The forecaster who makes the most accurate predictions, as early as possible, can earn a cash prize and, perhaps more important, the esteem of the world’s most talented seers.
—
Ross Andersen,
The Atlantic,
11 Feb. 2026
Seeing around the bend in the river—or even knowing the river ahead does indeed bend—can require the sort of leap of faith that made Vannevar Bush insist that shamans, priests and spiritual seers are the antecedents of today’s engineering stars.
But one of California’s leading political savants, Paul Mitchell, has developed a helpful online tool to suss out the possibilities.
—
Mark Z. Barabak,
Mercury News,
4 Apr. 2026
Ted Taylor and Freeman Dyson, two other mid-century savants of the atom, spent years at General Atomic designing a gigantic spacecraft that would weigh thousands of tons and propel itself to Mars, Saturn, and the nearby stars with nuclear explosions.
How scholars became aware of the Gimo archive, which includes nineteen works for mandolin, collected in Italy by the son of a Swedish iron manufacturer in 1762.
—
Tim Parks,
New Yorker,
11 Apr. 2026
Aurangzeb assembled a panel of qualified Indian ʿulamāʾ (religious scholars) to compile this legal manual.
Some pundits claim that social media is the equivalent to smoking cigarettes or illicit drugs, a common but false claim in technology moral panics (indeed such comparisons have been identified as a warning sign of misinformation).
—
William Proctor,
The Orlando Sentinel,
11 Apr. 2026
This decision to stop progress on Be Fri came in late 2023, months after Toy Story prequel movie Lightyear was a box office misfire in light of right-wing pundits causing commotion over its same-gender kiss.
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