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01 • 16 Minute Read

The New York Times

Gregory Barber

The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice

In the summer of 2019, Joan Birman was 92 and had stopped taking on young students. Then an email arrived from 15-year-old Vasudha Bharathram living ten blocks away on Riverside Drive. Birman sent the girl off with Herstein’s Topics in Algebra, and she came back with pages of proofs solved by routes Birman had never seen. Birman pointed her at the Burau representation for four-strand braids, a question nobody had settled in the 92 years Birman had been alive. They worked it over Zoom through the pandemic, brought in Tara Brendle at Glasgow, and posted the paper in July.

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02 • 12 Minute Read

Outside

Annette McGivney

They Entered a Sweat Lodge Seeking Self-Help. Three of Them Never Came Home.

James Arthur Ray charged 54 people nearly $10,000 each for six days at a New Age retreat outside Sedona in October 2009. He had appeared in The Secret and on Oprah, and his company was pulling in more than $9 million a year. Annette McGivney reconstructs the last afternoon of that retreat. Ray told the group beforehand that they would feel as if they were going to die, that vomiting and fainting were normal, and that nobody could leave except between rounds. He asked staff to heat 100 rocks, where other groups at the same site used about 30. Eight rounds and two hours later, Kirby Brown and James Shore were dead and 19 others went to hospitals. Liz Neuman died a week later. Deputies found Ray in his cabin eating a sandwich with his bags already packed.

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03 • 13 Minute Read

Aeon	Natalia Kucirkova

The bombarding of childhood

Natalia Kucirkova watched a boy at an airport gate clutch an iPad while a cartoon character cries, then smiles again, before she can blink. The problem, she surmises, is not screen time, but rather the pace of the shows. Kucirkova, who studies early childhood education at the University of Stavanger, points out that two children can each watch 20 minutes and live entirely different encounters with time. When the UK told parents of young children in March 2026 to pick slow-paced content without defining it, her Children’s Slow Media Project set out to do just that. Mister Rogers, Bluey, and Paddington rate high because they leave room around an action, while the lowest scorers restart a child’s attention with every new song and bright image.

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04 • 22 Minute Read

The Guardian

Barbara Speed

‘A completely unique opportunity’: the secretive process that will decide the BBC’s future

The BBC was founded by Royal Charter in the 1920s, and it comes with an expiration date. Roughly every decade it has to be renewed or the corporation stops existing as a legal entity, unable to employ staff or broadcast, its assets passing to the state. The current charter runs out at the end of 2027. Barbara Speed spent a year interviewing 30 experts, BBC figures, and government insiders about how the renewed charter gets written, and most could not even tell her what the charter is. As an American, this is a fascinating look inside an opaque institution and its practices.

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The 92-Year-Old Mathematician and the Teenage Apprentice

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