Category: Current
Why memes replace feelings. And why that should worry you
The relationship between memes and feelings seems obvious until you look at it directly. You feel something. Someone else made a meme about something close to it. You forward it. The feeling seems shared. But something in that exchange is not quite what it appears to be. You learned the word pointing at the same…
Solomon Shereshevsky: The man who could not forget anything
Solomon Shereshevsky arrived at Alexander Luria’s office in Moscow sometime in the 1920s as a journalist who had been sent there by his editor. The editor had noticed something strange. Shereshevsky never took notes in morning briefings. Never wrote anything down. Yet he could repeat back every instruction, every name, every figure, without error. The…
Why daylight saving time still exists, Nobody voted for it
Daylight saving time Europe has been trying to end itself since 2018. It has not managed it yet. The European Commission asked 4.6 million people a simple question. Should we stop changing the clocks? Eighty-four percent said yes. The Parliament voted to end it in 2019. The deadline was set for 2021. It is now…
After Twenty Years by O. Henry: the promise both of them Kept
After Twenty Years by O. Henry is told in less than a thousand words. It contains three scenes, two twists, one note, and four words that do more work than most novels manage in three hundred pages. Those four words are: Somehow I couldn’t do it myself. Everything the story is about lives in that…
What your brain is actually building while you are unconscious
A new study from UC Berkeley has now mapped the brain circuit behind deep sleep growth hormone release. The jellyfish does not know it is sleeping. It has no brain to know anything. No cortex tracking the hours. No alarm set for morning. And yet, every night, the pulses slow and the nerve net goes…
A Horse and Two Goats by RK Narayan: the funniest sad story ever written
A Horse and Two Goats by RK Narayan is the only story on this list that will make you laugh. It will also, if you sit with it long enough, make you feel something considerably more complicated than laughter. This is what Narayan does. He finds the comedy in the gap between people and then,…
The Universal Flood Myth: Collective Memory or Genetic Inheritance?
The universal flood myth is one of the most documented phenomena in the study of human culture. Over 200 distinct flood narratives exist across world religions and civilisations from ancient Mesopotamia and Hindu scripture to Aboriginal Australian oral traditions and Native American legend. These cultures had no contact with each other when their stories formed.…
The Real History of Gaslighting (And Why Knowing It Changes Everything)
The gaslighting history most people know stops at the definition. You probably know the word. Someone makes you doubt your own memory. Tells you the thing that happened, did not happen. Makes you feel like your reaction is the problem, not their behaviour. But almost nobody knows where it actually came from. And once you…
Lebanon is still being governed by a headcount from 1932
Why Lebanon is broken is a reason most people cannot name. Not the bombs. Not the banks. Not Hezbollah, not Israel, not the politicians who have spent forty years stealing in plain sight. The reason is a census. One census. Taken in 1932. Never repeated. Everything else flows from that. The arrangement In 1932, Lebanon…
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore: the story about two fathers and one lost daughter
Kabuliwala by Rabindranath Tagore begins with a little girl who cannot stop talking. Mini is five years old. She has been talking since she learned how. Her mother loses patience with the chatter. Her father never does. He finds her silence, when it occasionally arrives, unbearable. This detail matters. Remember it. Because the story is…
