Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

Most jazz records are photographs of a good live take. This one was built instead, layered, cut apart and reversed in the studio, and that is a different art rather than a better or worse version of the same one.

Sing the Color Blue

Roman-period mourners used cattail fluff bedding to make graves resemble places of rest

Archaeologists notice what survives: brooches, cups, beads. Four graves in northern Poland kept something softer, and it changes the picture of a richly furnished burial.

Pillows, mattresses or log coffin linings: Use of cattail (Typha sp.) in Roman period funerary rituals at Czarnówko in Pomerania

One of the book’s discoveries is the simple realization that experience has a history at all.

What is experience, exactly? The question has rarely been asked, and one answer is that experience has a history: it has not always been possible, and it has changed over time. Literature, art, music and philosophy trace that history, which ends in memoir.

Experience: A History

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

Robotics usually answers each new problem with another motor or sensor. This makes the case for the opposite: a small craft whose wings first slow its fall from the sky and then become its sails on the water.

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

One method to right the wrongs was to guide children in camera use to inspire them to shoot back.

In 1970s south London, a children's rights workshop handed kids cameras built from wellies, prams and chocolate tins. The aim was to let them shoot back at the images that defined them, and to show that independence learned in a makeshift darkroom could carry into social and political life.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

Priya’s experience reveals one of the costs the diversity contract imposes on residents of color.

A woman started seeing therapists — not over a crisis, but because she needed somewhere she was permitted to talk about race at all. She came to each interview with a list on her phone of incidents she had never been able to name out loud. Her case is unusually intense, which is exactly what makes an entire community's unspoken rules visible.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

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

The team expected a single regional episode of cannibalism. Then the radiocarbon dates arrived, and the question shifted from what one cause could explain it to why it happened again and again, and in such different forms.

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

The bottom line is this: AI safety absolutely requires constitutional democracy.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond