At a time when memories are increasingly flattened into folders, feeds, and cloud backups, a new experimental device from MIT Media Lab proposes a far more intimate archive: scent. Developed by Cyrus Clarke, the Anemoia Device is a speculative yet functional prototype that translates photographs into bespoke fragrances using generative AI, inviting users not to view memories, but to inhabit them through the body.
Ceramic works by Nicole Cherubini emphasize motifs of collage at Friedman Benda in New York, while the Berlin show, Vital Architecture: Between Idealism and Reality, turns attention to the built environment, tracing how architectural thinking negotiates environmental conditions and history through research-driven practice. Questions of time, inheritance, and transformation run through the month.
Most people will forget a name, misplace their phone, or lose track of a conversation at some point. Usually, those moments pass without much thought. But for many adults, especially as they age, small lapses can trigger a much deeper fear: Is this the beginning of cognitive decline? As a neurologist, I hear this concern often. And as a researcher, I have learned something important: Worry about cognition and cognitive disease are not the same thing.
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.
Already she remembers scenes, so many- her mother walking in through the front door with her wrapped-up baby brother; that time the big dog gobbled up her toast before she could take a single bite; that day a bad man pushed her so hard on the swing she spun out, landing face down in the dust. Also, sometimes, some first happy thing she barely senses anymore- a soapy bath toy, warm in her baby hands?
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.
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.
