My weekly collection of the provocative, intriguing, or curious, in a world where the house is falling down. The contextual, the cultural, and other things that catch my eye.
Image credit: Matthieu Gafsou/Granta
- Enhancing the human body through technology. A fabulous photo-essay on transhumanism by Matthieu Gafsou and Daisy Hildyard. Swipe to move through the photos, click on them to read the story.
- Billionaires, millionaires, they’re not useful descriptions of wealth. Bloomberg proposes a scale of ‘wealth numbers’ that starts at -2 and goes all the way up to 11.
- Suits used to be about power. Now, they’re about powerlessness.
- A pair of horses’ arses. The reason that rail tracks are the width they are
is down to Roman chariots. A Twitter thread on a story of technological lock-in. Update: This whole story was debunked online some years ago, it turns out. My thanks to Paul Raven.]
- The world of 2031. Simon Parker’s utopian story channels the spirit of William Morris for the 21st century.
- Skateboards, kidney-shaped swimming pools, and Aalvar Aalto. The 99% Invisible podcast traces an unlikely story of cultural innovation. (First 31 minutes).
- I know a woman’s hand in salvation when I see it. The American poet Maya C. Popa writes to Noah’s wife, who was on the Ark but travels without a name.
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“The whole world’s at sixes and sevens, and why the house hasn’t fallen down about our ears long ago is a miracle to me.” (Thornton Wilder)
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