Every life-stage has its share of novelty—first kiss, first tax return, first twinge of certain death—but when it comes to new experiences most of us peak in infancy. Just laying there, gargling and soiling our diapers, we as infants cycle through thousands of firsts. It would be nice to remember some of them, as our…
At the peak of summer, when just walking to and from the corner store necessitates a shower and a change of clothes, air-conditioning can seem almost too good to be true. It is one of the few staples of modernity without severe and readily apparent downsides: all it does, or all it seems to do, is make things cooler,…
Everyone, from time to time—or at every single moment of every single day—wishes they could somehow escape technology. It’s not ultimately that fun to be inundated at all hours with the collapse of society, the weekend activities of people you barely knew ten years ago, bad memes, worse TV, etc. You can smash your…
Not all superheroes wear capes, but many do, and it’s a long-established fact that these capes are crucial when it comes to flying around town to fight crime and brood and whatnot. And yet the people still don’t know, with anything approaching certainty, how exactly capes facilitate this process (at least, the capes…
The world is filled with disgusting toilets. You might personally prefer toilets that smell okay and aren’t covered in filth, but try telling that to whichever organs are involved in making you really need to use the bathroom. It has happened before, and it will happen again: you’ll be at a public bus station, or a…
Animal rights activists have done stellar work in foregrounding the question of creature-consciousness: no meat-eater is now ignorant of the fact that their food once lived, breathed, maybe nuzzled its kin in a blood-soaked slaughterhouse. Environmentalists have a harder go of it. Fracking footage will always be less…
I never thought I’d see the day, but vaping—the bejeweled fedora of nicotine delivery methods—is starting to seem a lot less ridiculous. Or, at least, somewhat less ridiculous. Juuling teens are still reliably funny. But at the same time, there are real, credentialed doctors out there making a case for vaping as a…
When separates us from the animals? Is it the burden of consciousness, the terror of knowing that one day we will die, along with everyone we’ve ever loved? Or is it our big weird asses?
Cats are enigmatic little creatures. It’s hard to get a read on them. Does your cat love you, or would it gladly stab you in your sleep, if only it had thumbs and a slightly larger brain? The cat never tells—it thrives on inscrutability. But it can’t help betraying certain signs of its inner life: it’s hard to play…
It’s an orgy of geometry, here on Earth. You got all kinds of shapes: Squares, trapezoids, even the occasional rhombus. Apples, desk-chairs, and dandelions—just an abundance of shape-having stuff. Outer space, in contrast, is minimally decorated: asteroids, stars, planets, galaxies. Big-picture stuff. We know the…
Animals fatally maul, sting, trample, and chew about a million humans per year. Pretty nice of them, given the numbers on our side—the average of 750 million chickens we kill in the U.S. every month, for instance. In an ideal world, no one would ever get mauled by a bear, or contract rabies from a feral squirrel. But…
In 2018, nearly everything is in place for a descent into a Ready Player One-style dystopia. The way things are going, we should be destitute and beaten down by climate change long before the 2040s. All we’re missing, for now, is the technology. People are already more than happy to spend huge percentages of their…
1-Click ordering a massively discounted flat-screen TV, or seventy pounds of coarse-grained salt, it can be easy to forget, or temporarily repress, all those stories you’ve read about, say, working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses, or its propagation of the gig economy through contract labor.
Two decades of healthy growth, followed by four to eight decades of slow-motion physical and mental collapse—that’s life, for most of us, despite the efforts of various deluded cranks and tech billionaires. Time spares nothing, and seems particularly to have it out for our faces, paying just as much attention to…
Ever since the 19th century, when disease was first linked to sewage-contaminated water, humans have gone to great lengths to escape their own filth. Meanwhile, animals have gone on reveling in the stuff—eating it, strategically dropping it, flinging it around just to pass the time, etc. Same goes for mud, piss,…
History’s littered with lost ears: Van Gogh’s, Evander Holyfield’s, that ear Kyle MacLachlan finds in a field in Blue Velvet, etc. Or maybe ears is the wrong word. The weird little flesh-whorls that jut out from the sides of most of our heads are just small components of a much larger, delicately interconnected…
Vibranium’s the lifeblood of the Black Panther universe—the metal that helped propel Wakanda into a hyper-advanced technological society and granted Black Panther his superheroic abilities via a Vibranium-mutated heart-shaped herb. The Wakandan strain, sheared off a meteorite hundreds of years ago, has a number of…
Humans do the wildest things to animals—stick them with experimental drugs, mash them into cheap nuggets, mount their severed heads on dining room walls. Against this backdrop of chaos and mass extermination the Puppy Bowl seems fairly benign, as do all those other events, like the Kentucky Derby, where animals are…
Nearly three thousand athletes have made their way to the Winter Olympic this month, and probably at least a couple are cursing the day they ever decided to become world-class bobsledders: Reports out of Pyeongchang list the temperature at or around a murderous subzero, putting this year’s games on track to be the…
The first bitcoin transaction ever was by man who bought two pizzas. That arrangement would be worth over a $100 million today. Regret was baked into Bitcoin from the beginning. Last year, somewhat inexplicably, Bitcoin’s price rose more than 1,000 percent. That number has since dipped, but a single bitcoin is still,…
