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

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

Taking the fat takes the pain away – in LiDo, the so-called lipedema.

The disease known as lipedema is neither edema nor ordinary fat: it is fat that hurts. A randomized trial of 410 women now shows that removing it completely takes the pain away, where diet, exercise and drainage do not.

Liposuction versus conservative therapy for patients with lipoedema in Germany: a multicentre, randomised controlled clinical trial

This example encapsulates a key facet of Old in the Game, that hip-hop’s familiarity and appeal is cross-generational.

At an AARP conference in Boston in 2007, a room of people with canes and walkers and greying hair nodding along to hip-hop beats, waiting for a thirty-nine-year-old rapper to bound onstage and lead their morning workout. It matters within the culture when you entered the game, at what age, and how you carry it since. "Inside, none of us feels sixty," one pioneer says. Another: "It took a lifetime to get here."

Old in the Game: Aging in and with Hip-Hop

Memory doesn't retrieve the past: memory makes the present.

An hourlong work for speaking voice and string quartet, built around Beckett's last prose, uses memory as its raw material. Musical events return, arrive early and open inside one another, so the past changes the size and meaning of the present.

Stirrings Still