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The Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
Murat Demirbas reflects on Ananyo Bhattacharya's biography of John von Neumann, tracing von Neumann's habit of abstraction across mathematics, computing and game theory, and his late view that nuclear-age safety rests on day-to-day judgment rather than formal models.
15 min · 3,390 words
Go Piss, Girl: The plight of the public potty
Kate Wagner reviews Bryant Simon's For Customers Only, a history of American public bathrooms, arguing that the scarcity of public toilets is a long-running policy failure tied to inequality, privacy, race, gender and the limits of architecture.
13 min · 2,995 words
The Alchemical Transformations of the Mutus Liber (1677)
Mathilde Montpetit on the Mutus Liber, a nearly wordless 1677 alchemical book whose fifteen plates illustrate the humid way to the Philosopher's Stone, tracing how readers from Eugène Canseliet onward have interpreted its imagery and how its reissues transformed the work.
4 min · 967 words