Outer Planets
August 2026
Every article published in August 2026. 6 articles · Back to full archive
Psychology
Psychology suggests who you end up close to isn't decided by looks or shared passions — it's proximity, plain nearness, because liking tends to grow for whoever we simply keep seeing, again and again
Mind & Meaning
For nearly a century, absinthe was banned across the Western world as a hallucinogen that drove artists to madness — then chemists tested the old pre-ban bottles and found nothing special at all, no secret in the wormwood, just an unusually strong liquor that people drank far too much of
Mind & Meaning
On the island of Sardinia there's a cheese so extreme it's been outlawed across Europe — a pecorino deliberately left open for flies to lay their eggs in, so that by the time it reaches the table it's alive with thousands of tiny maggots, eaten while they're still squirming
Mind & Meaning
The densest place that has ever been measured on Earth was a single Hong Kong block where 33,000 people lived stacked in six and a half acres — a self-built maze of 350 towers raised without a single architect, so tightly packed that sunlight never reached the lowest floors
Psychology