In all of our years of college and graduate school, my husband and I only had the chance to take the same course once. As a geologist and a civil engineer, we knew we were going to approach continuum mechanics differently. But neither of us anticipated just how differently. When placed side by side,…

Young Woman Sleeping by Jean-Baptiste Santerre, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. Courtesy Wikipedia In Tibetan Buddhism, the group of tantric techniques known as milam aim to reveal the illusory nature of waking life by having practitioners perform yoga in their dreams. It’s a ritualised version…

What happens when a new whisky distillery opens on a tiny, remote Scottish island? Time, the deer, is in Hallaig Wood There’s a board nailed across the window I looked through to see the west And my love is a birch forever By Hallaig Stream, at her tryst At Hallaig, a hamlet deserted since 1854 on…

Dlaczego, zamiast spisywać umowy regulujące najbardziej intymne i poufne aspekty naszego życia, nie zdać się na smart contracty – umowy, których jednolitą treść, tajność, jednoznaczność warunków i wykonanie gwarantuje niemożliwy do złamania kod i szyfr? Dlaczego nie zamienić rozproszonych cyfrowych…

The human heart of song and story is a changeable, if not fickle, thing. But in one crucial sense, the organ has been seen as immutable. Scientists long thought that mammalian hearts stop producing most of their new cells shortly after birth, and that when they grow bigger, they do so primarily…

Serial łączy w sobie pomysły rodem z klasycznego SF z akcją szpiegowskiego thrillera. Dzięki obecności J.K. Simmonsa produkcja stoi zaś na bardzo wysokim poziomie aktorskim. We współczesnej nomenklaturze serialowej „Odpowiednik” dostałby łatkę slow burn , czyli produkcji, która potrzebuje chwili, by…

Arsenal’s manager, Arsène Wenger, is one of the best in Premier League history, but, for years now, the Frenchman has been unable to pull the best from his players. Photograph by John Patrick Fletcher / Action Plus / Getty I’ve been a follower of Arsenal Football Club since I was ten years old.So…

When FIFA , soccer’s governing body, banned Paolo Guerrero from competition, citing suspected cocaine use, his lawyers conscripted a trio of unlikely character witnesses. Photograph by Luciano Belford / AGIF / AP This June, for the first time since 1982, Peru’s national soccer team will compete in…

The space could pass for a TV control room at any major sporting event. A few dozen workers were wearing headsets, looking at a maze of computer screens. A producer barked directions. But here, footsteps away from the frigid beach in the coastal South Korean city of Gangneung—which is hosting figure…

TASCHEN Köln/Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen From Art Forms in Nature , plate 8, 1899–1904; Desmonema annasethe, the jellyfish that Ernst Haeckel named after his late wife Anna Sethe In 1665, Robert Hooke published Micrographia , a small, illustrated treatise on the…

Franco-American painter Jules de Balincourt ruminates on abstraction, utopia and the accessibility of art, at the opening of his latest exhibition Another Divided Island , 2017 © Jules de Balincourt. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London / Venice If contemporary art is frequently found to be…

Don't aim for completion. Photo courtesy Wikipedia Despite reflecting on the good life for more than 2,500 years, philosophers have not had much to say about middle age. For me, approaching 40 was a time of stereotypical crisis. Having jumped the hurdles of the academic career track, I knew I was…

„Pokazaliśmy, że Polska nigdy się nie poddaje. Jestem dumny, że jestem Polakiem”Obrońca Jan Bednarek po remisie kadry młodzieżowej ze Szwecją 2:2, czerwiec 2017 „Prawdziwy Polak walczy do końca”Rogal DDL, 156 Lyrics Jako prawdziwy Szwajcar nie rzucę rękawicy. Rumun z dziada pradziada, walczyć będę,…

Members of the Peruvian national soccer team celebrate qualifying to next year’s World Cup. Photograph by Ernesto Benavides / AFP / Getty June, 1986, was a month of wonder, a month of falling in love. I was nine years old. By then, my family had been living for six years in Birmingham, Alabama,…

At the Modern Filial Piety Culture Museum in Qionglai, southwest China, February 2015. Photo by STR/AFP/Getty Not long before he died, I sat in hospital with my grandfather, keeping him company as he waited, gowned and gaunt, for whatever the doctors might do. Before I left, he pointed me to the…

The quirk of the game is that it’s a sports game in which you never play sports. Illustration by Ben Wiseman Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone. In November, 2012, the Azerbaijani soccer team FC Baku hired a Swedish immigrant named Vugar…

British writers often create American characters whose dialogue betrays their authors’ origins. What can one do to get it right? Illustration by David Biskup P. D. Viner is a British crime writer who has published two novels andtwo long novellas. Recently, he completed a manuscript titled…

W roku 1845 Henry David Thoreau postanowił zbudować własnoręcznie dom w lesie nad stawem Walden i zamieszkać tam, z dala od problemów, którymi ludzkość niepotrzebnie zawraca sobie głowę, za to blisko najbardziej podstawowych praw i zjawisk natury. W takim częściowym odcięciu od cywilizacji spędził…

PAWEŁ FRANCZAK: Za nami wisi sutanna. Twoja? MARCIN SŁOWIKOWSKI: W ten weekend byłem księdzem. To znaczy wcielałem się w rolę młodego księdza na larpie „Sioło”, inspirowanym Wyspiańskim, chłopomanią. Lepiliśmy pierogi, reperowaliśmy płot, były tańce i śpiewy, jedzenie, napoje. Można było na teren…

About a decade ago, when Eric Castien was writing a history of Real Madrid soccer stars, he asked scouts and coaches what defined the greats. “They all pointed to their head and said, ‘It’s in between the ears, something complex, maybe even magic,’ ” the Dutch journalist and entrepreneur recalls.…

When the dictionary went online, lexicographers such as Kory Stamper could suddenly gather data not only about the words in the book but about what people actually use it for. Photograph by Tony Luong / NYT / Redux One morning in 2001, Kory Stamper, a lexicographer for Merriam-Webster,arrived at…

Photograph by Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Tweetledenumb : The stupor you feel after being bombarded by so manyoutrageously dumb tweets that you don’t have the energy to becommensurately horrified by any single one. Melaniacholia : The misery and despair caused by realizing that youshouldn’t have signed…

PRIPYAT, Ukraine — In a post-Cold War world, the fear of nuclear holocaust has receded from the global consciousness. Donald Trump’s threat of unleashing “fire and fury like the world has never seen” against North Korea was an untimely and unwelcome reminder of a past, perilous era. Even by Trump’s…

Translator Sabine Sebastian tried to bring Seinfeld to Germans, yada yada yada, it flopped Like so many of Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriends on Seinfeld, Dolores was TV-beautiful, with glossy, reddish-blond hair, big blue eyes, full lips, and impeccable bone structure. Most of Jerry’s girlfriends brought…

Czy można żyć z tłumaczeń literackich? - Ja żyję, ale jestem wyjątkiem, bo mam dobrą pozycję. Tłumaczy, takich jak ja, którzy utrzymują się wyłącznie z przekładów, można policzyć na palcach jednej ręki. Tak jest w przypadku języka niemieckiego, ale przypuszczam, że z tłumaczami z angielskiego jest…

“HUMAN inventiveness…has still not found a mechanical process to replace horses as the propulsion for vehicles,” lamented Le Petit Journal , a French newspaper, in December 1893. Its answer was to organise the Paris-Rouen race for horseless carriages, held the following July. The 102 entrants…

Eleanor Davis/Koyama Press Detail from Eleanor Davis’s You & a Bike & a Road , 2017 In “Taming the Bicycle,” his 1884 essay about learning to ride a bike, Mark Twain described the way that cycling uncovers the secrets of a landscape. “The bicycle,” he wrote, “is as alert and acute as a…

„Najbardziej prostacka i bezskuteczna jest sztuka posługująca się formą innej sztuki” – pisał w swoich „Notatkach o kinematografie” Robert Bresson. Gdyby Hidetaka Miyazaki zdecydował się kiedykolwiek, tak jak francuski reżyser, spisać własną filozofię tworzenia gier, z pewnością podobna zasada…

Buster Keaton in Speak Easily (1932). Courtesy Wikipedia God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. This is the Serenity Prayer, originally written by the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr around 1934,…

Chinese pensioners exercise in a park. Photo by Jie Zhao/Getty Last summer, a research group from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) quietly published the results of a new approach in the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. What they found was striking. Although the size of the study was…

1130     Ai marziani hanno spento il raggio laser. Ai giovani fenomeni hanno bloccato la crescita. Barça, Monaco, non c’è avversario che tenga. La Juve sbanca il casinò di Montecarlo, innesta il turbo e imbocca lo svincolo verso la finale. Non è finita, i ragazzini francesi sono imprevedibili:…

In the world of grammar sticklery, there’s no rest for the weary. A video published today by the BBC shows an anonymous “grammar vigilante” roaming the streets of Bristol, in the UK, adding apostrophes where they’re missing and covering unnecessary ones. He’s been moonlighting for 13 years,…

Credit: Flickr/Rodrigo Siderakis Never before has a rock and roll band been as lyrically political as R.E.M. From Murmur to Fables of the Reconstruction , Green ’s “World Leader Pretend” and “Orange Crush” to Automatic for the People ’s “IgnoreLand,” R.E.M. is the only band of the 20th century that…

The impact of record-keeping on the course of history cannot be overstated. For example, the act of preserving Judaism and Christianity in written form enabled both to outlive the plethora of other contemporary religions, which were preserved only orally. William the Conqueror’s Domesday Book ,…

Even years into the deployment of the internet, many believed that it was still a fad. Of course, the internet has since become a major influence on our lives, from how we buy goods and services, to the ways we socialize with friends, to the Arab Spring, to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet,…

The Game of Thrones production has worked around the clock for six years straight just to bring us ten episodes a year. And yet, although they work hard to include as many things as are necessary to tell the story, there is still so, so much they leave out. And even when they do have time to put…

The idea of a human colony on Titan, a moon of Saturn, might sound crazy. Its temperature hovers at nearly 300° below zero Fahrenheit, and its skies rain methane and ethane that flow into hydrocarbon seas. Nevertheless, Titan could be the only place in the solar system where it makes sense to build…

The tonic of the wilderness was Henry David Thoreau’s classic prescription for civilization and its discontents, offered in the 1854 essay Walden: Or, Life in the Woods . Now there’s scientific evidence supporting eco-therapy . The Japanese practice of forest bathing is proven to lower heart rate…

Five years ago, *Game of Thrones *turned our expectations upside down. Here was a fantasy show that focused not on the portentous prophecies and heavy spellbooks, but on the politics and personalities of its medieval realm—and in the process, cultivated millions of fans. Now, HBO is hoping to do the…

Why the green great dragon can't exist The former US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, famously warned that in any situation there can be known knowns and unknown unknowns, the latter being the most potentially dangerous as they are "things that we don't know we don't know". But missing from his…