Daniel Rourke /stream

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Late one night last August, on the chalk downlands of southern England, Paul Kingsnorth stood in a field beside an old-growth forest, two yurts and a composting toilet. Kingsnorth is 41,…

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OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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What do you get when you combine two of the most futuristic products in consumer technology? Why, 3-D-printed drones, of course! And now, a Columbia University Ph.D.

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[Another post in our behind-the-scenes series.] One of the great aspects of bookstores and libraries is their uncanny ability to produce serendipity, as people bump unexpectedly into works as they walk…

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Places that have never existed except in the human imagination may find an incongruous afterlife in the everyday world. Umberto Eco tells of how an attempt to commemorate the brownstone New…

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Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change,…

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Anyone who can read German can read the first book ever printed. If you can read Sumerian cuneiform, you can read clay tablets that were probably the first things ever written.…

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Lou Reed got Kanye West's Yeezus absolutely right. "No one's near doing what he's doing,” Reed wrote in a review just a few weeks before he died. “It's not even the…

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“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell…

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Starting a new project is exciting and intensely busy (which is also my excuse for taking a month to blog about it). And the Digital Panopticon is the biggest one we’ve…

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So, returning to an old subject, about which I’ve got very annoyed in the past. Last week Arts Council England (ACE) published the second version of their 10-year strategic framework for…

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The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a…

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Given this context, it might be useful to think of Wiseau as something of an outsider artist. Outsider art—also known as visionary art, or art brut— “describes the work of untrained,…

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A number of recent books have lauded the connection between walking - just for its own sake - and thinking. But are people losing their love of the purposeless walk? Walking…

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OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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Thinking about the end of the world is something that most people try to avoid; for others, it’s a profession.

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If there is one issue in contemporary life that supposedly defines the progressive nature of liberal societies, it is gay rights. Over the past half-century, most of the world’s Western democracies…

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“Propaganda is called upon to solve problems created by technology, to play on maladjustments and to integrate the individual into a technological world” (Ellul xvii). How might future research into digital…

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Metaphor wants to be… ‘[...] metaphors work to change people’s minds. Orators have known this since Demosthenes. [...] But there’s precious little evidence that they tell you what people think. [...]…

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Today, cyber means war. But back in the 1990s, it meant sex — at least, the kind of sex you can have in a chat room. Why did the word change,…

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Lou Reed got Kanye West's Yeezus absolutely right. "No one's near doing what he's doing,” Reed wrote in a review just a few weeks before he died. “It's not even the…

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For the first time in memory, adults in the United States under age forty are now expected to be poorer than their parents. This is the kind of grim reality that…

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“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell…

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Starting a new project is exciting and intensely busy (which is also my excuse for taking a month to blog about it). And the Digital Panopticon is the biggest one we’ve…

Bookmark

So, returning to an old subject, about which I’ve got very annoyed in the past. Last week Arts Council England (ACE) published the second version of their 10-year strategic framework for…