At one point in season six of Line of Duty, which is currently airing on BBC One, Superintendent Ted Hastings – the proud, determined, grouchily folksy Northern Irish head of Anti-Corruption Unit 12 – is called into the office of some of the...
Is Twitter real life? This has become one of the perennial questions of social media. Indeed, it often seems as if prominent Twitter users enjoy nothing more than reminding the people they spend their lives, both professional and personal,...
On February 24, 2021, Lisa Nandy and Yvette Cooper – both senior MPs in the U.K. Labour party – used their Twitter accounts to share a thread by Eric Feigl-Ding, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist specializing in nutrition.
Recently, there has been a lot of excitement surrounding the development of Non-Fungible Tokens or NFTs. An NFT is like a bitcoin, except that it represents something unique. While the cryptographic information associated with a bitcoin only...
In the 1920s and 30s, a group of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians – most prominently Rudolf Carnap, Moritz Schlick, and Otto Neurath – began meeting on campus at the University of Vienna. This period was marked both by genuine crisis –...
One night in July 1895, Sigmund Freud – then an obscure Vienna neurologist interested in hypnosis and how sexuality was determined by nose-associated “biorhythms” – had a particularly consequential dream.
The dream revolved around a patient called...
The final season of The Leftovers – HBO’s drama about a world adapting to the aftermath of a semi-apocalyptic event – opens with a montage separate from the show’s main narrative in the present day; we’re taken to a nineteenth-century American...
So it’s RIP @realDonaldTrump. Late last week, Twitter finally announced the permanent suspension of what is surely the most consequential social media account in history. In the end, it was Wednesday’s attempted coup that turned out to be the final...
At one point in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Søren Kierkegaard tells us a joke about a madman who has just broken out of an insane asylum. As he strides down the road, away from the institution, to freedom, the madman thinks to himself:...