Mushroom hunting is a popular way to find wild food. For foragers of color, it may also help close the "nature gap."

Palooka is a global literary magazine seeking bold voices and brave stories. Submit chapbooks, prose, poetry, artwork, photography, and comics year-round. Anonymous reading.

Two researchers have proved that Penrose tilings, famous patterns that never repeat, are mathematically equivalent to a kind of quantum error correction.

This study examines diachronic trends in stress-related language, sentiment, and lyrical complexity in popular music’s lyrics from 1973 to 2023, exploring how major societal shocks influenced people’s music preferences and offering insights into collective mood management through music. Over 20,000 lyrics of songs in the US Top 100 charts during this period were analyzed using Natural Language Processing techniques, with stress-related language assessed using a dictionary-based approach (LIWC), sentiment estimated via a rule-based sentiment analysis tool (VADER), and complexity via the LZ77 compression algorithm. Our analysis reveals a significant increase in stress-related language, alongside declines in positive sentiment and lyrical complexity over five decades. Surprisingly, societal shocks like COVID-19 coincided with attenuations rather than amplifications of these trends, indicating a preference for emotion-incongruent music, which may serve as a form of emotion regulation, such as escapism. When controlling for long-term trends, we found no significant relationship between income growth and stress or sentiment in lyrics. In contrast, periods of high-stress language corresponded with increased lyrical complexity. These results support the notion that music plays a dual role in collective mood management, functioning as mood management and regulation, depending on the context and intensity of societal emotions.

Stupidity is eternal—and more complex than we think.

Mapmaking lay at the heart of Ursula K. Le Guin’s worldbuilding. An able illustrator whose subjects ranged from realist watercolors to cartoon cats, the author of such SFF classics as The Left Hand of...

Welcome to the first in a series of posts dedicated to debunking false claims used to undermine trust in libraries and attack those who work in them.

Over six million conversations with private AI chatbots were scraped and sold to data brokers for profit, according to new security research.

These authors respond to tragedy, modernity, and overstimulation with mundane brilliance

Music is a promising tool for improving cognition and promoting well-being.