Plants are intelligent beings that sense, remember, and communicate.

Western thought ranks plants at the bottom of the living world, passive and without minds. A growing body of science says they sense, adapt, remember and communicate, and a pandemic year spent among them led to a film asking what follows if we take that seriously.

Understory

The most sophisticated robots are often the ones that do more with less.

The idea began not with an equation but at a sailing centre, watching windsurfers. Years of work on maple-seed robots met a sail seen every day since childhood, and a sensor that could drop in by air and then sail off took shape.

ALBATROSS: A Bioinspired, Aerially Deployable, Autonomous Sailing Sensor Platform

If bad things had good outcomes, you wouldn't call them bad things.

We like to believe that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and research on post-traumatic growth seems to agree. This thread argues that much of that research rests on weak methods and on a story we already want to believe. Tracked over time, most people show resilience rather than growth.

Is There Always Value to Adversity? Looking Beyond "What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger"

All my films have a relationship to photography, this fascination and love of photography.

Living on the other side of the garden wall from the Casa Azul, the filmmaker watched a quiet neighborhood turn into a tourist trail. That daily view, and a long love of photography, became the seed of the film.

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

In rationalizing a state of anxiety, conspiracy theories operate very differently from a political manifesto.

Conspiracy theories are usually treated as bad thinking that more facts can cure. This thread argues they express something real: a feeling of lost agency and a future that seems foreclosed. Their spread says as much about the poverty of our political culture as about the people who believe them.

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession

Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

At Malalmuerzo, the bones of at least 36 people preserve a sequence of cuts, fractures and tooth marks. Set beside cinnabar-stained remains and carefully made skull cups from nearby caves, they show why one word cannot carry so many human stories.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

People Don’t Want to Argue with AI, and That Makes Them More Persuaded by It

Persuasion research has long studied the message. A conversation is two-sided, so the question became how people behave when the other side is a chatbot, and why they see so little point in arguing with it.

From People to Prompts

I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

An old, sick man tries to rob a bank to get medical care, and the police send him home. Seven songs ask what it would cost to treat everyone as a neighbor.

Rooming House