Believe it or not, analyzing seemingly unrelated data can reveal hidden truths. Take the Pentagon, the nerve center of the U.S. military. While classified briefings and high-level meetings happen behind closed doors, open-source data can offer clues about what might be brewing. Here’s where things get interesting. We can use Google Trends data to track searches for “Pentagon pizza delivery” and nearby “gay bars.” Why pizza and bars? Increased late-night activity might indicate longer work hours for Pentagon staff, potentially signifying preparation for a major event.

Could there be another way to practice copyediting—less attached to precedent, less perseverating, and more eagerly transgressive; a practice that, to distinguish itself from the quietly violent tradition from which it arises, might not be called “copyediting” at all; a practice that would not only “permit” but amplify the potential for linguistic invention and preservation in any written work?

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? According to digital storyteller, Brian Clark it doesn't! In this DIY conversation, Brian Clark applies the philosophical concept of phenomenology to art in the digital age.

This is the story of a marriage, told through an email being drafted in real time. It takes about five minutes to read/experience.

The sense-making definition of design fiction is to consider the ways that material artifacts — things considered, designed, made, produced in the material sense of things — can structure and arrange our understanding and ability to make sense of sometimes vague, nebulous notions of the future.

The UN Refugee Agency’s Project Unsung is a speculative storytelling project that brings together creative collaborators from around the world to help reimagine the humanitarian sector and promote narrative change and foresight in our work. The worlds produced through mediums such as non-fiction essays, science fiction, poetry, art and illustration, create visions for how we might radically reimagine our work with communities, our organizations, and our relationships to each other and the planet. The collection is framed across three overarching issues that we believe to be critical for building just futures: Nature (restoring and repairing the world by confronting climate change and ecological loss); Identity (fostering belonging, connection, and kinship); Power (reimaging and reconfiguring power dynamics and social transformation through decolonizing, localizing, and building solidarity across difference). The story of humanitarian innovation needs a new chapter. Join us in imagining better worlds.

Design for Understanding

We argue that the reason so little progress has been made against obesity and type 2 diabetes is because the field has been laboring, quite literally, in the sense intended by philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn, under the wrong paradigm. This energy-in-energy-out conception of weight regulation, we argue, is fatally, tragically flawed: Obesity is not an energy balance disorder, but a hormonal or constitutional disorder, a dysregulation of fat storage and metabolism, a disorder of fuel-partitioning. Because these hormonal responses are dominated by the insulin signaling system, which in turn responds primarily (although not entirely) to the carbohydrate content of the diet, this thinking is now known as the carbohydrate-insulin model. Its implications are simple and profound: People don’t get fat because they eat too much, consuming more calories than they expend, but because the carbohydrates in their diets — both the quantity of carbohydrates and their quality — establish a hormonal milieu that fosters the accumulation of excess fat.

Podplays that you listen to while riding the NYC subway