The hottest Time Substack posts right now

Transitioning from natural light to darkness can have a calming effect on our bodies and reduce stress levels.
Precision time-keeping in society has led to a loss of gradual transitions and a shift towards arbitrary rhythms.
Digital culture lacks discernible temporal rhythms, contributing to social disorders, and inhibiting communal and public time.

Archaeology can be a creative and imaginative practice that involves physical and practical work.
Objects like handaxes hold secrets of their making, usage, and the passage of time, providing a meditation on time.
Engravings of artifacts can capture the intelligence of the hand and communicate the process and skill involved in crafting the objects.

Our concept of time is a cultural construct, influenced by abstract measurements like clocks, which vary across different cultures.
The development of abstract time in the West was linked to the rise of capitalism, leading to a disconnect from natural, cosmic time.
Time plays a crucial role in societies, guiding activities like planting crops, religious rituals, and even warfare, reflecting differing cultural perceptions of time's passage.

Businesses often express newness through subtle hints like time elements
Words and designs evoke a sense of exploration to make things feel new and exciting
The use of prefixes like 're' can create a sense of newness, refreshing familiar things

Quality in art can be subjective and influenced by factors like popularity, originality, and cultural context.
Works of art can degrade with age as language and tropes shift, impacting their appeal.
Art categories like classics, pop, high art, and more exist, each with its own characteristics and nuances.

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Human timelines should be represented on a log scale to reflect exponential population growth and changing human experiences over time.
Our intuition about historical events can be misleading, and measuring time in person-years can be awkward and imprecise.
Plotting time on a log scale can help visualize history more accurately and prepare us for potential challenges in the future, like understanding time in different relativistic reference frames.

Abstractions, like time and money, help us connect different stories and experiences. They give us a way to understand and compare things in our lives.
Fungible measurements, or quanta, are tools that allow us to compare different items, like the price of a house and tuna. They show that all things can be understood in similar ways.
Using units of measurement helps compare experiences across cultures and stories, like relating a day in Harry Potter to a day in the Bible. This shows how universal these concepts are.