Rorotoko: scholars, artists and thinkers on their own work, in their own words

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

On a reservoir, a small robotic sailboat has to read a shifting wind before it can reach its mark. Instead of carrying a dedicated wind sensor, it lets the sail itself report where the wind is coming from.

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

The phenomenon of people dressing up as Frida, the lookalikes, is absolutely extraordinary.

Hairless xolo dogs wandering a garden at dusk, women in line dressed as Frida, the largest gathering of lookalikes ever recorded. In the costume, a declaration: I am here, and this is who I am.

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

Redemption will not come from truth, but from hope.

What happens when the ideologies that promised a better future lose their hold, and liberalism declares that history has arrived? A passage from the book reads conspiracy theories as the destructive half of an old apocalyptic story, stripped of hope. What it proposes instead is not more truth but the confidence that history is made.

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession

Draining the Fens and colonizing the Chesapeake were not separate endeavors.

Draining the English Fens and settling Virginia are usually told as separate stories. They were run by the same families, with the same legal move: call a lived landscape waste, then enclose it.

Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, and Belonging in Seventeenth-Century England & Virginia

If our eyes would be 1m in diameter, we would not need to do this.

Insects sway from side to side to judge distance. A robot that does the same, and folds what it sees into one giant virtual lens, can blur away the leaves in front of it.

How Robot Dogs See the Unseeable: Improving Visual Interpretability via Peering for Exploratory Robots

The use of attorneys in Suits reveals how cultural texts grapple with changing ideas about lawyers and professionals.

A quirky legal show, part drama and part comedy, that critics mostly ignored while millions watched. It works as a barometer of American life in the 2010s, carrying both Obama's audacious hope and Trump's nostalgia, and navigating Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

Suits: A Cultural History

Images get cheaper, beauty doesn't.

Over time I get used to everything and start taking it for granted.

Beauty & Design

Containment fails for a reason any parent recognizes.

The AI safety debate has split into two camps, contain it or release it, and neither works. Guardrails get routed around by any system optimizing hard enough, and scrutiny catches errors without installing values. There is an older, proven method for raising capable beings whose values cannot be programmed: releasing autonomy in stages.

Raising AI: How Artificial Intelligence Is Shaping Us—and How We Shape It