Get updates Follow @mattshumer_ Get early access to future reviews and builds. Think back to February 2020. If you were paying close attention, you might have noticed a few people talking about a virus spreading overseas. But most of us weren't paying close attention. The stock market was doing…

Adam Mastroianni is the author of Experimental History. He studies how people perceive and misperceive their social worlds. His work has been featured in Science, Nature, and The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. He has a PhD in psychology from Harvard and a certificate of completion from 137…

The global publishing platform Substack is generating revenue from newsletters that promote virulent Nazi ideology, white supremacy and antisemitism, a Guardian investigation has found. The platform, which says it has about 50 million users worldwide, allows members of the public to self-publish…

Become a Supporting Member For 15 years, Longreads has published and curated the best longform writing on the web—and we wouldn’t exist without dedicated readers like you. Give today and ensure that quality journalism continues to flourish. This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and…

I’m an old Mac-head at heart, and I’ve been using Macs since the mid 1990s (the first Mac I used was an LC II with System 7.1 installed on it). I don’t tend to genuinely think that the computing experience was better in the olden days — sure, there’s a thing to be said about the simplicity of older…

Digitalisierung: Zum Surfen in die Migros Die Digitalisierung ist eine Welt der Grauzonen – auch für Sans-Papiers wie Ackson. Während er in der analogen Öffentlichkeit ausgegrenzt ist, kann er die digitale Welt auch zur Erweiterung seiner Handlungsspielräume nutzen. 19.05.2023TEXT: FLORIAN WÜSTHOLZ,…

There's a feeling you get in the presence of beautiful buildings and bustling courtyards. A sense that these spaces are inviting you to slow down, deepen your attention, and be a bit more human. What if our software could do the same? —— We shape our environments, and thereafter they shape us. Great…

Every few months, my mother, a 57-year-old kidney transplant patient who lives in a small city in eastern China, embarks on a two-day journey to see her doctor. She fills her backpack with a change of clothes, a stack of medical reports, and a few boiled eggs to snack on. Then, she takes a 1.5-hour…

Top: Ivrea, Bottom: Camillo Olivetti The town of Ivrea is quite old and has a rich history, but today, its population has shrunk from around 90,000 in 1970 to just over 20,000 in the 2020s. In the 1400s, Ivrea gained small Jewish community. By the mid 1800s, Salvador Benedetto Olivetti was a…

A light-hearted behind-the-scenes look running the OpenStreetMap infrastructure. From fighting bots and scrapers to rescuing failing servers, discover how the Ops Team keeps OSM.org running smoothly. Full details of this session at https://2025.stateofthemap.eu/session.html#7RREJS Part of the…

What did people used to think the world looked like? From the beginning of human history to right before the age of exploration, how were world maps created? This goes from Anaximander to the Catalan Atlas in 1375. The Catalan Atlas - A Medieval Marvel by Flash Point History…

I am not a talented person, I’ve never been called “gifted” or anything like that. Anything I can do, anything I achieved took a lot of work and stubbornness to achieve. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I’m “selfmade” and that my position in society, my access to resources, etc. had nothing…

Deutsch | English Es sind Szenen, wie man sie aus Diktaturen kennt: Maskierte Agenten der Migrations­behörde ICE machen in den USA Jagd auf Migrantinnen. Im Stil von para­militärischen Gruppen dringen sie in gepanzerten Fahrzeugen in Quartiere ein und verhaften Menschen, um sie danach ohne…

I needed a restaurant recommendation, so I did what every normal person would do: I scraped every single restaurant in Greater London and built a machine-learning model. It started as a very reasonable problem. I was tired of doom-scrolling Google Maps, trying to disentangle genuinely good food from…

This is the first article of Issue 09. Read our Editor’s Note to preview upcoming articles, which will be published every Monday. By Robert Reason Science seeks truths that outlive those who discover them. English poet William Wordsworth’s observation that “to the solid ground of nature trusts the…

Today, we’re excited to launch AI Voices, which are high-quality, streaming text-to-speech voices. We’ve completely redesigned the text-to-speech player to make it more modern and intuitive. Lastly, we’re launching a major Android update with an improved search experience and a number of other…

The U.S. Border Patrol is monitoring millions of American drivers nationwide in a secretive program to identify and detain people whose travel patterns it deems suspicious, The Associated Press has found. The predictive intelligence program has resulted in people being stopped, searched and in some…

The first question I ask my clients is, “How would you like to see the world?” Some answers are charming; they want to see the world as an infant does, everything new and unspoiled by habit and familiarity. Some are more professionally minded and wish for magnification-enhanced, telescopic, UV,…

“I did not invent penicillin. Nature did that. I only discovered it by accident.” —Alexander Fleming Many know the story of Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Fleming, a bit of an absent-minded professor (and a bit of a slob), left culture plates streaked with Staphylococcus on his…

The Nostromo towing its refinery through the inky blackness of space. “I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star Wars, but definitely from 2001 and Dark Star.” The…

A Reporter at Large Daniel Kinahan, an Irish drug dealer, commands a billion-dollar empire from the U.A.E. Why isn’t he in prison? October 20, 2025 Kinahan has lived a strikingly public life in the Emirates, shopping at malls and consorting with famous boxers like Tyson Fury.Illustration by Ben…

I want to tell you a story about a map that never came to be. When I first heard it, in an interview with Katia Naouri in Desired Landscapes,1 its metaphorical power nearly knocked me over. The story itself appeared to me as a map of sorts, the destinations of which were almost innumerable. Very…

Dept. of Medicine The average American celebrates just one healthy birthday after the age of sixty-five. Peter Attia argues that it doesn’t have to be this way. April 15, 2024 In “Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity,” Attia, one of the most prominent longevity evangelists, extrapolates from…

Biological structures exist across a vast range of scales. At one end are whole organisms, varying in size from bacteria only a few micrometers across to mammals measured in feet. These can be seen with the naked eye or with simple light microscopes, which have been in use since the mid-1600s. At…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control…

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. One common explanation for why children spend so much of their free time on screens goes like this: Smartphones and social-media platforms are addicting them. Kids stare at their devices and socialize online…

Toward the end of March, Rachel Ganz had what she calls “a premonition of doom.” At the time, she couldn’t quite explain this foreboding. She and her husband, Jon Ganz, ages 45 and 49, respectively, were in the midst of what should have been a happy milestone: The couple were planning to move out of…

Standing outside the pub, 36-year-old business owner Rachel took a final tug on her vape and steeled herself to meet the man she’d spent the last three weeks opening up to. They’d matched on the dating app Hinge and built a rapport that quickly became something deeper. “From the beginning he was…

I got a bit concerningly obsessed with birds for a few months. Follow Sarah and The Mouth! https://linktr.ee/inkydragon Older bat vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4eqkaHkTAI 💗 Support this channel and join an amazing community: http://www.patreon.com/bennjordan 👀 Stalk me on social media for…

People like to tell the story of how VHS beat Betamax because adult film studios backed VHS. It’s a clutch-your-pearls story that says nothing about why these multi-million-dollar businesses picked one format over the other. The real story is that while Betamax tapes had better resolution and…

30. August 2021, Bahnhof Morges «Calme-toi!» Nzoy hob die Hände, legte die Ellbogen in die Hüfte und streckte die Arme vom Körper. Für eine Sekunde liess er den Kopf hängen, täuschte an, in die eine Richtung zu gehen und ging dann in die andere. Wie beim Basketball. «Get outta here», sagte er. «Get…

Today we launch Issue 08 of Asimov Press. Read our full Editors’ Note and preview upcoming articles on our website. Thanks for reading! Sight has never merely meant the detection of light. In almost every culture, the eye serves as a sacred symbol: the all-seeing Eye of Horus in Egypt, the divine…

Es ist ein kalter Dienstagabend im Februar dieses Jahres und im Luzerner Treibhaus ist nicht viel los. Erst am Wochenende erwacht das Haus mit dem mintfarbenen Anstrich zum Leben – wird zum Club mit hohen Decken, einer grossen einladenden Bar und einer vollen Tanzfläche. An diesem Abend sind hier…

13 Oct, 2025 I read an article yesterday, stating that on average, people spend 4 hours and 37 minutes on their phones per day1, with South Africans coming in fourth highest in the world at a whopping 5 hours and 11 minutes2. This figure seems really high to me. If we assume people sleep roughly 8…

I was 34 years old when I first had the idea for the world wide web. I took every opportunity to talk about it: pitching it in meetings, sketching it out on a whiteboard for anyone who was interested, even drawing the web in the snow with a ski pole for my friend on what was meant to be a peaceful…

Der Antrieb, der von innen kommt Eigenmotivation ist der Schlüssel beim Lernen. Wie aber entsteht intrinsische Motivation? Und wie können Eltern und Lehrpersonen sie bei Kindern und Lernenden fördern? Text: Fabian Grolimund Illustration: Dass sich die extrinsische Motivation zum Beispiel durch Lob,…