On Breaking Off a Piece — I have always loved the word “spalling,” ever since I first heard it in my youth. It’s the word for the process by which a large chunk of stone, concrete, ice, or some other solid material breaks down, shedding smaller fragments along fault lines and fissures, at impact points and…

A meditation on the ontology of the shortcut — David D. LaCroix That door was always different somehow. I think it started with the doorknob. Different lock than all the other doors on the house, different style of hardware. And they treated it differently, since it was the only one that would lock them out of the house if…

Dominyka Grucyté Were you to ask, I think a lot of learning and education professionals would tell you that they’re at war with entropy. They’d probably call it “forgetting,” or “failed knowledge transfer,” or the like, but the word would indicate the same thing: the general tendency for things to…