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The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same |

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A cafe in Sydney, Australia. Photograph: Loren Elliott/ReutersFrom the generic hipster cafe to the ‘Instagram wall’, the internet has pushed us towards a kind of global ubiquity – and this phenomenon is only going to intensify by Kyle ChaykaFor most of the 2010s, I was a religious user of Yelp, an app for finding and reviewing restaurants and other local businesses. The red-and-white interface became a trusted source of recommendations when at home in New York or abroad. Read More...

Top 10 books about time

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Top 10sScience and nature booksFrom St Augustine’s philosophy to HG Wells’s science fiction, these are some of the best books about a subject that is both very familiar and very strange Time is the most commonly used noun in the English language, yet we hardly understand what it is. The purer physical and mathematical aspects of time continue to be debated by the great minds of cosmology, and there are excellent books on that subject, from Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time to Richard Muller’s more recent Now: The Physics of Time. Read More...

Trippy eagles, vagina wounds, dragon intimacy: how medieval art got weird

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Trippy eagle of souls from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Photograph: Weird Medieval GuysTrippy eagle of souls from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Photograph: Weird Medieval GuysArtA Twitter account of the oddest illustrations from the middle ages has now become a book. Behind these naive drawings, author Olivia M Swarthout says, lie serious truths It is often assumed that the art that best communicates the spirit of its era is also the art that transcends it. Read More...