Around the Web: What We’re Reading

From a man that spent 25 years voluntarily in solitary confinement to Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of singularity to arrive in 2029, there is no shortage of surprising discoveries across the web. We’ve weeded out the best stories online so you don’t have to. Take a peek.

‘London is often where the world looks for a creative lead – and now there’s a book to celebrate this’. New book London Uprising is a rare look at the behind-the-scenes processes involved in what makes a London designer tick.

‘There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself. I became irrelevant’. With nothing more than a tent and a backpack, Christopher Knight walked into the woods and away from society, not to be seen again for over 25 years. He was one of the longest-enduring solitaries in history, a true hermit.

‘People are carrying around a portable dopamine pump, and kids have basically been carrying it around for the last 10 years’. Are teenagers using drugs less because they are constantly stimulated by their computers and phones?

‘This is death in the digital age; it is being reimagined’. Using thousands of texts, tweets and public Facebook posts, a woman creates a digital version of her best friend – after he died. Part of a series tracking the uncomfortable questions about our increasingly complex relationship with technology.

‘Globally, reefs as we knew them in the 1990s, I don’t think those will come back’. As the world’s oceans heat up because of climate change, coral reefs around the globe are under threat.

‘Of his 147 predictions since the 1990s, Kurzweil claims an 86 percent accuracy rate.” Now Ray Kurweil, director of engineering at Google, predicts that the technological singularity will be completed by 2029.

‘Until we see changes in the way we work, I don’t think we’re going to crack this nut,’ says Shelley Correll. The Atlantic asks, why is Silicon Valley so awful to women?