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Thursday, September 24, 2020

What Is Math?, by Dan Falk, Smithsonian

It all started with an innocuous TikTok video posted by a high school student named Gracie Cunningham. Applying make-up while speaking into the camera, the teenager questioned whether math is “real.” She added: “I know it’s real, because we all learn it in school... but who came up with this concept?” Pythagoras, she muses, “didn’t even have plumbing—and he was like, ‘Let me worry about y = mx + b’”—referring to the equation describing a straight line on a two-dimensional plane. She wondered where it all came from. “I get addition,” she said, “but how would you come up with the concept of algebra? What would you need it for?”

An 87-hour Bus Trip Made Australia Feel Like Home For Me – Now I Long To Rediscover It, by Caroline Riches, The Guardian

Fast forward 20 years and this land is no longer my playground: it’s my home. I have Australian children and a blue passport emblazoned with a kangaroo and an emu, animals chosen to symbolise a nation on the move because neither can move backwards easily. I too have moved forward with my life; my cross-country adventures are over.

But they say you always want what you can’t have.

Blue Ticket By Sophie Mackintosh Review – A Dark Fable About Free Will, by Aida Edemariam, The Guardian

There is great power, Sophie Mackintosh has discovered, in taking a familiar thing –so familiar that we no longer see it clearly – moving it to a place slightly adjacent to our world, then bringing it into closer and closer focus until we can see nothing else.

Five Leaves Left, by Declan Ryan, NewStatesman

Drugs began in Aix. Those left who knew him
still talk about his hands. The size of them. His stoop

Acarapis Woodi, by Matt McBride, Guernica Magazine

Meaning there are spiders
in the soft slinkies
runnelling our bodies.