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

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

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

A lump in museum storage labelled a moss pillow turned out, under the microscope, to be something else entirely. The find widens into a question about what archaeology can and cannot see.

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

What to feed them as they grow from paralarvae to juveniles and finally to adults remains a mystery.

Two obstacles, one biological and one political. Nobody has worked out what to feed a newly hatched octopus, despite decades of research, and until they do there is no industry. And if they do, the objectors are already waiting: American states have banned octopus farming outright, though not one octopus has ever been farmed in North America. In the nineteenth century it was the devil-fish; now it’s a beloved cultural icon.

Life on the Octopus Farm: The Ethics and Future of Growing the World's Most Intelligent Invertebrate

A very powerful woman's story

A phone hidden in a baby's diaper became a young mother's way of telling her story from detention in Libya. The rescue in the title is hers.

Rescue