#culture

Patrick Stewart taught us what good men do with power

When Patrick Stewart, who died on Wednesday, first stepped onto the bridge of the Enterprise in 1987 in his defining role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard, the Berlin Wall still stood. The Soviet Union would not fall until the fourth season of that show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, had already begun. Yet Picard’s generation of […]

Vox · EN

Can’t commit to vegetarianism but want animals to suffer less? You’ve got options.

Editor’s note, November 1, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary. The one below was originally published in August 2025. This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values […]

Vox · EN

When Your Parents Are Dying: Some of the Simplest, Most Difficult and Redemptive Life-Advice You’ll Ever Receive

"Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what's inside us from moment to moment."

Brain Pickings · EN

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World

The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx that exist whether or not we believe in them — is pocked with myriad subjective realities, each lensed through the particular qualia of the perceiver, each a function not of the mind alone but of the entire organism and the whole of its lived experience, embodied and enacted by the total creature. What we… read article

Brain Pickings · EN

Halloween’s Lost Heroes: Michael Pollan on Radical Gardening and the Insurgent Botanical Origin of the Broomstick in Flying-Witch Legends

"For most of their history... gardens have been more concerned with the power of plants than with their beauty — with the power, that is, to change us in various ways, for good and for ill."

Brain Pickings · EN

Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song

"The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body."

Brain Pickings · EN

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."

Brain Pickings · EN

Meteor of Joy: The Young People’s Chorus of New York City Sings Bird Divinations

Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and more transcendent than any of our poems and postulates can touch — the ultimate affirmation of our aliveness, emanating Richard Powers’s beautiful and bittersweet assertion that “the use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.” To celebrate twenty years of The Marginalian, composer extraordinaire Paola Prestini set six…

Brain Pickings · EN

The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude

"There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone."

Brain Pickings · EN

Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Moving Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” a Lifetime of Sorrow in the Making

A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.

Brain Pickings · EN

Virtual Art Museum built with Three js

My wife wanted a website for her artworks. While building the website, I suddenly had this urge to try building a virtual art museum to give her motivation. It turned out not bad. Put the rain mode on if you like cats btw. I'm still trying to optimize the performance as I'm having random fps-drops on Android devices. Let me know if you notice any bugs as this project is still in early build. It works best on PCs although tablets and smart phones are also good to go. I'm open to ideas to make it more beautiful. Comments

Lobsters · EN

Python Typing Survey 2026: AI Tools and the Shifting Checker Landscape

The 2026 Python Typing Survey received 1,794 responses. Type hint use changed little across three years, but checker selection changed sharply. Among respondents who reported which checkers they use, half selected more than one, and missing library type information was the most common difficulty. For the third consecutive year, we asked Python developers how they [...] Read More... The post Python Typing Survey 2026: AI Tools and the Shifting Checker Landscape appeared first on Engineering at Meta .

Meta Engineering · EN

World’s oldest? 66-pound Stone Age anchor found 65 feet down on Norwegian seabed

Archaeologists in western Norway have recovered a grooved, 66-pound stone from the seabed beneath a...

Interesting Engineering · EN

Bizarre cyberattack turns supermarket freezers into 122-degree ovens in six countries

Cyberattacks against supermarket refrigeration systems have disrupted grocery operations across Europe, with hackers remotely manipulating...

Interesting Engineering · EN