Anna Brandenberger

on the atlas — 262

• Holocloth2 savers
• Opinion | College campuses are being suffocated by administrators1 savers
• WAO - The Workers' Algorithm Observatory3 savers
• Dolly Parton: “I Will Always Love You” Track Review | Pitchfork2 savers
• Dirty Little Zine — Free 8-Page Printable Zine Maker1 savers
• Light pollution map3 savers
• The Laboratory and the Artist - Cleveland Review of Books12 savers
• Intelligence is not the main bottleneck - by Ruxandra Teslo7 savers
• Fast · Patrick Collison48 savers
• Niven T. Achenjang | postdoc application advice2 savers
• Elena Ferrante’s New Book: Art Wins | The New Yorker1 savers
• An Opinionated Guide to ML Research52 savers
• Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?—Asterisk8 savers
• Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk16 savers
• Relationship primitives8 savers
• Is There Love After Marriage? - by Agnes Callard2 savers
• Fence Digital – Our publications explore the boundary between the virtual nature of digital information and the viscerality of text.1 savers
• Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine12 savers
• Motion - A modern animation library for JavaScript and React8 savers
• Anime.js | JavaScript Animation Engine8 savers
• Real-Time Image & Video Effects — Effect.app2 savers
• Locals and Tourists | Flickr1 savers
• Stripe Press — Ideas for progress30 savers
• 5PM NYC - Happy Hour Finder1 savers
• Diana's Baths North Conway NH- Tourist info for 20201 savers
• DARK SKY PARKS & PLACES | Bortle & Light Pollution Maps for Stargazing1 savers
• Annie Ernaux Has Broken Every Taboo of What Women Are Allowed to Write - The New York Times4 savers
• the archive1 savers
• Redaction | Typeface from Titus Kaphar / Reginald Dwayne Betts’ show at MoMA PS111 savers
• Free Bespoke Sewing Patterns | FreeSewing1 savers
• Goodhart's law14 savers
• If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you27 savers
• Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved | PNAS5 savers
• GENER8ION - STORM starring Yung Lean - YouTube4 savers
• It’s Possible to Learn in Our Sleep. Should We? | The New Yorker1 savers
• Library of Babel9 savers
• [1202.6112] Anatomy of the giant component: The strictly supercritical regime1 savers
• Grad school is worse for public health than STDs | benkuhn.net6 savers
• The supreme court’s voting rights decision is a death knell for American democracy | Moira Donegan | The Guardian2 savers
• [2603.03257] Supercritical sharpness of percolation1 savers
• Pretext - Text measurement that never touches the DOM.2 savers
• Landsat - NASA Science2 savers
• PampaType Font Foundry | Typefaces1 savers
• Amaia: Tiny Desk Concert - YouTube1 savers
• The 25 Most Interesting Ideas I've Found in 2025 (So Far)4 savers
• games | eieio.games5 savers
• Jean-luc Doumont · Nicholas J. Matiasz, Ph.D.2 savers
• [0908.3437] On combinatorial testing problems1 savers
• Why books don't work64 savers
• 150 Great Articles & Essays: interesting articles to read online9 savers
• Tug-of-war with noise: A game-theoretic view of the p-Laplacian1 savers
• ROSALÍA x Dimitris Papaioannou / X1 savers
• Stitch - Design with AI1 savers
• Line Awesome — Free Beautiful Icon Font4 savers
• Feather – Simply beautiful open source icons5 savers
• Race and Ethnicity in the US by Dot Density (2020 Census)1 savers
• Index of /aofa15/slides1 savers
• NYC Subway Travel Time Map2 savers
• Henry From Online10 savers
• Stein's example1 savers
• How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss6 savers
• Rethinking High-School Science Fairs—Asterisk10 savers
• It’s hard to justify Tahoe icons @ tonsky.me7 savers
• Michael's Notebook8 savers
• The importance of stupidity in scientific research | Journal of Cell Science | The Company of Biologists7 savers
• Maggie Appleton26 savers
• This Page is Designed to Last: A Manifesto for Preserving Content on the Web12 savers
• Sebastião Salgado’s View of Humanity | The New Yorker2 savers
• smallweb2 savers
• Cooking Up Mehran’s Steak House - by danielle (raw & feral)4 savers
• Book Review: Seeing Like A State | Slate Star Codex6 savers
• Hovers, Cursors and Cute Interactions - Awwwards2 savers
• Peter Thiel on what works at work - The Washington Post2 savers
• 40 questions to ask yourself every year — Steph Ango7 savers
• Open Questions | cguti.xyz3 savers
• [math/0610076] A survey of random processes with reinforcement2 savers
• 50 things I know - by Sasha Chapin - Sasha's 'Newsletter'29 savers
• My Career as a Series of Emails18 savers
• 3 - seeking intensity - by Ada - Infinite Game4 savers
• Optimo3 savers
• The Technium: Scenius, or Communal Genius15 savers
• Gottesman–Knill theorem2 savers
• Very Good Films10 savers
• Kern Type2 savers
• Font recommendations | Typography for Lawyers4 savers
• Tim Gowers - Two cultures7 savers
• Six Rules for Dining Out - The Atlantic5 savers
• linus.coffee4 savers
• Research as Understanding26 savers
• On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs4 savers
• Lessons from my PhD - Austin Z. Henley2 savers
• Weird Languages3 savers
• What We Learned Doing Fast Grants - Future3 savers
• MakeSpace2 savers
• Black Holes as Mirrors: Quatnum Information (Hayden, Preskill)2 savers
• Thought as a Technology4 savers
• How To Be Successful96 savers
• Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland90 savers
• Theory of Change (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)83 savers
• You and Your Research77 savers

highlights — 374

• second feature of this monoculture is a kind of counterfeit contrarianism

  Intelligence is not the main bottleneck - by Ruxandra Teslo

• When I finish a great novel, film, or videogame, I don’t feel dispirited and hollowed out by the experience. Instead, it feels as if I’ve lived with and through its characters. Often, I want to relive that

  Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?—Asterisk

• Nichols was also friends with Moses’s other opponents; she and Jane Jacobs often brought their children to the park together, and she helped a young Robert Caro, who was struggling to break a major story about Moses, obtain access to the city planner’s files

  Is the Internet Making Culture Worse?—Asterisk

• So psychedelics, desperation, exposure to high-agency people. I think those are the standard things. And then there is just grace. Sometimes people wake up one day and they're like, oh, I don't like the way that I'm living. And that happens

  Can You Just Do Things?—Asterisk

• When art does transparently aim at moral guidance or social progress we dismiss it as dogmatic, pedantic and servile

  Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine

• there are times when the poet’s power to confront what the rest of us turn away from marks such a dramatic escape from the confines of ordinary humanity that we find ourselves drawn to describing them with the language of “a divine spark.” God is, after all, the one who sees the unseen.

  Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine

• In life, we are looking for all the various ways to make our marriages succeed; in fiction, we are fascinated to observe all the possible ways a marriage could fail. That is the insight behind Tolstoy’s opening sentence: it is true of fiction, even if it is not true of life.

  Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine

• night, ghosts, a castle, a lobby where a man can walk four hours together, a willow-fringed brook and a sad lady drowned, a graveyard and a terrible cliff above the sea, and amidst all these a pale man in black clothes

  Art Is for Seeing Evil | The Point Magazine

• the dead cadences of the machine

  If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you

• 1) There is an unhappy minority, whose unhappiness diminishes with rising income up to a threshold, then shows no further progress; 2) In the happier majority, happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes

  Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved | PNAS

• For the happiest 30% of people in the various income categories, happiness rises with log(income) at an accelerated rate beyond 100k

  Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved | PNAS

• there exist combined estimators more accurate on average (that is, having lower expected mean squared error) than any method that handles the parameters separately

  Stein's example

• cameras deliver you from time, GPS abstracts you out of space, and an all-consuming screen that keeps you a constant safe distance from yourself.

  How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss

• . The horror of simply existing, sitting alone with nothing to look at, nothing to do with my hands, no bright lights to briefly flood my brain.

  How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss

• Human consciousness as a brief, lossy interface between the navigation app and the steering wheel.

  How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss

• Valentine’s is, of course, an instrument for transforming the singularity of romantic love into a predictable annual stimulus for the wood-pulp industry.

  How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss

• The new always comes shrouded in the sense that old ways were much better, simply by virtue of being old

  How to live without your phone - by Sam Kriss

• I just want Zohran’s nonbinary praetorians to march across the country and put all these guys in cuffs

  Child’s Play, by Sam Kriss

• I kept a notebook where I jotted down things I wanted to google and twice a week I’d go down to the local library, look at the list, and say, why on earth did I want to know Justin Bieber’s net worth?

  Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson

• There was no public life, only private morality in its most naked form, namely, your character.

  Reading Lolita in the Barracks—Asterisk

• This wasn’t so much anti-intellectualism as a form of deprivation grounded in a clear understanding of education's value

  Reading Lolita in the Barracks—Asterisk

• Substantial scholarships and cash bounties are awarded to findings that are judged to merit retraction

  Rethinking High-School Science Fairs—Asterisk

• part of the education I received in a professional lab was how much the scientific process was dominated by anxiety, not curiosity.

  Rethinking High-School Science Fairs—Asterisk

• Fairs were structured with the goal of identifying the next generation of powerhouse researchers, instead of — as Meister originally hoped — forming a broad swathe of students for thoughtful citizenship

  Rethinking High-School Science Fairs—Asterisk

• drawing flowers on the corner of your screen

  batteries - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind

• how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out

  This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) - Farnam Street

• turns down, in order to work on something that no one cares about.

  Being creative requires taking risks - by Henrik Karlsson

• And on the reading, at least some of the time you need to be sampling from places you wouldn’t normally look.

  Being creative requires taking risks - by Henrik Karlsson

• Every state, whether via legislators or ballot initiatives, has the authority to amend its laws to no longer grant domestic and out-of-state corporations the power to spend in the state's local, state, and federal politics.

  Transparent Election Initiative - Our Fight Against Corporate Money in Politics

• This is authority every state possesses but no state has used in more than a century.

  Transparent Election Initiative - Our Fight Against Corporate Money in Politics

• Tang explained that she worried less about military invasion and more about the PRC winning the battle over hearts and minds—persuading the Taiwanese public that they’d be happier, richer, and more secure if they gave up their rights for centralized single-party control.

  garbage in, garbage out - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmine

• there is some disposition where tech, because it is the industry of innovators and disruptors, is just like: Anybody who's super effective and hacks the system, whether it's from the inside or the outside, whether it's in tech or in politics, they get that respect.

  builders vs. prigs (ft. arjun ramani)

• I still think social media is an underrated analogue to consumer AI—information and intimacy are now too cheap to meter. A good civic citizen should read newspapers instead of Twitter, but it’s hard to resist feeds perfectly tuned to my interests and tilt

  AI friends are already here

• The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day

  This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) - Farnam Street

• If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options

  This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio) - Farnam Street

• A great performance is one in which the player has absorbed the music so deeply that their choices seem not like choices, but inevitabilities

  Opinion | The Quest for Perfection Is Stunting Our Society - The New York Times

• “you’re going to encounter a lot of pressure to work for the State Department to work at a military contractor to work as a” — I think what he said was — “a pragmatic planner of the American empire.” Right? “And every single incentive is going to point towards you doing that. And it's up to you, whether you want to succumb to that or not.”

  ⚡ MIT: Progressions & Regressions - by jessica dai - Reboot

• Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art.

  "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript

• They turn humans into this hyperefficient terrestrial locomotor because they make being on land more like swimming

  A Human on a Bicycle Is among the Most Efficient Forms of Travel in the Animal Kingdom | Scientific American

• in music as in language, the medium shapes the message

  Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone? - The Atlantic

• If we let ourselves be guided by this basic question—which musical artists regard the score as a creative starting point?—we arrive at the broadest and most welcoming definition of “classical” music

  Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone? - The Atlantic

• jazz lovers would agree that the genre is not defined by the worship of specific studio recordings. Fans are more likely to value the evanescent moment of live performance, with its potential for spontaneous expression, for the very reason that a familiar tune can sound different every time it’s performed

  Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone? - The Atlantic

• in pop music, the studio album typically possesses an authority upon which all subsequent iterations—whether live performances or written transcriptions—are based

  Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone? - The Atlantic

• Though all music can be documented and experienced in multiple ways—scores, recordings, live performances—one approach to distinguishing musical traditions is to ask which form a given tradition treats as authoritative

  Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone? - The Atlantic

• like the cosmic equivalent of a ball of molasses

  Oddly viscous stars could be impersonating black holes | New Scientist

• But also the careful and meticulous craft in how these songs are made: undergirded by the images and objects that prove a life has been lived fully, the detritus around the human body as we traffic through time is marked (in this album and elsewhere), not merely as texture, but as effervescent naming and expanding personhood via memory.

  “The Songs Prove That We Were Here”: Ocean Vuong on Sufjan Stevens ‹ Literary Hub

• sometimes my emotions lived at the edge of my consciousness for months, lurking in half-remembered dreams and phrases on the tip of my tongue, and i had to hunt them down like wild animals to make sense of what they were

  ALIGNMENT - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind

• The nation’s troubles could be understood and explained — not as a result of impersonal forces or distant enemies, but of the concrete actions taken by its own leaders. And in a democracy those leaders can be held accountable and replaced.

  The 50th Anniversary of “The Power Broker,” by Robert Caro - The New York Times

• The overarching theme of “The Power Broker” is New York as a latter-day Rome dragged into decline by its imperial rulers

  The 50th Anniversary of “The Power Broker,” by Robert Caro - The New York Times

• Martin’s demos are the missing originals of our musical age—the blank space at the center of the past two decades of pop music.

  Blank Space: What Kind of Genius Is Max Martin? | The New Yorker