doctrine

Social media platforms are uniquely effective at short-circuiting our retrospective time perception. After spending time on these apps, the abstract field our mind’s eye draws from to make sense of recent experiences is left barren, devoid of the evocative wisps we integrate into the hazy memory palace that ultimately serves as our past.

A years-long project by HHMI Janelia, Google Research, and collaborators has built the first complete brain map for a male fruit fly, a key model organism in science.

L'Inconnue de la Seine was an unidentified young woman whose putative death mask, said to have been made in the late 1880s, became a popular fixture on the walls of artists' homes after 1900. It later became the face of Resusci Anne, the CPR training manikin.

Talking about loneliness feels so deeply personal. It makes us so vulnerable because it means telling someone that you're hurting on a primal level. So we don't talk about it. The epidemic becomes invisible.

Cody Blakeney, 2026

Schwedische Haus-Gymnastik nach dem System P.H. Ling’s, Theodor Bergquist, 1913

Maybe the self or the idea of the self has become this terrible prison that we’re trapped in. It’s what stops you from being free. And maybe you could be liberated from this fictional version of yourself that you’re always having to perform. Maybe the performance has become so exhausting. How to Escape the 21st Century: Adam Curtis Talks to Dean Kissick, 2026

Everybody transgender, Everything computer, Everywhere casino. An absurdist passage assembled from Donald Trump recent remarks.

The Global Consciousness Project is measuring the impact of shared human experiences on global consciousness using a worldwide network of Random Number Generators (RNGs), devices that produce physically random numbers and track unusual patterns in their output.

Hunger stones serve as famine memorials and warnings and were erected throughout Europe from the 15th to 19th centuries. One of the most famous, found in the Elbe River, bears drought dates going back to 1616, alongside the inscription: “If you see me, then weep.”

I said no, Ken Lum, 2009

Though mainstream AI has just arrived, we actually outgrew our mode of relating to images when the internet arrived; that, if today’s situation feels frighteningly new, it’s because AI pushed us to the necessary breaking point of an unsustainable period of semiotic limbo. All Images Are Quite Useless Now, Gideon Jacobs, 2026

The decisive moment of human development is continually at hand. This is why those movements of revolutionary thought that declare everything preceding to be an irrelevance are correct—because as yet nothing has happened. Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms, 1917

For some years the high status thing to do has been to start a company; now all the founders want to be longevity influencers too. The same utopian fervor once reserved for distributed systems is being used to construct ideologies of the body. Body Futurism, Toby Shorin, 2026

The tie between information and action has been severed. Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it. Informing Ourselves To Death, Neil Postman, 1990

There is no consistent, integrated conception of the world which serves as the foundation on which our edifice of belief rests. And therefore, in a sense, we are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

Mysticism is just tomorrow’s science dreamed today. Marshall McLuhan, Playboy Interview, 1969

Making Sense: Seven Movements, Curry Hackett, Shannon Mattern, 2026

Writing in his seminal work, “The Outermost House,” naturalist Henry Beston presciently intuited that, far from being background players in Earth’s vast cultural landscape, other animals are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear.” They are neither brethren nor underlings, he wrote — “they are other nations.” Animals Have Culture, Too, Ryan Huling, 2026

An echoborg is a person whose words and actions are determined, in whole or in part, by an AI. The echoborg method allows one to investigate how people behave and make attributions toward an AI when their psychological state is fully primed for human-human interaction.