China just approved the world's first commercial brain implant. It gives a paralyzed person back the use of their hands, a genuine marvel. It also opens a door that won't close: once a device reads the signals near your cortex, the real question is who else gets to look.
A Japanese airport is rebranding around Pikachu, and it sounds like a press release written by a fifth grader who got promoted too fast. It's a disaster recovery strategy. Inside the Noto experiment, and the argument that joy might be load-bearing when a region rebuilds itself.
Pussy Riot stormed the Russian pavilion at the 61st Venice Biennale under pink smoke, chanting “Disobey.” For about half an hour the gutter crashed the penthouse. A field report on what rock actually is, and why the realest art always costs something to make.
What a Chicago restorer's YouTube channel reveals about how a hurried culture remembers, and the slow hands that pull faces back into the light
Cities are telling stories about how to behave. Right now, a committee of engineers is writing them. What happens if we let the fairy-tale painters in instead?
There is something quietly political about choosing a typeface. It says: I thought about how this would arrive. Gotham Variable arrived this month, and almost nobody noticed. Perhaps that is the most interesting thing about it.
A Labrador in Milton Keynes is already pressing a button to turn on his owner's lamp. Meanwhile, the rest of us are downloading apps and factory-resetting our dignity. The dog button is trying to tell us something about design — and it's funnier and more serious than it sounds.
Jack Douglas built rock records the way a luthier builds guitars — by hand, with obsessive attention to resonance. His death is an occasion to ask what recorded music has lost in the age of bedroom production.
In a city of filtered noise, a website turns every active NYC subway train into a note — and asks what we lose when we stop listening.
The most human thing about us has always been our urge to build sanctuaries. Now coders, neuroscientists, and AI are helping us build them inside the machine — and the results are stranger and more tender than you'd expect.
A Cameroonian village, a London gallery, and an economist walk into the same argument: that value is something we make together at every scale — or it isn't value at all. Observatory on fractal economies, recursive justice, and what Whitechapel just quietly admitted it doesn't know.
AI can recycle the same 25 jokes forever, outscore most humans at humor tasks, and still not know when to shut up. What machines are learning about comedy — and what comedy reveals about the machines.