Description
What goes around comes around
This issue, we cast our gaze onto the feedback loops that regulate, control, and sometimes destabilize the world around us. We unearth them at every scale of space and time, from ants to continents, seconds to millions of years, human myths to the origins of life. Most surprising of all, we find a world carefully balanced between order and disorder, courtesy of one curious and powerful phenomenon.
- Secret Military Test, Coming Soon to Your Spanish Class: A powerful, precise language aptitude test is entering civilian life, by Michael Erard
- Ants Swarm Like Brains Think: A neuroscientist studies ant colonies to understand feedback in the brain, by Carrie Arnold
- When Theft Was Worse Than Murder: Hundreds of years of trial documents reveal our changing attitudes to violent crime, by Simon DeDeo
- This issue also includes contributions from: Steven Ashley, Rose Eveleth, Cynthia Graber, Eric Hoover, James F. Kasting, Brandon Keim, Steve Nadis, Peter Andrey Smith, Maia Szalavitz, and Josephine Wolff.