Nick Russo is wearing one sock and holding a small dinosaur. For a few moments it is settled in his arms, wings held tightly against its body, and then it erupts with a squawk-squeal-scream that hurts my ears and makes me think of Laura Dern. Nick is an ornithologist and…

A new generation of post-pandemic birders can change the way we see our cities — If you were to wake up tomorrow from sixteen months of fairy-tale sleep, you’d probably have a few questions. What the heck is a delta variant? What happened to restaurant menus? When did all of my friends become birdwatchers? On the last Monday in May of this year, 1,046 birders…

This morning, my family and I walked over the Manhattan bridge to the Lower East Side, to write two names on the sidewalk in chalk: Joseph Wilson and Fannie Lansner. Both twenty-two when they died, both workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, both Russian Immigrants, both living in the same…

The Mueller report is 203,028 words long. Here’s a much shorter version, centered around its primary subject. The President said, “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.” The President had not directed Flynn to discuss sanctions with Kislyak. The President told White House…

Last month, IBM ran a minute-long ad during the Oscars, titled ‘Let’s Put Smart To Work.’ Backed by a dramatic string score, the spot features a sequence of famous people — singer and actress Janelle Monae, spelling bee champion Akash Vukoti, Open Source software advocate Bruce Perens, Me Too movement…

Here’s a transcript from the latest episode of Artist in the Archive. You can listen to the full episode here. Jer Thorp: Let’s start with a story about two men named Horace. …

Here’s a transcript from the latest episode of Artist in the Archive. You can listen to the full episode here. David Brunton: 412,175,852 JPEG, 42,324,945 PDF, 11,854,378 TXT, 2,207,725 Word docs, 1,042,624 Excel files, 11,041,834 SWF, 6,722,968 MP4, 1,165,842 MPEG, 1,336,326 GZIP, 323,498 PowerPoint. Jer Thorp: A year ago in…

In Brussels he spoke of courage, of defending principles, of cultivating a ‘healthy suspicion of authority.’ He lavished praise on the GDPR, and called for a new comprehensive privacy law in the United States. He admonished the practice of collecting personal data and demolished big tech’s favorite talking point, that…

On Thursday November 8th, I’m taking over the Library of Congress’ Twitter feed for an experiment in collective serendipity. Any one can join in — our goal is to find as many interesting things as we can from the collection and to connect those items through vectors of chance, whimsy…