How China took over the world’s online shopping carts
Chinese e-commerce platforms like Shein, Temu, and TikTok Shop are going global with big ambitions.
Is spirituality the missing pillar of sustainability?
Early in my career, I came across the concept of the triple bottom line, a term coined by John Elkington in 1994 that expanded the conventional success metrics of business beyond the financial bottom line to also include environmental health and social wellbeing. The three P’s of People, Planet and Profit as they became known, are a beautifully simple concept to help businesses think more holistically about their impact.
Since when is philosophy a branch of the self-help industry?
The discipline today finds itself precariously balanced between incomprehensible specialisation and cheap self-help
«Many people buy books that supply the illusion of thinking»
How to Make Friends as an Adult
Many adults are lonely and want more friends. This article explores how to make friends as an adult in a more fun and intuitive way.
‘The good guys don’t always win’: Salman Rushdie on peace, Barbie and what freedom cost him
What can the great myths (and the summer blockbusters) tell us about peace? The writer, who has turned to fables all his life, weighs their wisdom – and considers the price he himself has paid for…
«‘Peace only exists here in pink plastic’ … Barbie, one of this summer’s legends.»
I tried lab-grown chicken at a Michelin-starred restaurant
Consumers are getting their first samplings of meat made in the lab.
GraphCast: AI model for faster and more accurate global weather forecasting
Our state-of-the-art model delivers 10-day weather predictions at unprecedented accuracy in under one minute
A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft
Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it.
Dinner With A Dictator: What Joseph Stalin Ate
He lays a hand on my arm. He looks me in the eyes, and then, resignedly, he looks off toward the mountains. Then at me again. “I killed a man, Witold, do you understand?” Again he looks away, at th…
Europe has lost the AI race. It can't ignore the quantum computing one
Quantum computing's physics-oriented behaviour allows it to be infinitely scalable, which is why Europe has to master this mysterious tech if it wants to avoid a brewing dystopia, Koen Bertels writes.
Inside the strange, secretive rise of the 'overemployed'
He was working three full-time jobs at Meta, IBM, and Tinder. His bosses didn't know.
My 12 Favorite Problems
A dozen things that drive my writing, research, thinking & actions
«battle against the constant pressure from powerful forces to narrow and constrain my life»
Baloney Detection Kit: How to Think Sceptically and Bust Bullshit
An exploration of Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit, a set of cognitive tools to help you think sceptically and bust bullshit.
«Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit is an informal set of thinking tools and techniques for evaluating arguments and detecting falsehoods»
To whom it may concern: AI wrote that cover letter
Fed-up applicants are letting bots handle their job searches.
How to Create So Much They Can’t Ignore You
Isn’t the Internet great? Never in human history have we had a better tool for getting our creative work in front of more people.
The wrong way to define productivity
Why trust is the most important overlooked driver.
«In a 2023 study, ic4p found that two-way trust in an organization was the biggest differentiator between high-performing organizations»
Researchers Warn We Could Run Out of Data to Train AI by 2026. What Then?
AI trained on ever-more data has yielded ChatGPT and DALL-E 3. But research shows online data stocks are growing more slowly than datasets used to train AI.
«Another option is to use AI to create synthetic data to train systems. In other words, developers can simply generate the data they need, curated to suit their particular AI model.»
Personal Discipline: What Is It and How To Create One
Explore the concept of personal discipline and its significance in shaping a healthy daily routine. Learn from my personal setbacks and experience.
The Gulf Between Design and Engineering / Design Systems International
A new set of principles for better workflows when making digital products
Score Your Spats: How to Stop Arguing and Enhance Your Relationships
I got this message from Shane Parrish: “Oh I meant to tell you... I remember something you told me that I now share with everyone. It's made a difference for so many.” The “something” he’s referring…
«Whenever you have a disagreement with someone you care about and who cares about you, pose this straightforward question:»
Are Designers Happy? Our New “State of the Designer” Report Aims to Find Out
Explore Figma’s report on job satisfaction among designers in the era of remote work, revealing increased happiness and new challenges.
NVIDIA's Eos supercomputer just broke its own AI training benchmark record
NVIDIA's new Eos supercomputer uses more than 10,000 H100 Tensor Core GPUs to train a 175 billion-parameter GPT-3 model in under four minutes.
Why are Western apps more minimalistic than Asian apps?
The digital behaviour traits of individualism and collectivism
Getting started with CSS container queries
CSS container queries are a powerful new tool for our CSS layout toolbox. In this post we'll dive into the practicalities of building a layout with container queries.
Reality Check #1: Building out a furniture site from Dribbble
We refactor the design of Hrvoje Kraljevic's "Furniture e-commerce website" and build it, step-by-step to show you how we do things in the studio.
Designing Web Design Documentation — Smashing Magazine
Words alone aren’t enough to safeguard best practices in the world of web design and development. Web design documentation must be like its medium — interactive and constantly evolving.
An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid
CSS Grid is an incredibly powerful tool for building layouts on the web, but like all powerful tools, there's a significant learning curve. In this tutorial, we'll build a mental model for how CSS Grid works and how we can use it effectively. I'll share the biggest 💡 lightbulb moments I've had in my own learning journey.
What I Saw at the Revolution That Didn’t Happen
Memoirs of a Weatherman.
China's Best Province
I have travelled through many of Mainland China’s provinces, and recently landed in Taiwan for the first time. In this post, I’ll argue that Taiwan is China’s best province. But first I need to…
An Attempted Taxonomy of Web Components—zachleat.com
A post by Zach Leatherman (zachleat)
Art direction vs artificial intelligence: A helpful tool or an added hassle?
AI-powered text-to-image tools are presenting a moral quandary in terms of creative ethics. But is there a way to use such tools while expanding artistic potential?
The West Must Defeat Russia
Putin hasn’t given up his plans. He thinks Ukraine’s allies will lose interest.
Merchant of Death: The case of Kenneth Law and the shadowy online network that helps people end…
After Kenneth Law lost his job as a low-level cook at the Royal York hotel, he found another way to make money: peddling suicide kits on the internet. Now, he’s been linked to the deaths of over 100…
What a Bloody San Francisco Street Brawl Tells Us About the Age of Citizen Surveillance
When a homeless man attacked a former city official, footage of the onslaught became a rallying cry. Then came another video, and another—and the story turned inside out.
The Other Side of Money: On the Stories We Tell about Wealth, Poverty, and Inequality
1. Once upon a time, around 2014, I began writing What’s Mine. It will be a novel about someone whose home gets invaded by this annoying person, I wrote to my agent. It turns out this annoying pers…
Days of The Jackal: how Andrew Wylie turned serious literature into big business
The long read: Andrew Wylie is agent to an extraordinary number of the planet’s biggest authors. His knack for making highbrow writers very rich helped to define a literary era – but is his reign now…
The Fog of Art
Compact Magazine, a radical American journal
«Institutions and individuals don’t have to take a political stand (but nor should they be punished for doing so).»
Louis Armstrong Gets the Last Word on Louis Armstrong
For decades, Americans have argued over the icon’s legacy. But his archives show that he had his own plans.
George Scialabba’s Prejudice for Progress
“When I started writing this review, I resolved to avoid the mawkish, almost elegiac tone that often seeps into essays about Scialabba. As you can see, I’ve failed.”
67 Weird Debugging Tricks Your Browser Doesn't Want You to Know
Advanced browser parlor tricks
HTML Web Components
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to “React components”. JSX had <MyComponent>…
A Very Subtle Bug
Feb 27, 2010 6.033, MIT’s class on computer systems, has as one of its catchphrases, “Complex systems fail for complex reasons”. As a class about designing and building complex systems, it’s a…
4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour
Learn more about how complex life evolved with our new, elaborately detailed Timeline of Evolution Poster. Available only on the kurzgesagt shop here: https:...
Candela P-12 taking off | 100% electric hydrofoiling passenger vessel
Candela P-12, the world’s first electric hydrofoil passenger vessel, has completed its first test flights and begun production at our Rotebro facility. P-12 ...
What If Money Expired?
A long-forgotten German economist argued that society and the economy would be better off if money was a perishable good. Was he an anarchist crank or the prophet of a better world?
«the concept of money was so pervasive and unexamined that money had become an end in itself, not the vehicle it was intended to be»
In the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge
Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key roles in digestion and disease that scientists are only just starting to understand.
When Gravity Sucked, According to the Plutocrats
After Einstein’s general theory of relativity was proven during a 1919 solar eclipse, quantum and nuclear physics pushed it aside to hog the limelight.
Why it’s important to remember that AI isn’t human
ChatGPT can talk like a person. You shouldn’t think of it as one.
Google DeepMind’s AI Weather Forecaster Handily Beats a Global Standard
Machine learning algorithms that digested decades of weather data were able to forecast 90 percent of atmospheric measures more accurately than Europe’s top weather center.
How Princess Diana's Death Transformed the Royal Family
The last season of "The Crown" will examine the aftermath of the beloved royal's death in a car accident in 1997
I met my husband in a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP group and I’m not alone
Shared by 150, including Essaadi
The Great Social Media–News Collapse
The truth about Big Tech’s relationship with journalism is much more complicated than it appears.
Why the Godfather of A.I. Fears What He’s Built
Geoffrey Hinton has spent a lifetime teaching computers to learn. Now he worries that artificial brains are better than ours.
38 Years Ago, Nintendo Changed Pop Culture Forever
Or, how a plumber and his powerful butt transformed the world
Why Your Child Can’t Answer This One Totally Basic Question
Finally! Proof that kindergartners really do live in an alternate universe.
How Netflix Conquered Hollywood — And Then Broke It
The inside story of how the streamer muscled its way to the top by defying the industry’s conventions — and eventually paid the price.
Scrabble’s New Official Word List Contains Dozens of Stunning Additions. Elite Players Are Mortified.
The slurs are just the beginning.
Why gaming is so important to players with chronic pain
A look at the true importance of gaming for people with chronic pain.
The Real Reason Movies Are “Getting Longer”
For one thing, they’re not.
Inside the Esports Industry's War for Survival
Decrypt's investigation reveals the ongoing challenges in the young esports industry—and where things may be headed in years to come.
The Final Frontier for Helicopter Parents
Inside the Facebook and WhatsApp groups where moms arrange playdates for their college kids.
The Mirai Confessions: Three Young Hackers Who Built a Web-Killing Monster Finally Tell Their Story
Netflix, Spotify, Twitter, PayPal, Slack. All down for millions of people. How a group of teen friends plunged into an underworld of cybercrime and broke the internet—then went to work for the FBI.
A Secret War, Strange New Wounds and Silence From the Pentagon
Many U.S. troops who fired vast numbers of artillery rounds against the Islamic State developed mysterious, life-shattering mental and physical problems. But the military struggled to understand what…
AI Cameras Took Over One Small American Town. Now They're Everywhere
Hundreds of documents obtained by 404 Media show how Fusus, a system for linking a town’s security cameras into one central hub and adding AI to them, has spread across the country.
Israel-Gaza war explainer: a visual analysis
A visual guide to the Palestinian territory of Gaza and the war between Israel and Hamas, following the deadly October 7 attack.
The Astonishing Behavior of Recursive Sequences
Some strange mathematical sequences are always whole numbers — until they’re not. The puzzling patterns have revealed ties to graph theory and prime numbers, awing mathematicians.
Psychology Lost a Great Mind
With his wife, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby transformed our understanding of human nature.
More than argument, logic is the very structure of reality
Some have thought that logic will one day be completed and all its problems solved. Now we know it is an endless task
Magnets, How Do They Work? On the Magic of Magnetic Force
A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta…
How AI could lead to a better understanding of the brain
Early machine-learning systems were inspired by neural networks — now AI might allow neuroscientists to get to grips with the brain’s unique complexities.
Keeping secrets in a quantum world
Cryptographers are preparing for new quantum computers that will break their ciphers.
Patients don’t know how to navigate the US health system — and it’s costing them
A crisis of confusion is making health care more expensive for many Americans.
An Epic Pilgrimage Across Three Great Religions
Before there was tourism, there was pilgrimage. One writer’s 40,000-mile journey through Bolivia, Mongolia and Iraq reveals the ritual’s enduring transformational power.
The case for inviting everyone to everything
In a time when loneliness is more pervasive than ever, why not extend an invitation?
«study found that people who mingled with more loose acquaintances or strangers in a day reported better moods and a higher sense of communal belonging»
Your phone is the key to your digital life. Make sure you know what to do if…
Preparing yourself for the worst is easier than you might think — and it’s never been more important.
Barack Obama on AI, free speech, and the future of the internet
The former president discusses AI regulation, free speech, deepfakes, and disinformation.
Jonas Salk, the man who cured polio, would have been baffled by modern anti-vaxxers, experts say
Many people once lined up joyously to receive vaccines. What changed?
Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial pulled back the curtain on crypto
The criminal conviction of the once-lionized cryptocurrency billionaire will have ripple effects on the entire industry.
Sony’s PlayStation Portal gives a confusing first impression
The PlayStation Portal is a perplexing single-purpose device.
Police Use of Face Recognition Is Sweeping the UK
Face recognition technology has been controversial for years. Cops in the UK are drastically increasing the amount they use it.
How does climate change threaten where you live? A region-by-region guide.
We broke down the National Climate Assessment's comprehensive report on the effects of climate change so you don't have to.
Weird stuff happens when animals reproduce in space
You've heard of the birds and the bees. Now let's talk about Medaka fish and cockroaches.
Leaf blowers are a scourge. Why is it hard to get rid of them?
We hate how leaf blowers sound. We love how they make our lawns look.
Artists Lose First Round of Copyright Infringement Case Against AI Art Generators
While a federal judge advanced an infringement claim against Stability AI, he dismissed the rest of the lawsuit.
Has solution to climate change been buried deep in Earth all along?
Burning hydrogen produces only heat and water, and is attracting billions of dollars in investment
Lessons learned from a startup that didn’t make it
What not to do when building a B2B startup
Sphere and Loathing in Las Vegas
My night in front of the world’s largest LED screen
Humility: Why modern leaders need to resurrect this ancient virtue
Subscribe for counterintuitive, surprising, and impactful stories delivered to your inbox every Thursday Many ancient thinkers have written about the dangers of arrogance. The Roman emperor Marcus…
«I think about humility in two ways. One way is being the right size in a given situation — not too big, not too small.»
Young children trounce large language models in a simple problem-solving task
Large language models like ChatGPT are immensely powerful — the first artificial intelligences to produce truly human-like content. They are already being used to provide customer service, write…
«large language models: While they are remarkable imitation engines, repurposing and spreading what’s already known and created, they do not introduce novel ideas.»
35 Interview Questions for Manager Candidates
We asked top hiring managers and startup leaders to share their favorite questions for interviewing management candidates.
Counterfactual Thinking: The magic of asking 'what if' (Wayfinder #10)
Welcome back to the tenth issue of Wayfinder, your fortnightly compass for navigating life’s toughest decisions. Have you ever caught yourself thinking, "If only I had taken that job, moved to that…
«Counterfactual thinking revolves around the very human act of imagining alternative scenarios to events that have already occurred — a mental revisiting of "what might have been".»
What If Stress is Not a Given?
Tactics to Rewrite the Story You Tell Yourself About Stress
«Brené Brown - Get curious about what your stress is trying to tell you. Listen to your stress symptoms for insight rather than fighting them.»
How to Spend Less Without Depriving Yourself
How can you spend less without feeling like you're depriving yourself? The key is to make it simple and sustainable. Here's how.
Wild Minds
Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s best marathon runner, was being held in a staging room during the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo. He and two other runners – Bashir Abdi from Belgium and Abdi Nageeye of the…
«Part of this is realizing that people who are capable of achieving incredible things often take risks that can backfire just as powerfully.»
It's all just leadership after all
Managers and senior individual contributors: it's all the same.
Improving deep sleep may prevent dementia, study finds
As little as 1% reduction in deep sleep per year for people over 60 years of age translates into a 27% increased risk of dementia, according to a study which suggests that enhancing or maintaining…
10 Ways to Stand Out from the Crowd
The Curiosity Chronicle has quickly become one of the most popular newsletters for growth-minded individuals in the world. Each week, subscribers receive a deep dive that covers topics ranging from…