The Expanse There are two great moments in the history of life that should always inform the science fiction of human space travel and settlement. One is when life made the huge leap from prokaryotic cells, which are mostly simple and very tiny, to eukaryotic cells, which are very large and complex.…

Science & technology | Human evolution Meet the Bajau THE Bajau, a people of the Malay Archipelago, spend almost all of their lives at sea. They live either on boats or in huts perched on stilts on shallow reefs, and they migrate from place to place in flotillas that carry entire clans. They survive…

“The past only comes back when the present runs so smoothly that it is like the sliding surface of a deep river,” Virginia Woolf wrote some years before she filled her coat-pockets with stones, waded into the River Ouse near her house, and, unwilling to endure what she had barely survived in the…

For the past few months, a single advertisement has been relentlessly popping up in my Twitter feed. “Tired of the internet shouting factory?” it asks. “Welcome to Kialo.” The name is Esperanto for “reason,” and the site is a collaborative debating platform where you can host or join discussions and…

“Oh God, that is so horrible,” grimaces Maye Musk, as though I had pointed out vermin in her son Kimbal’s impeccable new restaurant. All I had done was to ask for her views on the current fashion for

In an essay from early this year, artificial-intelligence designer Jacqueline Feldman wrote, “Refusing simple descriptions of the world — insisting on the world and not a micro-world — constitutes political resistance.” She was talking about AI’s ability (or not) to feel pain (or, really, how humans…

Cultural Comment April 17, 2018 The rapper Kendrick Lamar’s historic milestone—becoming the first hip-hop artist to win a Pulitzer Prize for music—figures in the grander, affected consecration of blackness within élite spaces.Photograph by Ellis Parrinder / Camara Press / Redux In 2015, the journal…

I got the new MacBook Pro (13″, fully maxed-out version) several months ago. My older MacBook Pro was (and is!) in good working order, but when I hired my brother last year he ended up using my ancient MacBook Air. Every time he’d do basic work the computer sounded like it was gearing up to blast…

Toni Morrison wrote, “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” In Spanish we say that when a child is born it is given the light. And that’s what it feels like to say the words, X⁠—. Like I’m being given a second chance at the light.

Two weeks ago, Facebook learned that The New York Times, Guardian, and Observer were working on blockbuster stories based on interviews with a man named Christopher Wylie. The core of the tale was familiar but the details were new, and now the scandal was attached to a charismatic face with a top of…

8.0 Greta Kline is a 19-year-old who records under the name Frankie Cosmos. Her charming new indie pop album Zentropy touches on love, aging, and the archetypal triumphs and disappointments of young life in a big city. Indie-pop has always privileged shy people who manage their world by making it…

8.7 Best New Music The mystical grandeur of Golden Hour creates a magnetic effect as Kacey Musgraves sings simply about the world as if she’s the first person to notice, and you’re the first one she’s telling. Kacey Musgraves’ third album goes down so smoothly that it might not even scan as a total…

Faye Bridge January 4, 2018 - 5 min read Learn If you’re reading this, you’ve either decided to learn to code this year as a complete beginner or maybe you’re already a programmer and want to expand your skill set. Either way, you’re likely familiar with the reasons why learning to code is a…

Page-Turner April 2, 2018 Dale Carnegie treated the employee-employer relationship as a sacred, symbiotic bond. In today’s economy, work is structured more like a string of one-night stands.Illustration by Oliver Munday Before Dale Carnegie wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time,…

On Thursday, Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, gave a speech laying out a new national strategy for artificial intelligence in his country. The French government will spend €1.5 billion ($1.85 billion) over five years to support research in the field, encourage startups, and collect data…

When did writing start to feel tenable, if ever? It feels tenable now. It was always plausible. I’m the oldest of five children from the same two parents, and I benefited from being the oldest in a number of ways—primary among which was that I learned to speak and read, and consequently write,…

The recently revealed Facebook data “breach” that allowed Cambridge Analytica to get access to millions of users’ worth of Facebook data has been greeted as a shocking scandal. Reporters and readers have been surprised to learn about the ability to gather personal data on the friends of people who…

Everyone thinks my dog is a puppy. His large, wide-set eyes; small, soft body and playful demeanor belie his maturity and emotional depth — attributes that become obvious once you get to know him. The truth is he’s about four, though the exact date of his birth, like that of many rescue dogs, is…

Page-Turner March 27, 2018 In general, the solid execution of Teen Boss makes the concept behind it—tween-tycoon ambition—even more unnerving.Teen Boss / Bauer Media Group The magazine Teen Boss, styled as Teen Bo$$!, débuted in September of last year. It publishes quarterly, like an earnings…

Portrait by Ann Zhao. The first time I saw Mitski in concert, I spent the day after walking around Toronto calling all my friends, my mom, and my sister, telling them how unbelievable the show was. I had been moved by shows before–mostly huge, performative ones, like Kanye West in a stadium, or…

Naples, Italy 1987 (© Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos) The writer who goes by the name of Elena Ferrante has, over the past 25 years, produced seven novels. The most famous of them— My Brilliant Frie

In the second half of 2017, the phrase “bisexual lighting” slipped into the queer Twitter lexicon. The phenomenon it described — film characters illuminated with deep blue lights on one side and saturated magenta lights on the opposite, which also happens to be the colors of the bisexual pride flag…

Comentario Credit...Hudson Christie La practicidad es la fuerza más subestimada y menos comprendida del mundo actual. Como rectora de las decisiones humanas, podría no ofrecer la emoción ilícita de los deseos sexuales inconscientes de Freud ni la elegancia matemática de los incentivos económicos. La…

Page-Turner February 14, 2018 In some of the past year’s fiction and nonfiction releases, love comes in many forms.Illustration by Kaye Blegvad One cloudless Saturday morning, last February, I sat alone on a bench, in Long Island City, waiting for the bus. The street felt artificially still, like a…

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“Hmm, your blood pressure is low. We’ll check that again in half an hour. Is there any chance you could be pregnant? Wait, of course not; you just had a hysterectomy!” The nurse frowns awkwardly as she administers my blood thinners, the shot you get when you can’t even begin to walk, leaving a…

Takeaway Points: CrossFit used to have a much more controversial presence on the internet than it does today. I've always thought that this fight was mostly silly, an arms race engineered by CrossFit

What do you concentrate on when you’re writing? When you put down a sentence, you don’t always know what it is as you’re writing it. Isn’t that thrilling? This morning, I sat down and thought, “I really am wasting the morning. I have to do something.” I have this pink typewriter that I just got…

How many recognizably queer places are there in any city or town? Queer bars, dance parties, and businesses exist, but their holds on space are always threatened by whims of the government and the market, as evidenced when lesbian and gay bars disappear in highly trafficked places like NYC. But is…

Annals of Appearances February 13, 2018 The gray skin in Michelle Obama’s portrait feels at first like a loss, and then like a real gain.© Amy Sherald The former First Lady Michelle Obama’s decision to commission the Baltimore painter Amy Sherald for her official portrait was intriguing. Like the…

Illustration by Ruby Aitken. I first started following @officialseanpenn for its curation of celebrities’ internet presences and Lisa Frank-esque Photoshop work. While it mostly just made me laugh really hard, I also felt a kinship with whoever was behind such a delightful satire of—and love letter…

Six months ago I quit Twitter. It happened in a moment that combined the deepest loathing (both self- and other-directed) and the brightest clarity, and I have not looked back since. Apart from the actual quitting of Twitter, the thing I am most proud of is not having written an essay about it, so I…

Cultural Comment January 18, 2018 The Awl was a place where outsiders and the unpracticed could find a sympathetic audience and an opportunity to sound like themselves.Photograph by Alex Welsh Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so,…

Illustration by Allyssa Yohana. Happy New Year, Rookies! Before we get to this month’s theme: Rookie on Love comes out tomorrow! Our fifth book and the first in a new series, it covers love of all kinds, with contributions from 45 writers, artists, and Rookie readers. I hope you love it very much.…

Late Saturday evening, the website Babe.net published a detailed account of an encounter between “Grace,” an anonymous 23-year-old photographer, and the actor Aziz Ansari. It described a September 2017 incident in which Grace says that she and Ansari went on a date after first meeting at an Emmys…

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not…

Career planning October 24, 2017 Summary. Leer en españolLer em português I was at a dinner with eight highly successful professional women recently, ranging in age from 35 to 74. Their stories were typical of research I have been conducting on dual-career couples. One had just been given a huge…

On a recent Friday afternoon, I was riding toward the intersection of two major avenues in Brooklyn — Atlantic and Bedford — when the lane markings disappeared and what had been a bike lane became a left turn lane for cars at one of the most chaotic crossings in Brooklyn. It’s a dangerous scenario…