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+25 +1
Beauty and the east: allure and exploitation in post-Soviet ruin photography
As new book Soviet Ghosts shows, everyone loves an artfully shot post-communist ruin. But, asks Jamie Rann, what does this say about us — and about Russia?
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+21 +1
The secret Soviet observatory still spying on space
Abastumani, hidden in the wild Georgian mountains, was a once-secret Soviet observatory. Tara Isabella Burton visits to see how it has adapted to post-Cold War life.
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+15 +1
WarGames for real: How one 1983 exercise nearly triggered WWIII
Newly released documents reveal the KGB software model that forecasted mushroom clouds. By Sean Gallagher.
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+14 +1
Language, Policed: The Monster of Bad Spelling
And the newspaper that led a movement for a more accessible language. By Annie Abrams.
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+14 +1
Nature’s Critical Warning System
Scientists are homing in on a warning signal that arises in complex systems like ecological food webs, the brain and the Earth’s climate. Could it help prevent future catastrophes? By Natalie Wolchover.
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+25 +1
How to declutter your life by not giving a fuck
We talk to Sarah Knight about her new book ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a Fuck: How to stop spending time you don’t have doing things you don’t want to do with people you don’t like.’
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+27 +1
The Devil at 37,000 Feet
There were so many opportunities for the accident not to happen—the collision between a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people. But on September 29, 2006, high above the Amazon, a long, thin thread of acts and omissions brought the two airplanes together... By William Langewiesche. (Jan. ’09)
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+28 +1
The Hadza, the Honeyguide Bird and the Persistent Problem of 'Naturefaking'
In the tree-strewn savannah of northern Tanzania, near the salty shores of Lake Eyasi, live some of the planet’s few remaining hunter-gatherers. Known as the Hadza, they live in Hadzaland, which stretches for about 4,000 square kilometers around the lake. No one is sure how long they’ve been there, but it could be since humans became human... By Cara Giaimo.
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+25 +1
Researchers find the tipping point between resilience and collapse in complex systems
Honeybees have been dying in record numbers, threatening the continued production of nutritious foods such as apples, nuts, blueberries, broccoli, and onions. Without bees to pollinate these crops, the environmental ecosystem—and our health—stands in the balance. Have we reached the tipping point, where the plant-pollinator system is due to collapse?
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+34 +1
How Alaskan hunter-gatherers preserved their food sources
A new study of humans on Sanak Island, Alaska and their historical relationships with local species suggests that despite being super-generalist predators, the food gathering behaviours of the local Aleut people were stabilizing for the ecosystem.
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+4 +1
The Problem With Evidence-Based Policies
Many organizations, from government agencies to philanthropic institutions and aid organizations, now demand that programs and policies be “evidence-based.” But the way this idea is being implemented may be doing a lot of harm, impairing our ability to learn and improve on what we do. By Ricardo Hausmann.
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+24 +1
No Mushroom Cloud
A fungus offers a complicated lesson in late-capitalist logistics and survival. By Miranda Trimmier.
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Video/Audio+15 +1
NSFW Knightriders
(1981)
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+34 +1
Our Beleaguered Planet
The interaction of global climate change, poverty, affluence, and overpopulation. By Marcia Angell.
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+5 +1
Why science needs to break the spell of reductive materialism
“At the centre of my argument is a vexing question: since the Big Bang, why has the Universe become complex? I claim that at least part of the answer is that, as more complex things and linked processes are created, and can combine with one another to make yet more complex amalgams of things and processes, the space of possible things and linked processes becomes vastly larger, and the Universe has not had time to make all the possibilities.” By Stuart Kauffman.
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+3 +1
The Real Secret of Youth Is Complexity
Our physiological processes become increasingly simple as we age. By Lewis A. Lipsitz. (May 26,’16)
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+31 +1
Do I Have Power
Carlos De Carvalho, set to Timber Timbre’s “Do I Have Power” (Creep on creepin’ on)
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+12 +1
The diversity of life across much of Earth has plunged below ‘safe’ levels
Scientists say that across the globe, more than 10 percent of species abundance has been lost. By Chris Mooney.
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+10 +1
Ur-Fascism
I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it. By Umberto Eco. (June 22, 1995)
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+35 +1
Everything Is Broken
“So the question I put to hackers, cryptographers, security experts, programmers, and so on was this: What’s the best option for people who can’t download new software to their machines? The answer was unanimous: nothing.” By Quinn Norton. (May 20, 2014)
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