#memory

#memory

Because, let's face it, creative work does require some form of faith. It is a tumultuous thing to launch an idea into a vast nothingness and hope that it makes a light bright enough to be found by others. Luckily, these luminaries were my light, and I hope they may become yours as well, and - more so - that these snippets lead you to more of their work.

Imagine, if you will, taking a seat at the piano before a full house of 2,000 music lovers ready to hear Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor - and, more importantly, on stage with an orchestra and conductor more than ready to play it. That would be difficult enough, but now imagine that you thought you were supposed to play the Piano Concerto No.23 in A major, another piece of music entirely. This is the stuff of nightmares, and indeed, the very situation in which pianist Maria João Pires found herself in 2013, after she'd been recruited to fill in for another player at an open rehearsal held at Amsterdam's Concertgebouw.

Funes could learn languages and recite books from memory. Recalling a single day took him an entire day, as every detail accumulated itself in his mind in its most meticulous insignificance. The poor wretch saw this as a gift, but as his story unfolds, it reveals itself more as a curse, for remembering in such detail prevented him from distinguishing the essential from the superfluous.

There's a nightmare I have that exists in my head almost as long as my earliest memories. My family and I are on our annual camping trip in New Hampshire's White Mountains. We are hiking and we get separated, leaving me with my dad and my older sister with my mom. As we are trying to find our way back to my mom and sister, my dad and I get chased by Smokey Bear.

Now, listening in late 2025, I no longer felt heroic. Instead, what I felt most strongly was tenderness. Tenderness for that young man who believed he could outwork any obstacle, who thought the American dream was just a matter of refusing to quit. He had no idea what was coming-the failures, the losses, the ways life would refuse his tidy narrative.

In Need of Seawater is not simply a documentary about poetry-it is an experience shaped by memory, voice, and lived history. Directed with sensitivity by Richard Yeagley, the film follows poet, writer, and producer Mark Anthony Thomas as he revisits the poems that defined his early adulthood, written between his early twenties and mid-twenties, and now read aloud more than twenty years later.

After the Cataclysm, the humans brought in robots to clear the rubble. It was why the robots had been constructed. They were sturdy enough to withstand any further tremors and falling debris, and they were strong enough to lift the shattered pieces of buildings. Twobit worked tirelessly, like their fellow robots. Solar panels kept them energized, and the engineers had developed circulatory systems to keep their joints lubricated by filtering elements from the air and remixing them, the peak of intelligent design.

In our family, we spend more time and effort planning our holiday food than any other aspect of the season. Not only do we love to eat, but we also carefully curate our sense of home and family by sharing food. And during our holiday meals, we will be serving memories with a side of nostalgia. Food is memory Are there particular foods that you simply must have during the holidays?

When Marjorie Prime premiered a decade ago, its technology felt abstract and futuristic. Today, it feels incremental. Artificial intelligence is no longer a novelty; it is fluent, responsive, and embedded in daily life. What once played as a cautionary what if now lands as a question of habit: not whether we would use such technology, but why we already do.

Deliberating over the Atlantic 10 list is, in some ways, a test of memory. Does a novel we read in January still thrill us? Does the reportage that impressed us midyear still feel surprising when we turn back to it in the fall? We're asking ourselves, in short, which books have kept our attention, sometimes months after we've first encountered them.

She imagined colleagues thinking, "Oh, that's the weird one who works on astrocytes," says Goshen, whose laboratory is at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. A lot of people were sceptical, she says. But not any more. A rush of studies from labs in many subfields are revealing just how important these cells are in shaping our behaviour, mood and memory. Long thought of as support cells, astrocytes are emerging as key players in health and disease.

This coy, macabre novel recounts a trip to Venice taken by a middling English writer in the early twentieth century. His memories are presented as a defense against the "prurient and hysterical attention" that was heaped upon him after a series of "dark and tragic events"-set off by the disappearance of his wife, a wellborn American who vanished from the decrepit palazzo where the couple stayed during their honeymoon.

For while Erpenbeck adopted some of the features of the form apparently throwaway observations on daily life, such as minor irritation at the difficulty of sourcing proper splitterbrotchen, an unpretentious pastry now pimped for a more elaborate and wealthy clientele she consistently enlarged and complicated it. Into that recognisable tone of ennui and mild querulousness with which journalists hope to woo a time-pressed but disenchanted or nostalgic readership, Erpenbeck smuggled metaphysics, politics and history.

I'm listening to Saves the Day's Stay What You Are on the car CD-player, on the way to play Soul Caliber and hold hands with my boyfriend after school ... It's cold, and you can still hear the dull thud of the music from the goth club in the basement under the sushi bar, and I'm wearing a cheap polyester corset, and I think I'm about to be kissed

It's a question David Ewalt, Scientific American's editor in chief, was tasked with tackling long ago, where he was forced to look at memory, human connection and technology in a way that asked deeper questions about how we preserve information in the digital age and what it means to come into contact with our past selves. Hi, David. David Ewalt: Hi, it's nice to join you.

Back to selectionEvery Contact Leaves a Trace, its title alluding to a basic principle of forensic science, is the latest cinematic exploration from experimental filmmaker and poet Lynne Sachs. Pairing this concept with seven (of the 600) business cards she's collected over the years, Sachs embarks on an investigation into "how an encounter with someone seeps into your way of thinking" (as she explains in a VO that runs throughout the film).

I remember opening our bounty of wedding gifts vividly. Ten years ago, right after our wedding, my husband and I road-tripped to New Orleans for our honeymoon, and we passed the time on the road by opening a gift every hour or so. With every bit of tissue paper, we felt like the most well-loved people in the world. Friends and family gave us so many of the things we needed to set up our home and start our family. I thought for sure that every single kind gesture would be bright in my mind forever, but it turns out that many of the specifics of those gifts have faded and been replaced by the feeling of the warm glow of support I felt opening them, as my mind has filled up with 10 more years of life.

Winston really pays tribute to the word 'morph', as his process involves printing images onto clay which he then shapes and photographs frame by frame to create a "sense of shifting, tactile movement", turning into bizarre animations that sometimes look like the evolution of brand new life forms. Focusing on memory, found imagery and the "tension between analog imperfection and digital control", his subjects bloom and curdle into lumpy clay creatures, some resembling people, others resembling plants in tendril-like movements.

People ask me sometimes, "What do you think about out there?"-usually with a curious look, as if pedaling for hours must feel like watching paint dry. But it's not like that at all. The longer the ride, the more my mind opens up. The road doesn't bore me-it speaks to me. It quiets the noise of everyday life and lets the thoughts that matter most rise to the surface.

Los Angeles-based photographer Kaitlin Maxwell was raised in South Florida and experienced the passing of her father at a young age. Photography has been a way for Maxwell to navigate the world, find meaning and a sense of identity. Using natural light and a medium format film camera, Maxwell's practice is an intimate study of the human condition, rooted in a desire to understand what it means to be seen.

A tattoo is an indelible mark, a permanent etching of a memory or a belief onto the body. We apply this concept to stuffed animals, which are often deeply intertwined with our personal histories. Through interviews with the owners, we uncover the unique stories and memories associated with each toy-where it came from, what it has witnessed. A tattoo artist then translates these narratives into a custom embroidery design.

Zeng was born in China and began studying Visual Communication at Shanghai Normal University in 2015. After working as a freelance artist and designer, Zeng moved to Germany to study at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. His artistic interest lies in the boundaries between documentary and fiction, and the self-referential nature of memory. "the internal crusade" is a reflection of Zeng's upbringing and education.

Anthropic is now making the memory feature in Claude available to all Pro and Max users. The feature remembers projects and preferences, so you don't have to explain the same context every time. Anthropic is also introducing an incognito mode. The rollout means that Claude can retain context between sessions. The memory function was initially only available to Team and Enterprise users since its announcement in early September. Now, all paid users have access.

Anthropic says the goal is "complete transparency." Users will be able to clearly see what Claude remembers rather than "vague summaries," it said. Specific memories can also be toggled on and off or edited with natural conversation. For example, you could tell Claude to focus on specific memories or "forget an old job entirely." Users can also create "distinct memory spaces" that will keep various memories apart.