Bradford Nordeen at Artforum:
As a musician, Charli XCX was born online. Her first album circulated via CD-Rs and MySpace when the artist was just fourteen. Journalists love to drop this detail, but seldom do they follow up on how this ever-shifting www. vernacular inflects her songwriting style. Her compositions often hinge on the repetition of single words or phrases, like “focus,” “airport,” or “number one.” Syncopation spins the familiar into an earworm, disarticulating the very meaning of a lyric into a melodic vibe. After a couple of major-label albums failed to connect, Charli saw promise in how this approach might marry with the emergent underground PC Music movement. Spearheaded by the late SOPHIE and A. G. Cook, these sound sculptors used vocal modulation to transform any bedroom singer into a K-pop star—displaced within a synthetic landscape that was critically unreal, pixelated and vast. The Vroom Vroom EP (2016) was Charli’s first stab at this sound and the recipient of great vitriol from her label and critics alike. Eight years on, that sound has become the genre of music called Hyperpop.
more here.
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Yuichi Hirose has a dream—a dream that someday everyone will have access to a machine capable of knitting furniture.
Simply put, downtowns matter less and less. In Austin and elsewhere, we are witnessing an epochal shift away from the highly concentrated urban center first described by Jean Gottmann in 1983 as the “
Every so often someone writes an essay with a title like “Against Travel,” “The Case for Staying on One’s Couch,” or “Germans in Sweatpants: Why Going Places Was a Mistake.” Such pieces usually go viral, since they appeal to the two itches few readers seem able to resist scratching—the itch to be agreed with and the itch to be mad at a stranger. I always root for the writers of these pieces. I want them to win the impossible fight they’ve picked.
If there’s one phrase the June 2024 U.S. presidential debate may entirely eliminate from the English vocabulary it’s that age is a meaningless number. Often attributed to boxer 
In 2016, a historically unprecedented incident took place. And yet, barely anyone even noticed. Even years later, we’ve failed to acknowledge it or to have begun the process of understanding it. Because we still can’t even see it.
When Tintin is captured by an ancient Inca tribe in his fourteenth adventure, Prisoners of the Sun, he finds an article on his cell floor that forecasts a coming solar eclipse. This will prove to be significant since he, Captain Haddock, and Professor Calculus are to be burned at the stake. Tintin manages to see to it that the execution is staged at the right moment. When the Inca Prince of the Sun orders the pyre to be lit, Tintin invokes the Sun God: “O God of the Sun, sublime Pachacamac, display thy power, I implore thee! … If this sacrifice is not thy will, hide thy shining face from us!” In this patronizing Occidental fable of mathematical calculation triumphing over traditional belief, the weather god gives way to the scientist, whose knowledge gives Tintin the power to produce an apparent miracle.
JOHN TOOBY (July 26, 1952-November 9, 2023) was the founder of the field of Evolutionary Psychology, co-director (with his wife, Leda Cosmides) of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, and professor of anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. He received his PhD in biological anthropology from Harvard University in 1989 and was professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tooby and Cosmides also co-founded and co-directed the UCSB Center for Evolutionary Psychology and jointly received the 2020 Jean Nicod Prize.
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The day I met Daniel Kahneman, he had asked me to join him for lunch at the Bowery Road restaurant in Lower Manhattan. Danny proposed this venue because it has comfortable booths and ‘is mostly deserted’. I arrived 
The IMO is considered the world’s most prestigious competition for young mathematicians. Correctly answering its test questions requires mathematical ability that AI systems typically lack.
In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of principles … but a homeland.” He went on to illustrate this by referring to his family’s cemetery where he hoped seven generations would be buried in a plot in eastern Kentucky. He said the country welcomed newcomers like his wife’s family from India, but “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”
In the past, Washington has served as a sort of relief valve for Netanyahu, a place he could count on strong support, even when his political position looked rocky at home. In that first speech back in 1996, after receiving a five-minute standing ovation from Congress, he