Squirrel

Moscow's ideological visa programme for foreigners seeking to escape 'destructive neoliberal tendencies' and 'satanic values' has not been as successful as was hoped. The Kremlin is counting on Maria Butina, convicted of spying in the US, to help boost the programme.

The great advantage of all this symbolic reference through physical artefacts was that, unlike speech, dance or ritual enactment, which is transient, the physical symbolism with which they surrounded themselves was always there, always reminding them, teaching their children.

The fight between creators and AI companies is fierce. The current paradigm in AI is to build bigger and bigger models, and there is, at least currently, no getting around the fact that they require vast data sets hoovered from the internet to train on.

classicist Emily Wilson describes in her recent translation of the Iliad as perhaps the most beautiful technique drawn from the oral poetic tradition — the extended simile. “Similes, like catalogs,” she says, “allow the narrative to contain far more worlds within itself than we might expect, including domestic activities in peacetime, vivid... See more

In combination with considerably slower rates of reading and diminished reading comprehension, curtailed homework time means that an English teacher might not be able to assign more than 10 to 15 pages of relatively easy prose per class meeting, a rate so excruciatingly slow, it diminishes one’s ability to actually grasp a novel’s meaning and... See more

Sapiens conquered the world because we can tell stories that inspire people to cooperate in very large numbers.

An important job of our memory systems is to keep track of locations where our experiences happen; they act as anchors for our personal memories. Consider this: all of your cherished personal memories happened in a particular place and it’s difficult to imagine the event without it. In order to recall a location later, it must be encoded quickly at... See more

Rising tensions between China and Taiwan, coupled with U.S. military commitments, mean that any escalation could cripple global chip supply chains overnight