Category: Other
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The blurry line between plants and animals
There are animals that are also plants. Elysia Chlorotica is a slug that looks like a leaf. She’s the one on the top left in the image above. Part of what makes a plant a plant is that it can make its own food out of inorganic materials like sunlight and water. Slugs like Elysia…
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An organic Internet made out of snails
Frenchman Jules Allix, in the mid-nineteenth century, popularized a kind of organic Internet made out of snails. Drawing upon the physician Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism,” which postulated the existence of a universal magnetic force connecting living things, it was predicated upon the idea that any two snails that had copulated remained linked across…
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They sold the horse bust for $62.95
In 2009, a journalist by the name Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, bought 200 objects from eBay. These were cheap trinkets, the average price for each was no more than a few dollars. They then called 200 authors and asked them to write a story about one of the objects. They returned to eBay to…
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Concentrate your efforts
A couple of weeks ago, I had dinner with an aspiring content creator. We’ll call him Mike. He’s been creating content for three years, but has struggled to build an audience. When I asked him about his distribution strategy, he told me he’s re-purposing his content for all the major social media platforms: Twitter, Facebook,…
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Idleness is an obligation
The regrettable consequence of justifying leisure only in terms of its usefulness for other things is that it begins to feel vaguely like a chore—in other words, like work in the worst sense of that word. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of…
Josh Pitzalis 