable is that for a quarter of a century, the governments of western democracies slept peacefully while some of the most powerful (and profitable) corporations in history emerged and grew, without let or hindrance, at exponential speeds. They will wonder at how a small number of these organisations, which came to be called “tech giants” (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft), acquired, and began to wield, extraordinary powers. They logged and tracked everything we did online – every email, tweet, blog, photograph and social media post we sent, every “like” we registered, every website we visited, every Google search we made, every product we ordered online, every place we visited, which groups we belonged to and who our closest friends were.

IF YOU’VE BEEN noticing Japanese things (products, music, philosophies, décor) everywhere lately, you’re not the only one—the country and its culture have been captivating sophisticated online circles for awhile now. I came across Osaka-based Truck Furniture a few years ago, but forgot about it until an image from their Instagram feed fell across my path that was so atmospheric, immediately needed to see more …